Screens Are Bad for Young Brains
parentology.com
parentology.com
I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice."
Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works.
It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest.
I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet.
So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.
https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-f...
"IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm.
If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."
Regulation is necessary to avoid: self-regulation of publishers, self-regulation of readers, regulation of speed of transmission. But the more connected our society is, the more power a viral message has to blow up, so the most viral messages crowd out everything else, and before you know it it seems like the whole world mysteriously has the same headlines.
Except so many people are incompetent parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?), the list goes on, and on, and on, and on.
Many kids will survive despite the awful way they were brought up, though often with psychological scars, and are likely to engage in the abuse they themselves were subject to, or turn to self-destructive behavior.
Not that the parents of all psychologically scarred, abusive, or self-destructive people are 100% to blame, but they tend to play a significant role.
So, yeah, I don't think the advice of "do whatever you think is best" to parents is necessarily the wisest approach, despite a lot of parents thinking they're smarter than the experts and that they don't need to listen to advice.
>... who refuse to vaccinate their kids,
>> The percentage of children who have received no vaccines has increased, reaching 1.3% for children born in 2015, compared with 0.3% among those 19–35 months when surveyed in 2001 (6). Some children might be unvaccinated because of choices made by parents, whereas for others, lack of access to health care or health insurance might be factors.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm...
> ... abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually,
>> 0.92 %
>> The majority (77.5%) of perpetrators are a parent to their victim.
Source: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2018.pdf
> ...feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?)
>> The prevalence of obesity [in children aged 2-19] was 18.5% and affected about 13.7 million children and adolescents.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
I'll leave this to you to parse out which parts of these are evidence of bad parenting; but it's pretty clear to me that the GP's statement is largely correct.
"Linked lists are bad."
"Java is bad."
"Databases are bad."
As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great.
The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me?
And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.
Will your child be worse off if they're fed with formula instead of breastmilk? There's some evidence showing that this is the case. If you're unable to breastfeed and feel guilt because you have this knowledge, that's not a valid reason to tell these researchers to silence themselves.
If you need an example of this, read the title of this post.
With stories like that as background you can see why people are sceptical.
Having spent a bunch of time around new parents, my observation is that most of them are way too hyped up about trivial threats. If a breast-feeding mother drinks a glass of wine once every few days the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs. If the baby plays with many types of toys marked “ages 3+” while the parents are sitting watching, the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby climbs up on a play structure marked “ages 4–7” while the parents are standing watching, the risk of permanent injury is trivial. If a 2-year-old walks around barefoot on the sidewalk, the risks are trivial. Etc.
The same kind of tendencies bring us the anti-vax movement, a rush to sanitize all surfaces in the home, excessive fears about kidnapping, theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk, and so on.
New parents’ (and people’s in our society more generally) risk assessment and concept of hygiene is excessively black–and–white.
But this is not the fault of “modern medicine”.
So yes. The hyper focus on breast feeding is a problem. Baby friendly is often hostile to the mother. The medical community is to blame while in the hospital prioritizing pumping over breathing.
We had twins two years ago and some of the nurses were just very lacking in empathy. A few of the other ones were fantastic.
The second night we were in the hospital, I went home to stay with our older daughter. This left my wife on her own in the room, and the understanding was the nurses were going to give her time alone and handle a couple of the feedings for her. Well, shift change happened and the new nurse didn't give a care. Have to follow the script.
Sure they took the twins away after the feeding, but when they need to eat every two hours and it takes an hour to do, and then they have a half hour of other checks they need to get in, basically my wife didn't get any sleep all night.
She broke down crying in front of her nurse and the nurse basically said, "Suck it up." Without considering that my wife was dealing with a C-section, new twins, having nurses in and out of the room constantly, and me not being there to lend a hand.
I came in at like 5 am, and she was basically just sobbing in her bed. Thankfully one of the nice nurses came in and sat with her and calmed her down, and then said she would have a chat with the younger nurse and let her know that she needed to cut new moms some slack.
The other noteworthy thing that happened was my wife ordered supper, and while the nurses were in the room, she very obviously was having an allergic reaction to it. They just carried on like nothing was happening because "we're here for the babies". Finally I put my foot down and pointed out that my wife was obviously having an allergic reaction and her eyes were basically swollen shut. Then they finally were like "oh, I guess we should get her something for that."
Which is a long way of saying, I agree that nurses aren't nearly attentive enough. And can relate. But also, I'm not sure if its the focus on breast feeding that is the issue.
Your example sounds so far away from everything normal.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/20/is-brea...
“This is the most important thing you can do for your child, and if it doesn’t work for you, that’s very unfortunate and, in the long run, will have serious consequences.” never crossed my plate. In germany mothers try, if it doesn't work, it doesn't. Thats it.
Has it ever crossed your mind, that medical people have a simliar distribution than every other field? Do you think every software developer is an expert?
Do you think everyone who is painting, paints equally well?
Do you think just because someone studied, that person is smart?
