Taiwan is right to ban iPads for kids
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Fast-forward to now, I have a 2-year-old and an 8-month-old, and with the benefit of experience all I can say is Yep, I was right as hell. Tiny children generally shouldn't use iPads, nor should they watch TV.
I wouldn't support a law like this, but at the same time it is astounding how often I see toddlers plopped down in front of an iPad or TV set for hours, as if the mere fact that it makes them easier to deal with means it's an appropriate thing to do.
Giving 2-year-olds a quarter of a Valium will do that, too; doesn't mean we should.
But in this case, the beauty (or ugly) is not that OP can now say this without backing it up; it's that when you don't have kids, the roles are reversed. You don't have children? You don't know what you're talking about. You do? Now suddenly we want proof and all that jazz.
He put his money where his mouth was, good on him. If he wasn't entitled to an opinion for not having kids at first, then, now that he has them, I say let the man have his hour.
If parents would agree that kids shouldn't have iPads, then no legislation would be necessary?
So ultimately it is parents opinion vs parents opinion...
He is completely entitled to his opinion, of course. I just don't see how merely having kids gives you any insights on the impact of iPads on kids, unless you give them an iPad.
I'd argue that, while parents controlling their young kids' exposure to electronics are doing it deliberately, some (most?) of the parents giving their young kids access to electronics simply can't be bothered to have an opinion.
When you start to have kids, you notice your social circle is full of other parents (on the one hand your friends are around the same age so they're having kids and on the other hand you tend to be with people having kids - usually the same age). You can clearly see the differences in kids getting (uncontrolled) exposure to electronics at various ages and their reaction to being deprived of them etc. So you certainly develop some awareness and some idea about their effects.
When my kid watches certain TV shows or uses certain apps, he can be extremely focused and extremely happy. I myself also have some fond memories of my favorite TV shows as a kid. There are some TV shows that explain things very well.
Of course we do not let him use these things indefinitely, and he doesn't even watch normal TV where you could do mindless "zapping" between channels.
Maybe if studies find children who are allowed to do worth computers whatever they want for an unlimited time, they also find parents who generally don't care at all. So that might be the root issue, and excessive iPad use might just be a symptom.
I don't see how these statement is opposed to kids using iPads.
Eventually, I felt like I should take it away, though. (And I did.) The reasons basically boiled down -- as much of being a parent does -- to gut feeling. The way he played with most iPad apps didn't seem healthy. He plays with blocks, builds a tower, it falls down... sometimes he is upset about that, sometimes he laughs. But his experiments with blocks and trains somehow lacked this obsessive quality.
I mentioned it in my reply to jasonkester elsewhere in this thread, but I felt like he was a kitten and the iPad was a laser pointer. He couldn't/wouldn't stop himself from using it, even when it was obvious that it had passed the point of being fun and became this frustrating, negative experience.
At such a young age, under two, the brain really is working on the basics. Weight. Gravity. Hard. Soft. Big. Small. Etc.
As he has grown, some of the things he can do with the iPad are getting pretty neat (painting, music, etc) and he does get a little bit of (supervised) iPad time now.
It's hard to say at this stage, but I wouldn't be surprised if we let him do iPad for an hour a day (or an hour or two every few days) by the time he is say, four. It depends on what we see him doing with it, and how observing that makes us feel as parents.
I'm just speaking from my experience here, because I am not an expert on brain development and things like that. But I do really think there is a qualitative difference between e.g., physical wooden blocks and blocks on a screen. In general, younger than two just seems self-evidently too young.
You might want to try. There's something pretty cool about watching your 2 year old doing addition on a screen so that he can make his cartoon fish eat each other.
Moderation is not really an issue. You're bigger than them, and you have shelves they can't reach. Getting too attached to the iPad gets it taken away. You're the adult so you get to win. Most of the day, you'll find my kids out in the yard digging up the flowers and trying to injure one another. But there's good stuff to be had on an iPad these days. It's not something you want to toss out because you're scared.
