Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

> After this (already a lot, isn't it) , it is mostly "let kids be kids".

Some of your list is just basic quality of life. Sleeping? Eating at the table? Talking to them? This is all general parenting.

> My daughter started getting hooked on to Ipad and one day, we went cold turkey and put it away. She only gets to watch TV now. No more eyes stuck in an Ipad.

How is TV better than an iPad? I mean, seriously? At least with an iPad there's a plethora of different apps, and a good percentage of them will be more enlightening than watching the ever diminishing quality of TV these days.

How much of this is just paranoia about "too much screen time" but reframed for a 21st century approach?

> My wife doesn't quite agree but I have been able to keep it like this for a while.

Parenting is a two person effort. Don't shut out the mother's thoughts on it just because you disagree.

View on HN

>How is TV better than an iPad? I mean, seriously? At least with an iPad there's a plethora of different apps, and a good percentage of them will be more enlightening than watching the ever diminishing quality of TV these days.

One thing I notice is with TV the kid will sit and watch a program for 20 minutes. On an iPad they open YouTube, they will switch every 30 seconds to a new video, often just showing a random mish-mash of super hero characters with an annoying song in the background. The videos are all derivative, mixing a number of popular things / characters / songs trying to just get clicks from kids. Search for "daddy finger" on YouTube and start clicking through videos to get an idea of the quality of programming kids will watch if you let them.

It seems that constantly being able to pick something new every 30 seconds would lend itself to shortened attention spans worse than watching a kids show with at least some semblance of a narrative arc.

This more applies to toddlers, not older children.

I'd that were my main concern, I'd put the device on a pipe with too little bandwidth to handle video... All the text you can eat, but no moving pictures.

> How much of this is just paranoia about "too much screen time" but reframed for a 21st century approach?

All of it. An entire generation raised glued to the TV is now flipping out about screen time. It would be funny if I didn’t have to deal with other parents all the time.

Educational TV has come so far too! Daniel Tiger is amazing at teaching social skills compared to any show available in the 90s.

From research it seems the biggest issue with kids watching TV is just that it takes time away from other forms of learning. Which means limit it but no need to get rid of it.

I can't say enough good things about the SciShow Kids YouTube channel. My four year old calls Jessie (the presenter), her "science teacher", and routinely surprises me with information she has learned there. They're a great length (usually 3-5 minutes), so you can 'tune' the time.

https://www.youtube.com/user/scishowkids

As far as PBS shows go, Nature Cat is a favorite (and well written enough to be enjoyable for parents as well).

Completely agree. In our house, TV === PBS stations. Daniel Tiger, et al., on PBS Kids are phenomenal. I would also point out that, at least in the case of my son, he is much more socially and temporally present when watching TV than when using his mother's phone (I do not share my devices with him). There's the additional annoyance that when using the phone, he wants to watch one of us play. He doesn't want to play the game himself or with us, he wants to spectate. So, TV is usually my preferred option for screen time.

> How is TV better than an iPad? I mean, seriously? At least with an iPad there's a plethora of different apps, and a good percentage of them will be more enlightening than watching the ever diminishing quality of TV these days.

Kids are all.. different? What he describes was surprisingly the same for my 6 year old. Tablets cause focus and aggression issues with him. Taking away tablet access has done wonders for our household.

Your mileage may vary.

Interesting. My five-year old has exhibited some aggression/anger occasionally. I have attributed it to him being tired or going through natural childhood phases. He does use electronic devices a lot. I never would have related the two behaviors, though.

I wonder if this is due to the instant gratification that devices provide, which creates an expectation that the real world should function this way, too, and anger when that turns out not to be the case.

From the reading I've done on the subject and observing our almost 3 year old, the ipad gives a dopamine rush to the brain. Taking it away causes the dopamine to stop and anger/frustration ensues...

At most he's allowed 1 hour a day, half hour after breakfast and a half hour before dinner. Both times he's given a 5 minute warning to turn it off, then he has to turn it off himself. We learned this the hard way, plus a lot if reading to figure out why he got so angry and frustrated when we turned it off.

Nowadays, either we play with him and his toys or he gets bored with that and wants the iPad again. We tell him the times he can watch it and he goes off bored again and starts getting creative with play on his own. The dopamine thing (self made opiate) really opened our eyes to his behaviour when the iPad was taken away.