As it should be. You're the responsible adult in the room, and you will have to make sacrifices to take care of the helpless person you chose to bring into this world.
If you think "mom comes first", then get a fur baby instead.
I didn't say that there isn't. What I said, literally, is that the mother doesn't come first.
Our son was screaming because he was hungry. The nurse kept saying this was good, that it would encourage breast milk production. It took several tries to convince her that, while it might be good in the long run, we needed some food for this baby.
This was a consistent experience with all nurses we dealt with. Interestingly, breastfeeding specialists tended to be more understanding.
I see older cases about nestle misleading women in developing markets to suggest formula was better, which led to deaths. However this seems to be due to nutritional deficiencies which I, perhaps naively, would assume they have figured out by now.
They have, it's fine.
> But, having some formula is fine too.
It is harder to get the baby on the breastfeeding train, if you will, if you're switching between breast and bottle. You can pump but many women find that really distasteful and either way it takes up shitloads of time and their body might still not cooperate. A surprising percentage of babies (admittedly anecdotal, but I'm a parent and know lots of others and the sample size is actually pretty large as a result, though not randomized) have a hell of a time "latching" and actually getting enough milk out, and that's if the mother's body's producing enough, both of which are hard to measure so it's really easy to end up with a baby who's in the "failing to thrive" range which can lead to further hospitalization (and more judgement from nurses and such).
Frankly, as soon as shit gets a little sketchy I'd say just go straight to formula and bottle. It's not as good, sure, but the other way seems to be wildly harder and more difficult to track, unless you get very lucky and have one of those pairings where both mother and baby sync up perfectly and it just goes great, in which case it's merely very time-consuming. This is like 20% of babies at best, in my experience.
The rest get to deal with non-stop stink-eye and condescension from nurses and other care providers while they're stressed out, hurting, and anxious already, to probably still fail at the whole breast feeding thing even if they try hard and feel like shit for weeks and maybe don't get their baby enough food to grow properly while attempting it.
The material on screen is very often (from what I can observe just walking around town and seeing kids looking at them) grossly inappropriate for the child’s current level – either too simple and repetitive or too advanced and incomprehensible – but the sounds, colors, and especially movement are so exciting as pure distraction that kids will sit entranced, whether or not they are learning anything. The overstimulation from the screen is addictive enough for the kids that the kids will start to fuss and cry when the screen is removed, and when given the choice the screen will crowd out other toys and activities.
It is probably possible to make a screen a meaningful learning experience for young kids, but few parents (especially the ones who are using the screen to get a break from childcare) have the time to research and personally vet material to figure that out.
If a kid watches 30m of Mr. Rogers every day, they’re going to be fine. But the kids watching 2 hours of YouTube low-budget animated nursery rhymes on loop, or watching endless unboxing videos, or playing a too-easy iPad game, when they could otherwise be playing with and learning about the physical world, are really missing out.
This is not to say that kids shouldn’t regularly spend some time entertaining themselves while the parents do something else. But if they can learn to do so with a wimmelbook or some crayons or some blocks or a cardboard box.... they’re usually going to be learning more than if stuck in front of a TV.
the problem with screens is that they are strongly attractive. my kids don't even notice me when they watch a screen. from the available entertainment kids will pick what is most attractive, and the only way to reduce screen time is to not make it available, and instead provide other options.
We try doing that with 20 min of Paw Patrol and it's impossible. Give a finger, they take an arm. It's impossible to regulate the quantity.
No matter how many different options they have available to play or what promises you try to make before hand, it ALWAYS ends in a total meltdown. We get 20 min of peace, followed by 40 min of hysteria.
Before streaming media (YT, Netflix) we could watch something say Sunday 6PM or Saturday 7AM, and that was it. Now everything's on demand and they know perfectly well there's always more as long parents say ok.
The only solution is to stop. After a few days of no TV, they stop asking and happily draw, leaf through books, build stuff. But nothing says "peace" like a kid watching TV.
Or something along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines
Dunno.. I tend to watch video with my 3.5 year old rather than leaving him to watch video while I go do something else. We only watch videos occasionally (maybe 3 hours/week on average), and don’t really end up with meltdowns when we stop. But that method doesn’t help if the goal was to get some time alone as a parent.
(The "there's always more [content out there]" component you mention - something I am very familiar with as someone with ADHD :X - folds nicely into the mesmerism/relive component described above.)
Where I learned about this recently: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/whats-paw-pa...
Linked from: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/how-toys-... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22259025 (9 days ago)
We decided not to even try with our twins, because it took an hour of pumping to produce half an ounce, every doctor we saw still pushed breastfeeding on us.
There's immense peer pressure surrounding it too. People love feeling superior to each other.
> People love feeling superior to each other.
I think it’s simply that people are poor at understanding that Option A being slightly better than Option B does not mean that Option B is bad. I think this deficiency in reasoning is what drives a lot of irrational behavior wrt to parenting (eg, making incredible sacrifices to afford a home in a neighborhood with “good schools”, going through hell so your newborn doesn’t sleep on its tummy, etc).
