I have two boys. 2 and 5. We’ve never done screens, instead we do books and focused attention from each parent and we are looked at like crazy people when we tell people that. But our kids are miles ahead of their cohorts in attention span, respectfulness, behavior, socializing, etc. It’s actually alarming. I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
Same with us. Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
When he is at a party and a tv is on in the distance he stares like a zombie at it. It's depressing at how TV changes him and I have to transfer his focus away.
> Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
I have a very qualified pediatric occupational therapist friend and when I was sort of bragging about how many "cool things" my toddler can do I was immediately told that they are nice party tricks but don't say much about the development of the child, predict future performance or intelligence, and definitely aren't what I should be focusing on as a parent.
The child didn't just naturally learn to do those tricks. Our games focused a lot on this because I thought "it builds brain and skills", always be ahead of all other kids. In reality only I benefited from this because I could drop it in random conversation and then have pride flow out my ears. And the kid kept repeating the now easy tricks looking for the reward, staying inside the comfort zone.
I was told to simply guide our interactions with a method called "serve and return"[0]. It's a much more powerful tool that makes any and every interaction an opportunity for development, not just individual tasks practiced to perfection and repeated for rewards. You guide but also let yourself be guided so your child gets to feel comfortable opening all kinds of doors rather than you even unwittingly pushing them through the same one again and again.
> I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
Seeing all the kids my kids play with, the ones who seem to turn out the most well rounded aren’t the ones without screen time but the ones without helicopter parents.
You’d be surprised how many of these kids have never been outside of their parents line of sight, even at middle school age.
My kid's school won't even release the child off the bus without a parent present. I let my kid walk on my own property and it wasn't 30 seconds before a Karen drove up to interrogate them about why they are "alone." It's gotten pretty crazy. Any asshole who wants veto powers on your parenting can punish you for weeks, and the geniuses who wrote the reporting laws make it illegal for you to even find out who your accuser is. Enforcers of the state are often happy to indulge their psychopathy, yes probably nothing will happen (though occasionally does), but in the process they scare the shit out of the child and the process is the punishment.
The USA badly needs a mass rewrite of negligence law, and the end of anonymous CPS complaints, before we can reasonably expect the helicopter insanity to end.
I'm so happy I don't have children (yet?) for that reason. Like, are you doing your child a disservice in the long run by doing what I'd call the right thing? I wouldn't dare answer that…
I once in a supermarket saw a probably 2-year old sitting in a stroller, holding a smartphone watching Youtube. When the ads came up, the little fella confidently pressed the "skip ad" button. I was perplexed and stunned, how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads. I don't even want to know the screentime that kid has.
My dude, go grocery shopping with a 2-year-old and see if you want them walking around. They'll be peeling a sticker off the floor for two minutes, then grabbing everything off the shelf. It's perfectly normal to cart the kid around so you can actually make progress through the aisles. They can reasonably follow you around between 3-4.
OP said “how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads.” A two year old should definitely know how to walk. Obviously you will not have it strutting around in a store, but it should know how to walk.
Also I don’t let my two year old near screens on her own, and generally do not allow screen time at all, but she absorbs things at a pace which is incredible. If I were to “skip ads” in front of her, I’d only have to do it around twice for her to be able to do it on her own…
They just leave them outside in the stroller in someplace like Sweden. It's hilarious how on HN the nordic countries are idolized and leaving strollers outside while the kid stares at the street man smoking fentanyl out of a piece of aluminum foil indicates you are a glorious liberated member of intelligentsia but by god if you put a tablet on to get a moment of peace while you take a shower then you are a hideous sub-human piece of garbage.
Babies. They leave there babies. They do not leave there two years old already fully capable to toddle away and still dumb enough to walk into anything.
Also, not every city has the same massive drug addiction homelessness problem as yours.
In most countries it's illegal to leave any child unattended in a way that puts them at risk which is a vague definition. But if something were to happen to the child while unsupervised any vagueness collapses into negligence.