It was decades ago that I studied journalism in college, and I can't find links to a lot of what I learned, including the deleterious influence of television on human development (especially children).
Today, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends[1], "Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2." We have pediatric doctors like Dr. Dimitri Christakis doing interesting research to help demonstrate the harms[2].
But I don't have much time to really follow it these days (aforementioned young kids and all...). At the same time, when I hear "show me the evidence! there's no proof TV is harmful to 2-year olds!" it really bugs me. (Not implying that's what you are saying, it's jut something I hear a lot.)
It's like one of those "there's no proof dogs have emotions!" things. It's obvious when you watch little kids with TV and heavy and mostly-unrestricted iPad/Nintendo. It's obvious that is not how you should do it (very much). I can't prove it, but I am certainly going to act on that conclusion with my own kids.
So, to answer your question, the reason I deny my 2-year-old TV and unsupervised iPad use is because I have observed it in him, and observed it in his peers, and it's just my best judgement that it is better off waiting until later.
Example 1: One morning I came downstairs and he was watching TV. He had turned it on by himself; it was an unusual morning in that my wife and I both slept in. He was just sitting there, in a kind of stupor, staring motionless at the TV with a kind of slack jawed empty expression (like my own, probably, when I drink beer and watch True Detective after everybody is in bed). I walked in and he didn't even respond. (The show was roughly the Japanese equivalent of Sesame Street.) I cleared my throat. No response. I grabbed the remote, and jokingly pointed it him from behind (the joke was for my wife, who had just walked in also). With the click! of the TV going off, my son immediately stood up, looked around, and busied himself with his Brio train set (which is what he usually did in the morning at that age (right around 2)). It appeared as if I had used the remote to turn him on.
Example 2: We experimented with letting him have limited access to Mom's iPhone, especially she started nursing our second child. For the usual reason -- it made him a lot easier to deal with while Mom did an unrelated but important task. He did these little 'educational' games where you build a train track and then the trains run on it, and you have to build around obstacles, etc. But we soon noticed that when we would take the iPhone back, he would have a very violent negative reaction -- really unlike him, we felt. All kids have tantrums and taking away a toy is always a risk of creating a situation, but we both felt that his behavior seemed unhealthy in some way; to exaggerate a little, it seemed like he was addicted to the little game. In that same vein, when we let him do it for as long as he liked, he would keep doing it over and over until he worked himself into a similar state. E.g., after an hour of doing it he would get so frustrated by the train track building not going well that he would have a similar tantrum of screaming and being very upset. He had this same kind of frustration with the real laws of the physical world, too -- like the wooden block too big for the hole he was trying to fit it in -- but those moments seemed much more short-lived than the iPhone-related ones. (And it wasn't just games -- interacting with the OS itself (dragging apps around, opening things to see what they did) seemed fascinating to him, but also seemed like a laser-pointer-and-kitten thing where he would get too worked up and couldn't stop himself.)
Example 3: My friends who disagree with me about this and let their 3-year olds watch TV hours every day have more annoying and obnoxious kids than those who don't. ;-) Bad impulse control, lower ability to accept and move on when things don't go their way, etc.
Also, I should clarify that we don't blanket ban TV and iPad. It's not an absolute, just a general rule.
With iPad especially, there's a whole lot of potential good stuff there, too. We let him use the iPad when we are supervising, or just sitting with him if he is in one of the painting or music apps. He's pretty awesome at Garage Band, and incredible using EasyBeats. He does a lot of painting in Paper and apps like that. And although he is not allowed to, he is a small and clever homo sapiens and therefore predictably manages to sneak a substantial amount of screen time, whenever somebody leaves an table or phone around with an easily-guessed password.
With TV, we watch NHK news around him -- he doesn't tune in to it. We had to stop watching the news channels with commercials though; as soon as one would come on, you could see him stop building his Duplo block tower and swivel his head to focus on the TV.