The sheer amount of guilt, shame, tut-tutting, and general bullshit around the birthing process is just astounding.
Breastfeeding is the poster child for this (great example here) but so does every other thing about parenting. Women have to make "no-win" choices around this, plus career, plus body changes, plus so many parenting choices.
Every single one of these things has 10 books that say X and 10 books that say Y.
Our pediatrician was supportive of nursing and suggested we stick with it but also said "the data that breastmilk is better in any significant way is just not there".
My wife breastfed for 6 months with both our kids then called it good, and I thought that was heroic.
Having to duck out to pump every couple hours is literally the last thing a new mom back at work (guilt! shame! second-guessing!) wants to be doing.
There are similar issues with the “back to sleep” campaign - the risk of SIDS apparently is indeed Slightly lower for babies sleeping on their back, but it is only very slightly lower, and some babies will not sleep on their back unless they are exhausted which causes other non trivial issues. If you actually look into the “back to sleep” study data, it is much, much weaker than proponents imply it is.
And yet, every nurse in the hospital kept telling us with religious fervor to not even think of letting the baby fall asleep on their stomach. I was so impressed that I was sure the evidence was overwhelming. But after a week with a hardly sleeping newborn (relatively speaking), I decided to look into it myself. You should to, rather than trust the “experts”. (Or a random internet post like mine, for that matter)
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199308053290601
Strongest predictor of SIDS was mom’s education level, followed by whether or not she was smoking; stomach/back was third. It’s the strongest one that can (easily) be changed, but something is very fishy about the data.
Proponents point out the inverse correlation between sleeping on back and SIDS, starting at the time the recommendations were made, as proof that this is a causal relationship. However, inclusion of time prior to recommendation shows that SIDS is inverse correlated to time; and sleeping on back is positively correlated with time only after recommendations were made.
Also, it’s possible data in the last 10 years paints a different picture - but at the time, the case for causal “back to sleep” was very flimsy.
Note the decline in SIDS rate, which starts in 1988 (see e.g. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/105/3/650 ), before the recommendation (1992) and "back to sleep" campaign (1994) and though it does track the decline of belly sleeping position, I found in the past graphs of belly sleeping from before 1986 in which it was essentially uncorrelated (or even inverse correlated, if you go back enough - but I don't trust that data).
But what's more alarming, is that although there is a continuing decline in SIDS, if you look at the combined SUID (Sudden Unexpected Infant Death) rate, it is essentially flat since 1996 (following a decline from 1990 as visible in the CDC graph, and which goes much farther IIRC). As a data scientist, this hints either (a) change of classification system that was not properly noted, or (b) that there's an underlying reason which causes infant death, which may manifest in different ways depending e.g. on whether the infant sleeps on their belly or their back.
As a new parent, this was terrifying (is anything really ever safe?) but also reassuring (the expert advice might technically be true, but seems to be useless).
I've found this over and over in many other cases - e.g., statins seem to reduce the change of a heart attack, but do nothing for (or even slightly increase) all cause mortality. Also financial advisers give advice which is technically correct but often useless.
Experts rarely qualify the limits of their advice, and that goes double when it is delivered 2nd hand (by nurses or even doctors who never bothered to look at the data but just parrot the official recommendations).
As a data scientist, you should really consider more than these two causes. For example, perhaps some other cause of infant deaths was rising during that same period. Or, perhaps there is a change in classification, AND there has been a saturation point reached in terms of how the existing public health initiatives can affect population behaviors. You really just cannot reason from coarse, population level death rates like this to a specific condition or cause.
Also: https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm
The graph on that site very clearly shows that most of offsetting increase is caused by strangulation and suffocation, not an actual unexplained cause. It appears to be mostly a change in classification.
Finally, I really want to point out that we should not expect that a public information campaign would decrease SIDS rates to zero. After all, we can see in this thread that there are still plenty of parents who put their babies to sleep on their tummies. As far as most people know, the data could show that SIDS is 100% caused by prone sleeping and people would still doubt the evidence and put their child to sleep prone. SIDS rates would still not drop to zero, and that would not be evidence against the hypothetical cause.
And I started with saying that my conclusion was that it is likely safer for babies to sleep on their back from the SIDD/SUID perspective, but the evidence didn’t seem as conclusive or overwhelming as I was led to believe.
The hospital staff made it sound like letting my baby sleep on their tummy is signing their death warrant.
Do note, also, that prevalence of back sleeping went from less than 30% to more than 80% over the period graphed. One should not expect compliance from such a campaign in general, but (as far as medical compliance goes) a very good one was achieved. New parents are perhaps the most compliant group.
I am unlikely to dig as deep into the data again, but my well supported (I believe) conclusion at the time was that, all-cause-infant-mortality-wise, the recommendation may be somewhat justified, but the strength, might and terror in which it is given is definitely not.
Also, not to be all hippie but would we not have evolved to want to be held as infants? What species just leaves its young to sleep without physical contact?