Also, my 2 year olds walked around the store all the time, as well as sat in the cart when I didn't have time to supervise. It is good exercise, and helps them practice following instructions.
> how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads
At 2 kids can walk and have fine enough motor skills to press a small button, if that was the direction you were thinking.
Kids are surprisingly intuitive and form connections super quickly. It probably took a few tries, and maybe the parent even showed them how to do it: button appeared in the corner > press it > see fun content. If something works they commit it to memory like you wouldn't imagine.
My wife stays home with our kids. My daughter ends up watching a fair bit of television while my wife does chores and the like.
We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned. If anything, she's learning things that I would not thought to teach her at her age. About 6 months ago she had an assessment through the school district for early education and at 2 years of age was able to identify about half the letters of the the alphabet.
My wife and I watching this happen were genuinely surprised because neither of us had even considered trying to teach the alphabet to a 2-year old. We did not teach her this, educational content taught her this.
I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
I think the kids will be all right as long as you're involved. We're not hand our kid a tablet and saying "Go nuts". We're watching TV in the living room as a family.
> I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
At 2 years old?
There are babies under a year who watch youtube brainrot shat out by obscure indian animation farms multiple hours a day, I'm not sure it has the same impact as watching Stargate when you're eight. My niece is 9 months, she never watched anything on a phone yet as soon as someone in her line of sight gets a phone out she's mesmerized, it's scary to witness
You have no idea what potential of you was lost there, and we don't even know what your life looks like so can't judge any of that. But stating 'I spent most of my childhood in front of TV so all is fine' is... I guess you don't have strong affinity towards nature, adventure, sports, wildish traveling for example?
You do you (and your kids), but as a parent of small kids myself we do TV max maybe 30 mins weekly on average, older cartoons (age 4 and 6). There is little gained and a lot lost in screens, but you need to be aware of things being lost in the first place lol. Screens form addictions, active screens even moreso - why do this to your own children? Why not just let them roam the streets all day then, they will gather much more experience that way. Don't tell me it can be harmful to them - screens are too yet seemingly very few care.
Its much harder spending quality with them of course - this is the main reason why most parents slack off. Actively engaging with them, leading them by example, coming up with novel ways to play with them, that's not how our generation was raised up. Its not easy for me, for some reason easier for my wife, but we are trying our best. If anything in life is wroth pursuing will all vigor, this is it and not some empty white collar careers or even worse money status (this comes from senior dev in a bank and a doctor couple).
In my view, there are only few paths towards happy balanced adult individual that knows what they want in life and go for it, and this is the most sure way even though there are never any guarantees.
Maybe the plus side is if screens become their encoded reality from a young age, staring at a screen for work because that's the only thing you can do that pays well enough to support a family won't be nearly as depressing and just feel normal.
> We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned.
That is likely the key element, along with being the reason why the guidance suggests no screen time before the age of 2.
Some parents know what their child needs, some parents don't know how to navigate the mess of children's content, some parents would use it to justify using the screen as a babysitter. It is nearly impossible to offer generic advice, so it tends to be on the safe-side.
It is also worth noting that you are using one metric here, assessments based upon academic achievement. There are other things to consider, such as social and physical development. Perhaps your family is also taking that into account, but again they have to consider how everyone would interpret generic guidance.
Yeah, I use Ms Rachel with my son when I need to cut his nails or if I am alone with him and I need to take a shower or something.
He goes to swimming classes and he learned to clap in the "If You're Happy and you know it" song even though the song is different in his classes, I was confused as to how he learned that you usually clap in the song but I presume he learned it from Ms Rachel.
It's useful English language exposure for him too as we live in a non-English speaking country and my partner doesn't speak English either so without TV I am his only exposure to English.
I wouldn't let him watch it for 8 hours, but I presume that's the typical newspaper sensationalising.
My 2.5 year old and my 4 year old both get their fair share of TV.
