If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
So yes it's a great idea.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
It's improved. When cell phones first came out, I kept getting run into by teenagers in stores and on sidewalks who couldn't both use their phone and navigate the world. That skill is now generally present and it's no longer a problem.
whenever I see a little kid with his head buried in a tablet / smartphone in a public place or when visting relatives / friends I start to wonder if this is what I looked like to my parents when I spent more than 1 hour playing on the family computer.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy)
Yeah, but they were right though?
If you think a vertical scroll slop tablet is the same as a portable game console, then why not just get them the console instead?
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phones. The kids occasionally watch Bluey and Peppa pig on the TV (live not apps).
Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
> criticizing from the sidelines
You dont even have kids, why do you have such a strong opinion on what real parents are saying about bringing up their own? You are the one criticising from the sidelines whilst us parents are making the tough choices in bringing our kids up.
In agreement, and I'push another point:
The dual working parents part is a red herring.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
I am a dual working parent. It is hard. I am not saying zero screen time.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
At least you acknowledge some screen time unlike the puritans we have in this thread but i also suspect you're not in the most extreme of difficult parenting situations.
If you don't give kids a tablet and instead give them a stack of toys, the kids will grumble and eventually start playing with the toys.
Hell give a bunch of bored kids enough rocks and they'll find a way to build a small village out of said rocks using mud as a connecting material.
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Parenting before the age of tablets and phones was a thing that seemed to work fairly well overall.
My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
Curious about this school; I live in Japan with my family.
It's true and it's also true that parent's would be criticized from the sidelines for allowing kids, even from a very young age to sit in front of screens for hours on end when i was a kid.
I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.
I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
This assumes TV and tablets are they same, they very much are not.
Your very point about them being more interactive is what makes them much more dangerous.
>The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
> I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
I turned on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the first time for my son a few days ago. After a few minutes I asked how the show felt. "Relaxing".
We sat down and watched the Music episode together for 20 or so minutes.
Parents can choose what their kids watch and listen to. Ignore the feed.
You can do whatever mental gymnastics you need to justify parenting decisions. But a static device located in a common area in the home is no comparison a device that follows a child everywhere which they stare at alone.
The content of TV was also vastly different. There was a barrier to entry, not an infinite stream of brainrot content.
There is just no reason to give kids such devices at a young age, far better learning experiences exist until at least 9 years old.
My wife was worried our son would be "left behind". We talked about it and I pointed out he can already navigate photos, and Spotify to play an audio book; from just looking over our shoulders every now and then. Must be around 5 hours interaction in total (he is 4).
Poking a screen is barely a skill, less than a day and he would be caught up to all the kids that had been staring at one for hours a day since they were 3.
The problems are tablet and phones. Apps are really bad, even the ones made for kids.
I am sure there are exceptions, but if you are a duo working parents, you don't have time to dig through children apps to figure out which are good.
Overall tv in common space is better (occasionally), you can keep an eye on what the kid is watching and how is affecting their behavior.
You realize when they are done watching tv way earlier than they are (if ever)
The arbitrage will show up when kids raised without screens compete for the same college / job spots as kids raised by screens.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
Maybe desktop computers? But touch computers have been designed to be dead simple to use, I don't think jobs had uniquely designed the iphone to be simple enough for a child to use, but he did design it to be usable by people from other countries and cultures with no previous training, children being able to use these touch devices is at least a side effect.
I did mean desktop or laptop computers. Yes touch devices are like you described
I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
You are the parent, you can start at the IF. I'm attacking the premise, not the conclusion.
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
Sudden lightbulb moment:
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
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The original comment invites discussion, yours is just a pointless sarcastic response and will most likely be flagged or killed for being as such.
I see your points, and I kind of agree. I'm trying to express outrage.
> If you think this is a bad idea, please tell me why, happy to discuss.
There are several reasons. The most important one is that children (ab)using highly stimulating devices don't learn to be absorbed by or find reward in less stimulating ones (most importantly, books). It's exactly the same risk as giving addictive drugs to adults.
This is not theory. Just look at children whose parents give them mobile phones/tablets as pacifiers - they become easily restless.
The intellectual argument is also important. Gamified learning is nice on paper, but one can imagine what children are actually going to play.
Related to another post: the difference between a child and an adult who plays videogames is that the latter has (hopefully!) learned "slow" skills, so they can choose pastimes like this deliberately.
Having said that, I'm for forbidding children from using this type of thing, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope, and there's lots to work on before that step.
Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Not always. AI is being pushed on plenty of people. Let's just say that not all products serve consumers and there's room for regulation.
Even if I want to buy uranium, I shouldn't. And if I want to buy a chair, I shouldn't be seeing only uranium chairs.
I mean uranium can be a hazard to people around you, so I don't think that's an equivalent scenario.
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
Amusingly, I totally bought Uranium off of Amazon ~7 years ago when I wanted to test my Geiger counter. Doesn't seem to be available anymore though? Sad!
This is also a great argument for low-tar cigarettes for children.
Do you have a strong argument against them?
The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health
The parents who don't allow it would never consider them
I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero
You're asking if I have a strong argument against targeting children with tobacco products?
The existence of them, yeah. I don't think it's so clear cut that it'd be a net increase in harm. Advertising I'm not so sure about, but as for the mere existence of them:
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
You’re missing Group C, who didn’t offer cigarettes to their kids until their kids heard of these “healthy” cigarettes that are “safe for kids”
Juul was essentially this scenario.
