What surprised me the most was 26,000 people watched Tom and Jerry between 7:30pm and 6:30am on some website. That’s a lot more than I would have expected.
Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.
Basically, children's entertainment = animation = Tom and Jerry, more often than not. Urban 1%er parents tend to default to Peppa Pig.
Animaniacs and Invader Zim at the top of the list.
Suggestions? SpongeBob is surprisingly subversive and anticapitalist to boot...
Almost every toddler I have seen has an old broken phone as their own video player.
Being so black and white about sticking a video in front of a kid to make sure it sits in one place and eats is dismissive of parents who have to make these decisions in real time.
Do we know those kids don’t get play time with friends? Or down time to get bored and hence be forced to invent games in their own heads? We only see and opine on “bad” behaviour, not the what happens behind closed doors the remaining 23 hrs of the day when the kid is out of our line of sight.
In any case, it doesn’t matter a whit if the average is one meltdown if your kid has gone without two consecutive meals. All this theorising goes out the window when the third meal is coming up and you’re struggling to get a morsel inside your kid. How many consecutive meals are you willing to let your kid skip on principle?
Comparing what we did in the past, how we lived in the past, what worked two decades ago is basically useless.
Phones exist. On demand entertainment exists. Kids know it. You know it. You aren’t putting any genie back in the bottle by trying to explain to your kid that since you grew up without being amused into eating, they need to do that too.
Does that seem like a bad habit to impose on your kids + you not engaging with them? It does to me. Am I gonna call (the equivalent to) child services? No. Do I make other probably equally bad choices for my kids? Quite likely.
No need to get defensive.
And this is critical.
I've seen enough times when kid did expected to receive what they wanted and threw a tantrum if not.
I've never used phones with my kids. They throw plenty of tantrums at meals. Sometimes they don't eat. They are alive and fine.