But there’s a reason the AAP recommends no screen time before 2.
There’s a lot of data that show that babies and toddlers don’t learn language skills from TV for some reason. And it inhibits learning because instead of doing what they’d normally do which is watch and listen to adults and older kids speaking they are glued to the screen.
we avoid it very well with our kids but sometimes I am worried it won't make a difference in the long run and we are just doing hard mode for no reason. kids are pretty adaptable. will be interesting to see in 10-15 years.
The public doesn't even have the capacity to support all the babies that are outright abused. A lot of researchers will get more notches on their precious CV but let's be real, if anyone gave a shit about random babies then screen time is so far down the list that they're never going to get there under any rational prioritization of who needs assistance.
It's better at holding their attention, but is it actually better?
My impression was that a lot of the content was effectively "attention slop", bright colors and noises, often with very little sense to them, or just variations of the same rhymes a 90's baby would've been raised on.
A lot of it seemed to cross over from just being stimulating to being overstimulating.
I have two boys. 2 and 5. We’ve never done screens, instead we do books and focused attention from each parent and we are looked at like crazy people when we tell people that. But our kids are miles ahead of their cohorts in attention span, respectfulness, behavior, socializing, etc. It’s actually alarming. I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
Same with us. Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
When he is at a party and a tv is on in the distance he stares like a zombie at it. It's depressing at how TV changes him and I have to transfer his focus away.
> Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
I have a very qualified pediatric occupational therapist friend and when I was sort of bragging about how many "cool things" my toddler can do I was immediately told that they are nice party tricks but don't say much about the development of the child, predict future performance or intelligence, and definitely aren't what I should be focusing on as a parent.
The child didn't just naturally learn to do those tricks. Our games focused a lot on this because I thought "it builds brain and skills", always be ahead of all other kids. In reality only I benefited from this because I could drop it in random conversation and then have pride flow out my ears. And the kid kept repeating the now easy tricks looking for the reward, staying inside the comfort zone.
I was told to simply guide our interactions with a method called "serve and return"[0]. It's a much more powerful tool that makes any and every interaction an opportunity for development, not just individual tasks practiced to perfection and repeated for rewards. You guide but also let yourself be guided so your child gets to feel comfortable opening all kinds of doors rather than you even unwittingly pushing them through the same one again and again.
[0] https://developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/serve-and-re...
> I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
Seeing all the kids my kids play with, the ones who seem to turn out the most well rounded aren’t the ones without screen time but the ones without helicopter parents.
You’d be surprised how many of these kids have never been outside of their parents line of sight, even at middle school age.
My kid's school won't even release the child off the bus without a parent present. I let my kid walk on my own property and it wasn't 30 seconds before a Karen drove up to interrogate them about why they are "alone." It's gotten pretty crazy. Any asshole who wants veto powers on your parenting can punish you for weeks, and the geniuses who wrote the reporting laws make it illegal for you to even find out who your accuser is. Enforcers of the state are often happy to indulge their psychopathy, yes probably nothing will happen (though occasionally does), but in the process they scare the shit out of the child and the process is the punishment.
The USA badly needs a mass rewrite of negligence law, and the end of anonymous CPS complaints, before we can reasonably expect the helicopter insanity to end.
I'm so happy I don't have children (yet?) for that reason. Like, are you doing your child a disservice in the long run by doing what I'd call the right thing? I wouldn't dare answer that…
I once in a supermarket saw a probably 2-year old sitting in a stroller, holding a smartphone watching Youtube. When the ads came up, the little fella confidently pressed the "skip ad" button. I was perplexed and stunned, how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads. I don't even want to know the screentime that kid has.
Maybe this is evidence that the urge to skip ads is innate.
Parrot skips ads https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MLoJ_t36Png
It is the first thing most any kid learns on a tablet.
Anything to keep the dopamine flowing.