Regardless of how true it is, the establishment cannot make a recommendation of the “Co sleeping is ok if you don’t drink, not overweight, and a light sleeper” kind, as many of the people in those categories are in denial of being in those categories. so it will be “co sleeping is always dangerous”.
But then, you nords leave your babies to sleep in the snow which is perfectly healthy but would get you a visit from child protection services in the US (did not hear of such a case, but have heard of cases for letting 9-year old kids walk from school or play basketball without parental supervision)
But like anything else, fuck, if it's working for you and the risk is very low, do what you need to do. I avoided it because I kept seeing hellish outcomes but if that's not what's happening for you, go for it.
Our oldest goes to sleep early and will insist on going to sleep when she feels tired and will wake up with me in the morning. Our youngest fights sleep until exhaustion and prefers to sleep in (until 9-10am if allowed). They have been raised exactly the same way.
We take way too much credit for our children's sleep habits.
The opposite: When my kids wake up in the middle of the night if they are alone they freak out. If there is another person there they feel comfort and go back to sleep without waking anyone else up. But YMMV.
Babies want that feeling of comfort, which is why you swaddle.
I'm with you completely except for this one. Cigarette smoke feels like it sucks the air out of a nonsmoker's lungs from quite a wide radius. A nonsmoker can smell an outdoor cigarette from a block away, and it doesn't smell good even at that distance. Up close it makes people involuntarily gag. Not recognizing that seems pretty blind.
None of my parents, aunts/uncles or grandparents have been smoking since before I was born AFAIK and I still disagree with you.
I've always liked the distant smell of smoke for some reason. As everyone stops I'll probably miss it a bit but that is OK, I don't want them to destroy their lungs.
But your blanket statements feels weird to me, even as a non-smoker from a non-smoking home.
This post is pure hysteria. You're rationalizing a conditioned, exaggerated reaction.
Is it that difficult to understand that most people don't want to inhale smoke and find it really distasteful?
Honestly, inhaling flatulence is probably less dangerous than inhaling second-hand smoke, and I don't think anyone is going to blame someone for intensely disliking inhaling that.
Unless you have an allergy or something, this is entirely in your head.
Some people also “involuntarily gag” when they think about interracial marriage or a person eating pickled cabbage. This kind of paranoid disgust is a conditioned response, not a reasoned risk assessment.
* * *
Note: I am not defending tobacco advertising, smoking in enclosed public spaces like restaurants, smoking in a car with kids inside it, smoking on primary school campuses, etc. (For that matter I’m not defending spending time near an indoor wood cooking fire, etc.)
It is clear that getting significant amounts of second-hand smoke is bad for anyone, and children are especially vulnerable because they can’t make choices about where to go.
But desire to avoid dangerous levels of smoke doesn’t excuse being a jerk to people who are engaged in a behavior (outdoor smoking) which they have a physical addiction to, and is predominantly harmful to themselves alone.
The narcissism of tobbaco users is emminently obvious to non-smokers but completely invisible and incomprehensible to them and their gratification. Just like how cigarette butts are the most common litter, and chewing tobbaco was curtailed due to concerns of tuberculosis from spitting it everywhere. It seems to be an effect of the drug more than anything sociological that all dissenting evidence is mentally erased.
What a peculiar defense. The next time you use a bathroom that has gone far too long between cleanings, just remember that your response to the odor is all mere conditioning and that you just need to make a risk assessment. Inhale deeply, my friend. Take it all in. Let the fresh shitsmelling air cleanse your thoughts. It's not dangerous after all.
> Unless you have an allergy or something, this is entirely in your head.
The fraction of the population with asthma is easily high enough that there's plenty of people for whom it's not in the head.
Personally I just hold my breath and speed up until I've passed those people, but its most definitely unpleasant.
Additionally, as the world became safer and sanitized, we became more distanced from injury and it seems more traumatic. Parents are more afraid and focused on the downsides. As well as the fact that we have fewer kids than in the past. The potential consequences are greater.
It's also worth noting that the body and brain are anti-fragile. That is, they become stronger and more robust when challenged. Weaker in the absence of it. The end result of all this sanitization, safetyism and overprotection is a fragile human. One that is less able to cope with the challenges and messiness and nuance of the real world.
That negative feedback loop has led to quite a mess. The Coddling of the American Mind does an excellent deep dive on all this: https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
My sis used to climb out of her crib and flop down to the ground when she was little. Turns out she was just naturally athletic. Now she’s a personal trainer.
Put some pillows next to their bed and let them roll
We are disgusted because the poison in cigarette smoke is extremely harmful to young lungs.
Smokers should have to go into designated areas they should have no right to pollute the air of those around them.
When someone is idling their car or truck do you go knock on their window and make a big scene about how they are poisoning your child?
And I say this, FWIW, as a on and off smoker.
There is a fundamental difference between someone minding their own business on a public street, not harming anyone else, and someone else putting on a show to shame them based on gross mis-assessment of risk.
That is a big claim. In view of the association with passive smoke and SIDS you will need some citations. It should not be hard to find them. Huge efforts have gone into researching causes of SIDS and there should be a good correlation between city vs countryside dwellers if your hypothesis is correct.