>How is TV better than an iPad?

The iPad IS more dangerous than the T.V. BECAUSE it is so much more engaging. Unless you have super-cable-satellite T.V. with more channels than you could possible ever watch - and sometime still even then - TV watching becomes boring, and people are drawn to do other things. iPad often does not do this - which makes is simultaneously less dangerous (because it is more engaging and therefore educational in some sense) and more dangerous (because the impetus to leave and go away can express itself by loading up a different app or even popping onto the app store for a new free one, or by going on the internet or even youtube with their incredible variety).

I still use and iPad with my little boy, but I always try to be using to together - we talk about what he sees and hears, we watch Daniel Tiger and I sing the songs and ask about specific things he sees on the screen, etc. I feel like this is a good compromise, even if it ruins the otherwise potent ability of the iPad to engage him so I can do other things - I'm willing to sacrifice the other things in most cases. :D (I am somewhat horrified at how simple it is for us both to just get absorbed in one thing or another and spend too much time NOT doing all those talking/playing/interacting things with stuff on the iPad, though! So simple, takes effort and energy to refuse to fall into that trap! :) )

>Some of your list is just basic quality of life. Sleeping? Eating at the table? Talking to them? This is all general parenting.

That can't be taken for granted anymore.

It was never "taken for granted", but it's still basic quality of life.

Indeed, but considering some of the comments from other parents on this thread--and accounting for my own experience--spending time with one's children, just being present in the world together, exploring and fostering experiential learning, is not as simple as it would at first appear. Parents' lives are beset by demands and obligations outside those of parenting and managing a household, so it can be incredibly difficult to balance these disparate tasks and still make time to be present in the lives of their children on a timetable that does not begin to negatively impact the children's development.

Quality time is important and possibly one of the scarcest commodities in our economy. The importance of experiential learning (eg, dining together at the table), wherein a child learns about the world firsthand, including how to comport oneself in various situations, cannot be understated.

>> How is TV better than an iPad? I mean, seriously?

You can only watch TV in one room. Kids can carry a tablet around 24/7, everywhere they go.

So, don't let them carry the tablet everywhere they go?

> Parenting is a two person effort. Don't shut out the mother's thoughts on it just because you disagree

Sometimes one or the other is flat out wrong and it's ok to be firm in that case. For example, it's taken my wife about 6 years (and a small fortune in family therapy) to realize that backsliding on boundaries and discipline undermines all boundaries and discipline, including mine. Thankfully she has finally heard me when I've explained why DD took me seriously, while ignoring and walking all over my DW.

>How is TV better than an iPad?

One of the few compelling arguments for TV is that it's excellent for teaching language to first learners. My wife and I have a bilingual family, English and Japanese, but we live where there are no Japanese speakers my children's age to socialize with. A subscription to a few Japanese TV channels has been instrumental in passively supplementing language acquisition. It's the only reason we have a TV in the house at all.

Can you not set up the iPad to be in Japanese or otherwise make sure to include the language in your life other ways?

>Can you not set up the iPad to be in Japanese

It's complicated for a few reasons. First, my daughter is too young to read, and she won't be ready to read Japanese for a very long time since it's much more work to achieve literacy than for English.

Second, with iOS and the Apple ecosystem generally, you have to contend with arbitrary and draconian region lockout. It's not as simple as just switching the phone to a different language, you have to maintain a separate Apple ID to get content from Japanese stores, and in many cases, a Japanese credit card and/or bank account, and sometimes even a Japanese IP address!! Frustrating!

Third, I can't trust unsupervised use of the iPad the way I can with a TV set to the kid's channel, having seen the kind of filth that e.g. Youtube's autoplay will serve up.

>otherwise make sure to include the language in your life other ways?

"""Supplement"""

I don't think that works though. You need a real life human for language transfer to occur. It does't work via tv/video. http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/why-your-kid-cant-l...

Maybe it's different for keeping/improving a language you already know...

>Some of your list is just basic quality of life. Sleeping? Eating at the table? Talking to them? This is all general parenting.

Unfortunately, there are still many children whose only meals are served at school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com