Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

Some things that might provide the kids some distractions...

1) Nintendo Switch with Yoshi's Crafted World (easiest game for kids), buy an extra controller because I think it only comes with 1... earliest age for this would be about 3, 3.5, and would need some in-game assistance from their older sibling (which the game provides mechanisms for)

2) iPads with games, including coloring games ... even a 2 year old can enjoy iPad games

3) Netflix cartoons

4) Amazon Prime cartoons

5) Kinetic sand (https://www.amazon.com/Only-Kinetic-Sand-Folding-2lbs/dp/B01... plus an extra http://amazon.com/Kinetic-Sand-Pounds-Beach-Packaging/dp/B01..., possibly doubling both for 2 kids)

6) MegaBlocks (https://www.amazon.com/Mega-Bloks-80-Piece-Building-Classic/...) I would buy 2x per kid to ensure they have plenty to build with

7) small dry erase boards and colored dry erase markers

8) YouTube Premium (remove the ads so they don't interrupt their cartoons)... for example, they might like Blippi https://www.youtube.com/user/BlippiVideos

I'm not saying little kids should play video games all the time, but it does give them something entertaining to focus their attention on.

We're talking about toddlers, here. I don't think many parents will be comfortable giving their child a Nintendo Switch, an iPad, access to Netflix/Amazon Prime/YouTube, etc.

Or maybe I'm out of touch with the reality of having a 3-year-old child? Mine is only 2 and doesn't have any access to any screen. We plan to keep it that way as long as possible.

Same until last week. Now we allow ourselves one old fashioned disney a day to pull in those last 2 hours of work of the day. Rest is offline :). Good job keeping the screens away

Last week was vacation for me, planned a long time ago. I ditched my plans and watched the kids while my wife worked from home, secluded upstairs.

When the weather was crap we turned to TV but at the end of the day the kids (and myself) were just zombies. With toddlers it's hard to stop ("No, one more!") and it's hard to get going again after 2 hrs of cartoons.

I find it best to do as much as you can without screens and only when you're totally out of ideas or they start getting tired toward the end of the day, you turn to TV to zone out for the rest of the evening.

We do "Saturday morning cartoons" (as in, Saturday mornings is the designated time for watching cartoons), and one trick I've found is that switching TV shows every episode or 2 really helps with attitude and the eventual "well, that's enough TV for now". If we binge-watch one cartoon, after three or four episodes we have a cranky toddler who just wants to keep watching that same show all day, but by cycling through different programs we can do cartoons in the morning and then switch to crafts, playing in the yard, etc, without (much of) a fuss afterwards.

Is Blippi the son of Timmy Mallet?

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