Even for upper middle class parents, "using a screen as a babysitter" just means you're more stressed and have less hands around. My kiddo has not seen a screen at the age of 2, but that's just because he has two parents at home at 5pm everyday.
This has resulted in so much stress (especially in the 3's and 4's, because he still doesn't sleep through the night in his own goddamn bed) that I arguably lost a job from it... 50+ year old bodies are simply not well-capable of handling toddlers for the more-than-fulltime-weekly hours that they require
I'm sure there are fringe benefits though but damn
As you pointed out, you don't have a lot of help in raising your kid. You're expected to do it mostly with your partner (or god forbid alone).
They've done some studies of hunter gather tribes to determine who handled babies the most. Turns out the kids' actual parents only handled the kids for about half the time (I think even a little less)! The term for it is "alloparenting".
Evolution did not prime us for this level of child care. Good luck to you!
Did people ever do that with under-twos? Or under-fives?
The big difference in more recent times was community and extended family help, and at least one parent having more time at home.
I'm EXTREMELY jealous of my partner's older cousins who are now grandparents and specifically stipulate that their kids drop their grandkids off at their house every other weekend (!!!!) so that they can devote it to themselves.
If that's not a good-marriage hack, then I don't know what is! And their parents KNEW it! Because when that's NOT happening, the weekends are almost 100% kid-focused. It is absolutely overwhelming, even with breaks here and there.
The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.
So, yeah, that's eighties suburbia, and my sister wasn't less than two. On the other hand, if there'd been a larger age difference (and, maybe if I'd been a girl? My mum was more progressive about gender roles than most of her contemporaries, but still) I expect she'd have been entrusted to me earlier. Starting at the age of ~4 I'd been left alone with my sister for up to an hour while she napped, with the instruction to run next door to get my mother if she woke up.
By the way, I think all of that was fine.
Kids spending a lot of time in front of the TV was already a concern in the 80s so screen time was definitely a problem back then. IIRC the average amount of time children spent watching TV a day was about five hours a day in the UK.
Yah. Screen time (and, once I got older, specifically video games) caused a lot of parental angst amongst my peer-group's parents, too. My family didn't have a TV, so I read lots of books. Funnily enough, I (later) ran across Victorian-era think-pieces about how books were damaging to young people for all of the same reasons that people are (now, and back when we were kids) concerned about screens.
By the way, this same subject came up in another thread a few days ago, and I had this to say:
Now? Good luck getting a teenager to clean out the dishwasher.