> When someone is idling their car or truck do you go knock on their window and make a big scene about how they are poisoning your child?
When my child was new born I would have moved away from them whilst saying loudly how disgusting they are - exactly the same as I did for smokers.
If someone is running their engine for no reason I would probably ask them to turn it off.
and really, this is the worst for kids
Yep, this is just as obvious as you want it to be.
And yet there's a massive government advertising campaign taking out billboards with the message "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother and your baby will die". Check out the posters in the BART system sometime.
I find this incredibly disgusting. Nothing can justify this official message. But there it is out there anyway. The government, spending your money to hurt you.
Go back 50 years and the things like nutrition, vaccination, etc had huge benefit in risk reduction.
Now that we’ve tackled those, we go after the next set. Now it’s breast feeding, screen time, etc. we put a similar focus on those but the returns are much smaller and sometimes questionable.
Is breast feeding better? Sure. Is your child going not going to reach their full potential if you use formula? No. Not worth getting stressed over.
There is just as much unsubstantiated fear generated by medical staff when it comes to kids as everywhere else in the community.
Seems that just having been a child qualifies somebody to comment on how you choose to raise your children.
Too much attention and you are a helicopter parent, not enough and you are neglectful. God forbid you let them play in the park without you being there.
Medicine is not unique in it's "accepted dogma" having a 1/2 life of course, all sciences do. But it's horribly short. From https://hms.harvard.edu/news/medicine-changing-world :
> Today, the half-life of medical knowledge is currently about 18-24 months, and it is projected that in about four years that half-life will be only 73 days.
That's from a mob trying to flog education so it's going to be an exaggeration, but it's still short no matter who measures it. By comparison Engineering knowledge 1/2 life is till measured in decades, although I expect they conveniently leave software engineering out of that.
Overall I agree with him, the doctors are far too eager to hard sell the latest advice in some paper. I guessing that's because selling advice is how they make their money. That behaviour has its downsides.
I don't have kids but I was 8 when my sister was 0 so I like to think of myself as having seen how things go.
Kids are very resilient. They'll raise themselves if they have to. Just keep them fed and sheltered and you're fine. The more you leave them to their own devices, the more confident and self-sufficient adults they'll become.
Our great grandparents raised their kids by letting them run around in the fields "helping" while everyone else was working and everyone turned out just fine. You do not have to optimize every little second of their lives.
It's okay for kids to struggle a little in a nurturing environment. You are not their butler.
Anyway, I just want to point out that the medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo (except surgery (but then there was that study of placebo knee surgery...))
And how can you "do science" to parenting without multi-generational "longitudinal" (I think that's the word) studies with control groups?
Can we compare e.g. Amish children with Sentinelese children with tech-saturated children?
(The people of N. Sentinel Island are likely the closest thing we have to a control group for human society.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
> The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are one of the world's last uncontacted peoples.
> ...the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on the island.
"medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo"
What? Is there anything at all from your side which resembles an argument here?
What beef do you have with 'medical system' that you think that it is as good as just guessing everything?
Yeah, I take it you didn't know that?
If I'm on any "side" it's the side of truth and health.
Other than some kinds of surgery and a handful of chemicals (like anesthetics, the action of which is still very mysterious, and penicillin, discovered accidentally) our fancy "scientific" Western medicine is actually pretty crappy.
Now I never said it's "as good as just guessing everything", and since Galen it's been kind of scientific even, but in the USA at least, the medical system is a major cause of death. Not to mention that it's more expensive and less effective than in other first world nations.
Heck, the idea that nutrition is crucial to health is still considered new-fangled and radical!
Don't even get me started on Reiki, which is a radical healing agent I have personal experience with that is typically dismissed as pseudoscience (despite not being scientific in the first place.)
> Reiki is a pseudoscience, and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki
Here is a healing life force the very reality of which is denied by the "scientific" medical system.
So yeah, if I get creamed by a car please take me to the ER to get sewn back together, that's awesome! And some morphine please. But the current system is in many ways still stuck in the dark ages.
I'm not discussion someone who believes in Reiki.
When I first encountered Reiki, it was just my scientific curiosity that was aroused. I've experienced electromagnetic fields (e.g. a Van De Graff generator, static electricity, and so on) and currents (touch a 9v to your tongue, once touched a socket that was improperly grounded, etc.) and I have worked with simple circuits. I grok Ohm's law. I'm well-grounded in modern science (for a layman.)
So, when I felt Reiki, whatever it is, I knew something serious was going on: either it's a unknown form of bio-electricity or something even stranger.
But you don't want to discuss it.
This boy actually missed the dance performance from the native people. Where do you draw your line?
When does it become just normal vs. neglecting your child? And i'm not talking about neglect in a directly hurtful way, i mean it in a way that the potential this kid could have had in the future is between university vs. non university.
Whats <kid> up to? He watches tv. Oh so why does he not play games? Or with others? Or why does he not have any interesests etc.?
