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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:

   94 The Good Dinosaur
   92 Trolls
   98 Wall-E
   88 The Lion King
  103 Moana
   81 Toy Story
   91 Trolls World Tour
   95 Inside Out
  103 Frozen II
   95 A Bug's Life

> We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.

So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?

That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.

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Author here (surreal to see my post at the top of HN!)

My kids are 3 and 2, and they don't watch TV like adults. They watch a bit of movie, get up, walk around, do something else, come back, and watch a bit of another movie or even switch to a TV show. It's weird!

I like your idea about flexibility, but they're too young right now. Maybe we'll introduce your "bank" concept when they get older or increase the "TV budget". But for now we stick to 2x 30 minutes.

I have learned that doing just weekends for TV is much better for small kids so they don't get used to TV watching.

Even for not so small kids. With my 7 and 9 yo we do one ~30/40min session during the weekend, and a family movie on the 1st weekend of the month. No TV or screen time outside of these.

I can't imagine having a 3yo watching TV 1 hour a day, especially the movies shown on this video.

That being said, to focus on the technical project, that's very cool!

We only do TV on the weekends (Miss Rachel mostly, sometimes a movie), but 1 hour a day seems like nothing considering they're in daycare learning and playing for 8+ hours among the many other things they're doing throughout the day. For me the issue is when it becomes a dependency for them.

Yes, we also switched to TV only on weekends.

> […] but they're too young right now.

Indeed they are. I have a five year old who is now old enough to choose his own films and series from a selection curated by us. A system like this would be fine for children of his age.

But 2 and 3? They are too young to choose their own media at all. Not because they can't, but because they can't judge the impact. For toddlers you really want to be the one in control about what they watch (and that horrible Bing can die in a tragic bunny bonfire).

The Lion King, Wall-E? That's just overloading them at that age (and both are rated 6+ in the Netherlands). You can start with those at 5 or so depending on the child, or later if you've noticed them reacting too intensely to films rated 6+. For now? Stick with shorts suitable for their age, and move on to films (like Ghibli's Ponyo) at 4 or 5 as a special treat.

Autonomy is all fine and well, but screens have an enormous impact on developing children. This is a really cool project, but you might want to reflect on how their brains are developing and what you as a parent can do to guide them.

Also, given that they understand Dutch, get them on to Buurman en Buurman! (The excellent stop motion Pat & Mat from Czechia). That's something which works well even at 3.

Fun fact, the original has no dialogue. I think only the Dutch version is dubbed.

Due to a quirk of history the Dutch version got dubbed initially as an attempt to create an edgier version of Pat and Mat when it was aired within the framework of a quite progressive block of children's television in the Netherlands. But the result of two professional comedians ad-libbing dialogue for these silent shorts was so absurdly successful that they've been doing that ever since.

It is unique. There is no guarantee that this would work in any other language unless you found two voice actors with the same level of natural skill and collaboration (I'm sure it must have been tried). You can't write out the dialogue in Czech, translate it, and have it dubbed in various languages; the ad-libbing seems essential, and I'm sure any attempt to replicate this would fail if you didn't get two actors who not only completely grok the show and its protagonists, but also know how to apply the local tropes of this type of character correctly.

But it works. There are few countries where Pat & Mat are as popular as the Netherlands. In fact, it's probably only Czechia itself which tops that. It's not that Pat & Mat were lacking anything — the silent shorts are brilliant in their own right — but the Dutch dub adds another layer of humour which so completely matches the feel of the characters in the show that it doesn't detract at any point. A lot of Dutch don't even know that it is only here where a dub is used, and that the affable dialogue added was never intended!

The only weird and regrettable thing (for a variation of a Czech show) is that you have to understand spoken Dutch to get it.

Very interesting, I had no idea!

Both The Lion King and Wall-E are rated universal in the UK.

My point is that these things are subjective. I get this unsolicited advice is coming from a good place but it's just your random opinion. Let's leave the parenting up to the parent.

Ain't overloading nothing. My favorite movie at 5 was Romancing the Stone. Anything non-age appropriate goes right over your head at that age. We are not talking scary nor violent. I liked the movie because of the crocodiles

> "It's weird"

Not that weird I think... my 5 year old does exactly this. He cant sit through a full movie. My 7 year old also had that issue but now she can.