A 2-year old should be able to walk unless they are pretty severely developmentally delayed.
sitting in a stroller doesn’t mean the kid can’t walk
I agree, but OP stated:
> a child that can't even walk yet
My dude, go grocery shopping with a 2-year-old and see if you want them walking around. They'll be peeling a sticker off the floor for two minutes, then grabbing everything off the shelf. It's perfectly normal to cart the kid around so you can actually make progress through the aisles. They can reasonably follow you around between 3-4.
OP said “how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads.” A two year old should definitely know how to walk. Obviously you will not have it strutting around in a store, but it should know how to walk.
Also I don’t let my two year old near screens on her own, and generally do not allow screen time at all, but she absorbs things at a pace which is incredible. If I were to “skip ads” in front of her, I’d only have to do it around twice for her to be able to do it on her own…
I think the point was fine motor control at 2.
They just leave them outside in the stroller in someplace like Sweden. It's hilarious how on HN the nordic countries are idolized and leaving strollers outside while the kid stares at the street man smoking fentanyl out of a piece of aluminum foil indicates you are a glorious liberated member of intelligentsia but by god if you put a tablet on to get a moment of peace while you take a shower then you are a hideous sub-human piece of garbage.
Sweden doesn't have as big a problem with drug addicts, homeless people etc. on the streets. Although it's changed a lot in recent years.
Giving them a tablet so you can get a brief moment of respite to do something you have to do is different from watching 8 hours of a screen a day!
Babies. They leave there babies. They do not leave there two years old already fully capable to toddle away and still dumb enough to walk into anything.
Also, not every city has the same massive drug addiction homelessness problem as yours.
In most countries it's illegal to leave any child unattended in a way that puts them at risk which is a vague definition. But if something were to happen to the child while unsupervised any vagueness collapses into negligence.
My dude, that is not what
>how can a child that can't even walk yet
means.
Also, my 2 year olds walked around the store all the time, as well as sat in the cart when I didn't have time to supervise. It is good exercise, and helps them practice following instructions.
> how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads
At 2 kids can walk and have fine enough motor skills to press a small button, if that was the direction you were thinking.
Kids are surprisingly intuitive and form connections super quickly. It probably took a few tries, and maybe the parent even showed them how to do it: button appeared in the corner > press it > see fun content. If something works they commit it to memory like you wouldn't imagine.
My wife stays home with our kids. My daughter ends up watching a fair bit of television while my wife does chores and the like.
We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned. If anything, she's learning things that I would not thought to teach her at her age. About 6 months ago she had an assessment through the school district for early education and at 2 years of age was able to identify about half the letters of the the alphabet.
My wife and I watching this happen were genuinely surprised because neither of us had even considered trying to teach the alphabet to a 2-year old. We did not teach her this, educational content taught her this.
I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
I think the kids will be all right as long as you're involved. We're not hand our kid a tablet and saying "Go nuts". We're watching TV in the living room as a family.
> I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
At 2 years old?
There are babies under a year who watch youtube brainrot shat out by obscure indian animation farms multiple hours a day, I'm not sure it has the same impact as watching Stargate when you're eight. My niece is 9 months, she never watched anything on a phone yet as soon as someone in her line of sight gets a phone out she's mesmerized, it's scary to witness
> At 2
Yes, I absolutely did.
I was home with my dad, gated into the living room while he did things around the house. There is only so much to do.
You have no idea what potential of you was lost there, and we don't even know what your life looks like so can't judge any of that. But stating 'I spent most of my childhood in front of TV so all is fine' is... I guess you don't have strong affinity towards nature, adventure, sports, wildish traveling for example?
You do you (and your kids), but as a parent of small kids myself we do TV max maybe 30 mins weekly on average, older cartoons (age 4 and 6). There is little gained and a lot lost in screens, but you need to be aware of things being lost in the first place lol. Screens form addictions, active screens even moreso - why do this to your own children? Why not just let them roam the streets all day then, they will gather much more experience that way. Don't tell me it can be harmful to them - screens are too yet seemingly very few care.