"So !@#$ you Parentology." there are people out who smoke in the same room as their kids. People who do not take any precautions and have a dead kid because the shelf collapsed. You think they do the articles? Those are click bait articles.
Having said that - people have managed to parent their kids for ever without screens. Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.
It's kind of blindingly obvious to me - even without the evidence of science - that putting a screen in front of your kid falls short in so many ways compared to how it used to be - maybe encouraging them to play, properly, with blocks / Lego, soft toys or books. This is so obviously more likely to enable them to build their spacial awareness or encourage reading than staring mindlessly at YouTube Kids, surely? Not least of all it will give them some understanding of how to interact with the real world around them. Plus - and this is a big one for me - real, quality time with parents actually interacting, properly, with their kids - talking to them, reading to them, playing with them - is lost! You can pretend you're "browsing YouTube together" or whatever but we all know that's b/s - there's no meaningful interaction between you and your kids in doing that.
You want space in the evening to be an adult? Sure - get your kids to bed at 7pm every night so they have a routine and you get to have grown-up time! You don't need a screen to do that shit - you just need to parent with conviction and stick to your guns. It's hard, really hard, but it's never been anything else. Expecting it to be somehow made easy with an iPad is a fools game.
Final thing - we gotta be really careful with the "I don't believe in experts any more" thing. That way ...is Trump.... ;-)
Because our lives are different. It was overwhelmingly common for a parent to stay at home a generation or two ago (yes, it was almost always the mother but there’s no reason that would have to be the case today). But plenty of families, my own included, need both parents to be working in order to get by.
Simply put, we’re paid less than people used to be. Housing is more expensive than it used to be. Transport is more expensive than it used to be. So we have to work harder and our personal lives suffer.
Also just a defensive style sidenote :-) - My kids are now 12 and 15 so this was, what 10-12 years ago, not the 1950's. We both had to work. We had no money. We got by, no phones, just shed loads of books and a massive heap of love and care.
That's a valid sentiment. We should be suspicious of experts in non-hard sciences (in hard sciences a proof is a proof). They often get things wrong, they are often paid by industry, and they often follow ideological or other fashions.
But the suspicion should also be cautious, and you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".
>I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure.
What "harm" was that, and who said they are wrong? For one, there are several 100s of millennia of evolution backing beyond breast feeding, and feeding a baby is at the very core of evolutionary processes, so if anything one should began being suspicious of any novel industrial formulas made for profit...
Not sure why screens wouldn't be bad for "young brains". Evolutionary speaking almost everything that's not part of 1000000s of years of evolutionary history and takes such a huge time each day and such huge changes in lifestyle (from eyesight/brain used outdoors to eyesight/attention devoted to a backlit screen for hours each day), will be bad in one way or another -- unless it actively corrects for another bad thing (like how housing corrects for exposure to raw weather elements).
This article was not produced in order to help parents. The "science" behind it was not produced in order to help parents. The article was written to get clicks. The "science" was done to get citations/funding/tenure.
It is entirely appropriate as a parent to tell these "experts" to go and stand in the corner and think deeply about what they've done, and only come out again when they're ready to actually do something useful for society.
I don't think that's a very generous interpretation, and your paraphrasing feels like you decided early on that you could safely dismiss everything that person wrote.
It’s really quite simple - have we have proven that formula is non-inferior to breast milk over the life time of the child? No. Is there some evidence that it is inferior? Yes. What is the size of the difference? Not clear, but probably depends on the child. Who decides what goes into formula? A for-profit company.
For the health system to encouraging breast feeding seems eminently reasonable under these conditions.
Contrast that with what pregnant women are told from doctors and lactation consultants: that breastfeeding helps with bonding, dental structure, allergies, weight gain in babies, weight loss for mothers, etc. They’re pushed to websites like KellyMom that cherry-pick studies supporting these outcomes, and shamed for choosing alternatives. They’re told that just one bottle in the first month can ruin their chances of breastfeeding successfully.
Many hospitals belong to an initiative that pushes breastfeeding on new mothers to the extent that they have to get a prescription to give formula. You can’t put your baby in a nursery anymore because the baby needs access to the breast round the clock. But heaven forbid the mother fall asleep holding her baby! Babies go home from the hospital to mothers who are exhausted from birth and trying to feed round the clock. Their milk supply hasn’t come in yet and their babies leave the hospital having lost 5-10% of their birth weight. Some of these babies never get enough milk, and they die while their mothers are still told ‘Breast is Best’. Others feel shame, embarrassment, and inadequate for not nursing their children, from professionals and laypeople who have internalized this message.
All this to prevent a couple of colds in a baby. It’s insane.
I’m not so sure that the data proves that there isn’t much difference. The randomized PROBIT study showed less eczema (3 v 6%) and less gastrointestinal infections (9% v 13%). That is with 43% of mothers breastfeeding in the intervention arm versus 6% in the control arm at 3 months. You might not care about this at all, but clearly breastfeeding is doing something significant. It also shows, inescapably, that some kids will get eczema because they were not breastfed. This was my point that breastfeeding probably does make a big difference to some kids. Finally, this study showed that encouraging and supporting breastfeeding really made a lot more people breastfeed.