I do let him sit down and watch UFC fights with me, though -- that is the hypocrisy that proves the earnestness of my intentions.
[1]: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-ini...
[2]: http://www.medicaldaily.com/interview-dr-dimitri-christakis-...
Have you noticed this same reaction elsewhere? It sounds a lot like the one that happens when it's time to stop playing run-around-the-house-with-the-cowbell and get ready for bed. It's sort of a normal 2 year old reaction to the super-fun thing stopping. Sometimes I think his worst childhood memory will be that time he had to get off the tractor.
I wouldn't let it color your opinion of any particular toy. Lego would certainly be next on the list!
We have never seen our own very young child (or his playmates) have the degree of adverse reaction to stopping legos as they do with electronics. And we have never seen them work themselves into the same kind of a fit playing with blocks -- that usually just kind of peters out when they get bored, and they don't end up stacking and stacking and stacking and stacking blocks until they are half-hysterical.
I think for a five-year-old, the iPad might well be the same as any other toy in that way. But I don't think so in the case of two-year-olds (at least, not with the dozens of two-year-olds I know).
He also spends time drawing, singing, painting, or reading stories. I don't feel like there is anything wrong with this. The iPad is just another activity.
Declaring something inappropriate is just a way of saying you don't like it.
It is sad but true
My 5 year old, while at a basic level, starting playing pieces of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" on our keyboard, unprovoked. I asked where she learned this song and she said the iPad. She plays a piano DDR type of game on the iPad and this is one of the songs.
I thought that was kind of neat.
Surely there is a middle ground between tablet parenting and helicopter parenting.
Overspending time looking at a screen is real easy though.
This is very relevant: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
The taiwanese regulation seems to be along the lines of "don't let toddlers in front of a screen for hours while you do other things", which honestly seems like a good suggestion.
Of course, depending on your social-economic level, this is __far__ easier to do for some parents than others. I'm lucky with my flexible high-earning techjob my wife only works 2 days a week. We have a great deal more time to actually go outside and walk around in nice parks with the kids. Very different from the parents that work crazy hours, _SIX_ days a week and barely have time to sleep before having to go back to work - not to talk of having time with their kids.
______
Pre-emptive: At about this time, in previous similar discussions, someone on HN will say: "Well, why did they have kids if they can't take care of them?" I think this thread handles it well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177756
I can accept that excessive use of entertainment devices is probably not great for young kids. Excessive use is the key though, and there's not nearly enough research to quantify that to the degree required for legislation.
I'm very skeptical of blatantly unenforceable nanny-statism like this. Doubly so where it involves parenting decisions that aren't conclusively detrimental. But cheerleading for it is even worse!
As for railing against the nanny-state - give it a rest. Most people are not experts in everything and expert advice, say, from the AAP, should be heeded.
Did you read the article? They have banned iPads for children under 2 in Taiwan. There is a gulf of difference between expert advice and legislation.
Red meat being bad for you was common sense. Fatty foods being bad for you was common sense. Asbestos being safe was common sense. Hell I saw a guy eat it to prove it was such.
Bright colored Snakes being dangerous is common sense. Something like this isn't common sense. It's parenting by government via criminalization. That's crazy. And we're not even talking about real child abuse.
Fatty foods were a part of our diet and then the experts at time said they were unhealthy and provided evidence - still the burden of proof was on them.
Children were (successfully) raised for generations without digital devices - you need to actually prove it's a benefit otherwise it's wise to avoid it just on being conservative.
A couple of days ago there was an article about parents camping out for days to get their kids registered for a specific school.
If all experts (like teachers) are so good, why are parents going to that extreme length to avoid the majority of those experts (teachers at the unpopular schools)?
If you have kids, you will find a lot of crappy opinions handed out to you. Another example would be "the worlds worst mom" who was criticized for letting her 9 year old kid ride the New York subway alone. Which expert would you as a parent trust?