Totally normal for kids of such age. A 5-7 year old maybe could sit through a whole movie, but only if it would be engaging for him.

Every parent is required to say they only allow very limited screen time even if secretly they all allow quite a bit more.

Lol, kind of true!

We stick to the 2x30 minutes rule for 90% of the time but we do make occasional exceptions like when they're ill.

Might change when they get older though.

Or we are ill!

Haha, can confirm!

Well, the nice thing about having borders is that you can allow those borders to disappear every now and then. Feels like something special for the kid!

Plenty of parents do use screens responsibly. My five year old can watch one episode of whichever series he is watching at the moment after school (currently Hilda, which Netflix really should push harder than some of the crap that gets suggested). In the weekends sometimes we allow for one film instead.

It's not a challenge to keep a limit on screen time at this age.

> It's not a challenge to keep a limit on screen time at this age.

Good for you.

It is, however, a challenge for us.

If all your friends have the same rules as you, then great. If all your friends have no rules at all, you are a tyrant, and your child will be at his friends places as much as possible.

My 4 year old naturally does this anyway, and I can imagine many kids do.

We don't have a set amount of allowed TV time for her, but she typically watches around 15-20 minutes of TV and then gets up and does something else.

The only real rule we have around it is that TV (unlike music) is not a background sound. If you're done watching something, you have to turn it off, not just let it play forever.

May depend on the kids' ages and what sort of viewer they are. As a young kid (like around age 6 and below) watching a movie episodically would've been fine for me. Time was different; I had no sense of a story arc spanning more than an hour.

FTA

> Between certain hours, we allow them to watch TV. They can watch any movie they like. They can even switch between movies. But the timeframe is fixed. They can watch a good chunk of one movie, or they can watch a tiny bit of 10 different movies. It's completely up to them.

1 hour of TV time PER DAY for small kids is considered restrictive?

I would have thought it's much less. What would be an equivalent restriction on the phone/tablet/more actively engaging devices?

My 3 year old gets 15 minutes (!) max per day. Only on weekdays. Weekends no screens.

That's closer to how I'd like to handle it when my 3m old is old enough. But are you able to properly restrict your screen time as well? Seems complicated to tell a kid they can't do something their parents are doing multiple hours a day.

Yes, we don't tend to be on our phones near him. Not just to set a good example, but I've found that being glued to your phone isn't really a great thing anyway. For doing real work I sit in my home office with the door closed.

We don't do this either (I hardly look at the thing at home), but just a look at the other parents bringing in their preschoolers at school is depressing. Half of them have their phone out, and the number of parents you see pushing a pram or stroller with a phone in front of them is absurd.

We are a minority.

It is truly bizarre, I agree! Everything to chase a bit of dopamine.

And if you peer over and look at what they're browsing, it's mostly junk, social media videos or just mindless scrolling.

It's actually healthier for the brain to be bored in such moments.

Junk like hackernews?

HN is more than entertainment, though.

It's apparently also a hangout spot for (self-awarded) gold star internet parents who love the smell of their own farts and think anyone else wants to smell them.

My figurative farts aren't that cool but I do appreciate the inspiration I get from all y'all's gold-star farting

> 1 hour of TV time PER DAY for small kids is considered restrictive?

In general, probably not. My point was that in the specific case of movies, where even movies designed for children usually run at least 80+ minutes, maybe an exception should be made so that the kid can watch the whole movie in one session if they want to and have the patience and attention span to do so.

You can still limit the average to an hour a day. They just have to mix shorter content with movies to keep the average down.

Breaking off movies after an hour is going to put the break around the act II low point in most children's movies. If the kid got invested in the characters and story that's a terrible place to make them stop until tomorrow.

Eh it'll probably be a reason for therapy when they're older, but the skill to say "okay, time for bed" and stop watching in the middle of something is an underrated skill.

IMO it’s at least as important to be satisfied after one thing has ended, and not start the next thing.

I'm in my 30s and I can't leave a movie unfinished. I'll either be up all night thinking about how it ends or never start it up again forever wondering.

I have the opposite issue, I usually stop watching after 30mn and never return

we handle it similar; <30min/session, <1h/day, <2h/week

there is a round robin process for who gets to pick from the catalogue and if there is no amicable consensus, we split or override.

30mins is about the attention span of a kid and you can see them get anxious and distracted after that, most of the time.

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