Again, it seems very reasonable to encourage breastfeeding. You might not like the way it is done, but this is a public health type intervention, and it is impossible to please everyone. Most of the population isn’t looking up the evidence themselves, so I guess you aren’t really the target audience. I mean I could whinge about anti-smoking ads on TV because I would never smoke, or the extra time it takes people in wheelchairs to get on the bus because I’m not in a wheelchair, but on the population level these things are very desirable.
One thing I learned: Any advice that starts with "just" should be ignored. Smile and nod.
Kind of thought that this site would attract a slightly more intelligent group of people than that.
> who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child
But that's your problem, not science's. You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better. If the fact is "breast feeding is better than formulas" and you can't breast feed just get over it...
> they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula
Your response inferred the OP desired scientists to lie - but that's a notion you introduced to the conversation:
> You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better.
Maybe being exposed to order of magnitudes higher level of culture will make them build an utopia. How could they rule that out?
I am 100% pro tech, showing the kids how to use smartphones constructively, etx. We were controlling what our kids watch to avoid in particular all the modern crap pumper onto YouTube or various American TV channels - and yet our four year old developed serious attention issues.
It's not gone but it's MUCH better since the TV is banned to only be on on Friday evenings. Choose your own path forward but I am happy I managed to help my son be a more balanced person, rather than park him in front of the TV just to have my own 'quiet time'. We read more, the parents themselves drop their phones more often - all in all family life is much happier. I just wish my wife would accept to get fully rid of the thing. Spending time with kids is enjoyable, especially when they are not unbearably begging for TV TV TV or can't focus on a thing longer than 20 seconds.
That said - not sure what you're going on about breastfeeding but the evidence that it's good for kids is pretty overwhelming. You shouldn't feel guilty if it doesn't work out for one reason or the other, but breastfeeding is a positive for the child.
If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.
> If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental.
So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.
I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs.
My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one.
Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix.
The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children.
Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.
That's interesting! I'm mainly going by my mother's recollections of her childhood in 1950's rural Finland, but in her words: "We kids didn't spend time with our parents. It would have been embarrassing!"
The vast majority of parents are trying, reading at least a couple times a week.
I also haven’t seen any data to suggest that WHAT is read is all that important. The important things seem to be that the reading happens and roughly aligns with or mildly stretches the child’s language capacity.
Finally, there is no reason to assume a “twisted ulterior motive” to parents doubting the article- the study was small N (47) and doesn’t seem to disentangle high screen time from low reading/other interactions.
My kid's bedtime is 7:30. So not much time to do anything other than eat and get ready for bed.
Here's one meta study:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
"This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents."
here's another one:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use...
"Our results indicated a small significant relationship between media use and ADHD-related behaviors."
In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close.
The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc.
Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.
The thing is: it’s hard to find actors for a play in the child’s bedroom at night. It’s hard for parent to come up with 200 different well-plotted stories at the appropriate level with visual props. Etc. But after 2 years of daily practice I can read a picture book decently (including funny voices, etc.) while half-asleep and consciously thinking about something unrelated with half my attention.
The kind of logical reasoning, grammatical variety, vocabulary, etc. used in books is not literally impossible to imitate with some other medium. It’s just a lot more work and in practice not really done.
Because, I don't know if you have children, I do (8 and 6): you can't read them a different book every evening for 1h. Even for more than 5 minutes.
You just can't. Life is messy, there's no place for such idealistic hobbies.
That's why I can't relate to those "advice" (too use kind words), I just don't think they are relayed by real parents.
There are so many studies that are wortless because they don't controll for the environment.
Besides there is quite a bit of evidence that games and especially competitive games are good for the brain.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...
How can you for example control for the believe that they are bad? Better parents will have more success reducing the metrics that are believed to be bad than other parents. How can you control for the rising philosophy?
I'm especially skeptical about the claim about ADHD and that games are bad. There is lots of evidence that games, especially of competitive nature like shooters or strategy games, improve cognitive functions. ADHD is to a large degree heritable and influences all kinds of behavior. I think it is by far more realistic that ADHD would influence screen use and not the other way around.
Similarly, being good at some FPS game makes you at best marginally better at video games of a different genre, and have no actual relationship to your abilities in the real world. Even a study on driving games showed no improvement of actual driving in test subjects.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/295/5564/2468.full
Deferred imitation is a powerful thing. "Brain Rules for Baby" is a great resource for new parents that covers this topic pretty comprehensively.
Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights
But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.
But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert?
Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)
Nonetheless I see your point. Perhaps there is an interesting distinction! Maybe worth investigating, and not particularly suggested by a 'screens are bad' line of thinking
You could replace these studies with: "Not using the brain is bad for the brain."
The screen itself is basically a red herring. What's on the screen matters. There's a big difference between interacting with a puzzle or strategy game and passively consuming a video, for example.