Enforceability is not necessarily a criterion for the usefulness of the law. It only is in western states with an emphasis on individualism so our skepticism comes from our own cultural background.
The big problem I find is that the education system, at least here in the UK, is very focussed on pushing technology on children who are very young as a solution for everything. Everything else suffers for this.
I totally agree that it's wise to manage kids' access to these devices, but legislation is an aggressively poor approach.
One school that bought 700 iPads for their students now reported that: "Yeah, their sort of useless, and laptops would have been better". That's weird to me, you buy 700 iPads, only to find out that most of the software the kids need doesn't work on an iPad, and that their aren't great for productivity. Why where schools so instant on iPads/tables to begin with? It seems that we're pushing technology into class rooms, without any plan.
Whilst probably true in isolation, this is rather a false dichotomy. You could equally say that kids learn better by interacting with people than with cuddly toys, so we shouldn't let kids have them either.
Having a child watch TV,or play with a doll or an iPad, doesn't mean you will now stop talking to your children, and parents aren't going to be spending every single waking second talking to their kids.
So the question that should be asked is whether TVs and iPads are better or worse for kids than the other things that they could be doing during the times that the parents isn't going to be actively interacting with them - things like playing with their dolls, crawling around the house, listening to music, sitting and staring out the window etc.
And I'm guessing that the answer to that question is that they aren't intrinsically particularly better or worse than any of those other things, and that the problem comes when you let any one activity be the default way of keeping the kids quiet.
Of course there are parents who replace any actual human interaction with 18 hours of TV a day. But the problem there isn't really the TV. If you took that away, it probably wouldn't be replaced with human interaction. They'd just find some other way to keep the kids quiet that didn't give them much stimulation either.
>The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the most influential body to have released such guidelines, recommends that "television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age two."
So they're an influential body but I'd be curious to see the actual evidence. I mean if you worked for the AAP would you say sure go ahead and give them iPads, risking subsequently being found to have caused harm or say oh no be carful and thus cover your arse. They are almost bound to recommend caution as a default.
Computers got relatively cheap (we didn't own the latest and greatest) and provided quite a lot of fun. I'd probably do much worse if I avoided them.
Maybe concerned parents would do better if they lobbied communities to provide better environments for children - more opportunities for fun, safer and less controlling.
Better environments for children would be a universal plus either way.
In general the whole discussion seems silly because there is such a wide range of things you can do with a computer or an iPad. Surely it makes at least a little difference how you use the device? Just as it makes a difference what kind of books you are reading?
At least in terms of agility/movement/obesity, spending too much time reading books should have the same effect as time in front of computers. Yet I rarely see calls to limit reading time for kids?
The article's opinion is a contradictory, muddle headed and esentialy pointless as the law. Whatever your opinion on appropriate screen time for children, the law and the article aren't actualy any help whatsoever.
Furthermore, children under two interact primarily with their parents. They do not really play with other kids at all, even if you take them to a playground. So if AAP says "young children learn best by interacting with people", they are talking about parents for under-twos.
At some points in the day, my wife and my daughter are just sick of looking at each other. So a little TV provides a welcome break. Yes, we try to limit it. But giving a blanket statement like "no TV under two" and making you feel bad when you cave in does not seem to help the situation.
Also, what happens when 4-year-old Jimmy is happily watching his two hours allowed of TV, and 14-month-old Bobby wants to watch too? Do you banish Bobby from the living room because it might hurt his brain?
One suspects the AAP recommendations are made knowing they will not be heeded. Like the eight glasses of water a day thing, it's one of those things adults tell each other "oh, you know they say..." If AAP were living on this planet with the rest of us, they would give more nuanced recommendations, just as USDA has had to do over the years with rec's on food.
>..."made screen time a shared experience".
Sitting with them and singing along to Barney and interacting with them when they try to mimic a dance is a more balanced approach to the whole TV and kids debate.