Absolutely no cigarettes should be marketed to children. That doesn't mean various cigarette-adjacent products cannot exist.
The net harm result really only changes because the scope and numbers differ. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually allows their kids to smoke, I see a lot who give them tablets though.
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
I think I get what you're saying, but it's really an unfortunate example.
I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.
I don't see what banning it actually accomplishes unless we totally ban tablets altogether. From the way I see it, it's the parents who are choosing to give their kids tablets in order to make their own parenting job easier. Am I wrong there? What do you ban to stop that happening?
This is basically the needle exchange argument. Except instead of just needles, you just want to hand out the drug.
I agree that if a parent is dead-set on giving their kid endless screen time, tobacco, or heroin, they will find a way to do it. But the tobacco story demonstrates there are many interventions that can significantly decrease the net amount of abuse. If you want to take a public health argument, do it honestly.
I don't really think looking at it through the lens of tobacco works. Parents giving their children tobacco and heroin aren't a thing. In reality many are self-motivated to give them a tablet for their own benefit, nothing much to do with the kid
Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.
Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard
"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"
I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets
I thought that people don't know what they want until you show it to them? They thought they wanted faster horsies but Amazon gave them noxious cars?
The demand was for transportation, not any specific product.
Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.
My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.
They're going to use a device anyways because mom or dad are going to want to avoid parenting. Might as well give them something designed for them.
That's no reason to design devices that enable this parent behaviour. We should move in the other direction. Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
I know there's no hard leverage.
So.. stop producing smartphones / tablets? TVs? What's your other option?
Stop marketing to them to kids or normalizing kids using them?
This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.
I'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.
> Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
I'd like to hear more about the results you've gotten with this approach. How do you approach is this with your kids?
I don't have data, I don't run a study. Are you saying that shame is an ineffective mechanism of social cohesion?
With my kids, I oversee everything they do (they are under 6). They average 15min daily for two episodes of a kids show.
I'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.
Oh, I was just trying to figure out how you were using shame to get other parents to change their behavior, since that's what you said worked. Wasn't looking for a study.
Oh, the usual: make sure they overhear "my kids would NEVER", look at them with a signature look of superiority, smh literally...
The idea is to send a signal that this is not ok. I have no guarantees on effectiveness. What especially gets me going is when the kid eats and looks at some trash like baby shark while it's blasting loud everywhere.
> How do you approach is this with your kids?
Regarding my kids: high priority, wide/curated choice (not in terms of restriction, but in terms of actively finding things they may like), accompanied learning, and, crucially, starting from a very young age. It's pretty much standard parenting, that is, one gets out what one puts in.
By the time children start to pressure for this type of devices (say, 10/12), they will have learned to enjoy books and more creative activities.
I am in the same boat as you, my kids have never had screens. However I do wonder that if by not teaching them to use tech sparingly at a young age, will they just fall down that hole at an older age when they are young adults?
Mobile devices and social media does not get less addictive as you get older, otherwise anybody over about 30 right now would never have any issues with it. Therefore I worry its entirely possible to bring your children up completely avoiding the downfalls of screentime, but then set them up to fall later because they havent developed the guards against it or even havent 'got it out of their system' so to speak.
parents will do it anyways, so products that have child safety features are being developed
It's ridiculously hard to restrict all of the harmful content. And frankly, the big tech is less trustworthy by the minute.
I think by having adult devices parents will be more cautious and mindful of what they are granting to their kids.
LLMs could change all this - it's possible to quickly do pretty impressive analysis of the content of videos, games, and so forth.
I hope username checks out.
Leaving parenting duties to the overall average of the internet bound together by corporate scammers is not something I will ever do.
My only possible counterpoint in agreement is whataboutism. Companies make lots of devices designed for "negative" behavior.
Not an excuse but an explanation perhaps?
What bothers me the most is targeting children. I see why we need to make axes or chemicals. But these come with disclaimers and labels as well as common sense that they are harmful.
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Our kid has certainly not had access to tablets/phones the first years of her life and only rarely until she was 9 or 10 or so. We have also banned phones from the dinner table, etc. from the beginning.
Parenting takes time and focus. Putting 0-6 years olds behind a tablet screen is just absolving yourself from your responsibility as a parent. Some TV time can be ok after 3 years or so, but you have to time it strictly (so that it does not become a convenience) and exclude some types of cartoons [1].
[1] https://thesciencesurvey.com/editorial/2024/07/07/the-proble...
It's a such a shame that it's impossible to parent children without a screen in reality land.
What? My kids have never ever had a screen of their own. They sit still in restaurants and flights like well parented kids have for decades. Anyone who thinks screens are required for bringing up children is ignoring countless research projects which prove otherwise, and are actively hurting their childrens development.
Parenting is hard. I know it firsthand. I never said zero screen time.
I'm opposed to dedicated devices for children that expose them to the internet.
It's ridiculously hard to restrict all of the harmful content. And frankly, the big tech is less trustworthy by the minute.
Reality is nobody forced you to have kids.
If you cannot raise your kids properly, please dont have kids.
When has telling people to not have kids ever resulted in said people not having kids? It's a part of our instincts and biology and really really easy to do.
We have to deal with the fact a lot of people produce kids they do not want or regret having. That's reality.
Reality is that telling future bad parents not to have kids isn't going to stop them having kids, even if you say please
Enabling the avoidance of parenting incentivizes parents who would otherwise be parenting to also avoid parenting. I agree with OP, hard to see how this is a good thing.