Its much harder spending quality with them of course - this is the main reason why most parents slack off. Actively engaging with them, leading them by example, coming up with novel ways to play with them, that's not how our generation was raised up. Its not easy for me, for some reason easier for my wife, but we are trying our best. If anything in life is wroth pursuing will all vigor, this is it and not some empty white collar careers or even worse money status (this comes from senior dev in a bank and a doctor couple).
In my view, there are only few paths towards happy balanced adult individual that knows what they want in life and go for it, and this is the most sure way even though there are never any guarantees.
Babies are designed to pay attention to what you pay attention to, and want to do the same.
It may be more 'harmful' for babies to see parents paying attention to screens than it is for them to watch the screen themselves.
(They also become very good at telling if you're really "looking" at the phone or just pretending to look at something.)
Maybe the plus side is if screens become their encoded reality from a young age, staring at a screen for work because that's the only thing you can do that pays well enough to support a family won't be nearly as depressing and just feel normal.
"Babies are designed..."
sure they are.
I would expect everyone to be mesmerized by amazing technology they have not gotten used to yet.
> We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned.
That is likely the key element, along with being the reason why the guidance suggests no screen time before the age of 2.
Some parents know what their child needs, some parents don't know how to navigate the mess of children's content, some parents would use it to justify using the screen as a babysitter. It is nearly impossible to offer generic advice, so it tends to be on the safe-side.
It is also worth noting that you are using one metric here, assessments based upon academic achievement. There are other things to consider, such as social and physical development. Perhaps your family is also taking that into account, but again they have to consider how everyone would interpret generic guidance.
No the no screen time before 2 has nothing to do with content. Read my reply to the GP comment.
Yeah, I use Ms Rachel with my son when I need to cut his nails or if I am alone with him and I need to take a shower or something.
He goes to swimming classes and he learned to clap in the "If You're Happy and you know it" song even though the song is different in his classes, I was confused as to how he learned that you usually clap in the song but I presume he learned it from Ms Rachel.
It's useful English language exposure for him too as we live in a non-English speaking country and my partner doesn't speak English either so without TV I am his only exposure to English.
I wouldn't let him watch it for 8 hours, but I presume that's the typical newspaper sensationalising.
It's amusing to watch kids pick up Australian slang from Bluey.
My 2.5 year old and my 4 year old both get their fair share of TV.
But there’s a reason the AAP recommends no screen time before 2.
There’s a lot of data that show that babies and toddlers don’t learn language skills from TV for some reason. And it inhibits learning because instead of doing what they’d normally do which is watch and listen to adults and older kids speaking they are glued to the screen.
we avoid it very well with our kids but sometimes I am worried it won't make a difference in the long run and we are just doing hard mode for no reason. kids are pretty adaptable. will be interesting to see in 10-15 years.
> A report finds a third of newborns use devices for more than three hours, despite government advice that under-twos have no screen time at all
Disgusting :(
That said, I can't read the article, paywalled. Anyone have a working link?
https://archive.ph/qHUFg
What's going to happen to those poor babies do you think?
They’ll be sold software to correct the damage.
Gen Z is the first generation to score lower on standardized tests than previous generations.
> https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
The public doesn't even have the capacity to support all the babies that are outright abused. A lot of researchers will get more notches on their precious CV but let's be real, if anyone gave a shit about random babies then screen time is so far down the list that they're never going to get there under any rational prioritization of who needs assistance.
TBF content is generally better than it was 15 years ago even for babies. I don't blame em...
It's better at holding their attention, but is it actually better?
My impression was that a lot of the content was effectively "attention slop", bright colors and noises, often with very little sense to them, or just variations of the same rhymes a 90's baby would've been raised on.
A lot of it seemed to cross over from just being stimulating to being overstimulating.
The quality of the content is not the issue here.