I can’t agree with this.
Stimulating lights and sounds which distract attention and make it more difficult to focus on a problem or task are actively getting in the way of learning.
For a 2-year-old, playing with a toy with a bunch of buttons that blink lights and make sounds is a lot less developmentally appropriate than playing with blocks or plastic gears.
For a 4-year-old, watching action cartoons (or modern “PBS Kids” shows for that matter) is a lot less developmentally appropriate than watching Mr. Rogers episodes from 30 years ago.
For a 7-year-old, spending time on a computer playing an unchallenging but flashy game is a lot less developmentally appropriate than figuring out how to make a Logo turtle draw a picture.
Etc.
This isn’t to say that children should never ever play with flashy things, but access should be moderated by parents so they don’t crowd out other activities, because they can be highly addictive.
One of the problems with screens is that the more hyperstimulating e.g. a game or show is, the more likely someone is to pick it vs. alternatives, which means that the medium in general tends towards distraction over meaningful content.
This is not as big a problem with physical books. Even e.g. popup books and comic books are nowhere near the level of stimulation of a TV or smartphone. Same goes for non-electrified physical toys
That said, I think my point that the devil is in the content remains with the additional important note that screens enable new types of particularly dangerous content.
That may in fact be a more important point than mine and thus bolster the original decision to study screen time specifically.
screen = tv with tons of ads, basic entertainment, simple mobile games with tons of ads etc.
I'm not aware of any studies indicating learning something from a webpage is any less effective than learning it from a book. I'd be interested to see studies targeting that. Even more so if it had breakdowns by age
I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.
Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2].
Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children.
When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160800... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494....
If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time."
Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.
1. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification
Related blog posts:
Screens are not bad. Screens display things. What is on the screen and how the child is interacting with that defines what is good or bad. Screens just are.
And re: this study, when I was a kid in the 90s I used my screens to read books (and still do). It's not either or when it comes to books and screens.
I personally am a little skeptical that these studies have no confounding factors, but I don't think it's fair to blame parents for what doctors, researchers, and clickbait authors are saying.
If it's anything like this, it still seems like doctors are more guilty than parents. They're supposed to be the experts.
Organizations (and doctors, as you note) have a real incentive to conveying to parents things that parents subsequently find to be valuable, "action item" information. In other words, they are biased toward making themselves seem important.
I don't think they necessarily "fudge" the results, but they can certainly avoid going out of their way to think of how such results might be biased toward "useful data".
So non-fiction screen time is bad?
It's studies like these that get parents like me to get all riled up but with no answers. I should start a research that tests if too much media consumption by parents leads to erratic child development.
Basic points on how we use technology: -totally disable the internet before the age of 6 -find all the interesting ABC / Songs / etc. that are interesting and download them locally (ssyoutube) -Always differentiate between the activities, i.e. are they consuming, creating, or playing with content?
On the last point, it is interesting that the kids will sometimes not want to play the iPad if they aren’t allowed to watch ‘shows’ Once it becomes another toy, instead of an addictive consumer-driven device, it gets used just like the other things in the house.
Can answer questions if there are any>
Are you able to work or are you a stay at home mom?
If you work, does your company or government provide assistance/aid?
I hear people with 1 or 2 kids struggling, I don't think I've met any with 5 kids so young.
- It's 47 participants (out of 69 recruited)
- The only other variables controlled for are household income and age
The study's conclusion itself says:
> The findings suggest further study is needed, particularly during the rapid early stages of brain development.
So we should all be interested in the results of that future study, but at this point nobody can really make a strong claim one way or the other.
1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
My wife and I work a standard 8 hour day. Kids wake up at 700. We leave for daycare/work by 800. Arrive at work by 9. Work until 6pm. Pick up kids. Get home by 7pm. Prepare and eat dinner. Bedtime routine starts at 8pm.
This leaves zero hours of dedicated kid time during the work week.
In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.
They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK.
It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.
How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?
The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later.
The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.
There's all the weekend time.
There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch.
There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour.
There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.
Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad.
At least that's what happens with some kids I know.
And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.
It did get better later on as the kid grew up.
Also studies who's results challenge the prevailing bias are much less likely to get published.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
But I've also been careful to keep them aware of the consequences of their various choices (screen time, junk food, etc) and they self-regulate pretty effectively. Although my daughter is currently addicted to fantasy novels and I may need to help her dial that back a little so she gets enough sleep at night :).
The key seems to be exposure to bright sunlight including the UV part so you could watch TV outside and I guess that'd work (modern windows are often UV blocking so cheating and watching in front of a window might not do it)
To be fair, reading or doing anything else indoors while not getting outside much is just as bad, though.
Go to the source journal article (Not CNN, it also is blatantly incorrect), it does not say what they claim.
What this article claims is phenomenal. Why would you trust parentology.com with a discovery that would win a noble prize?
To me, if you trust this article and use it to justify "Screens Are Bad for Young Brains" you clearly are not looking at the evidence. And that to me means you are not thinking at a low level what's best for a child. That's bad parenting.