While research on children’s screen use is growing, most of it has focused on how a child’s behavior and temperament influence how much time they spend on screens.
Yet far less attention has gone to parents’ role in children’s media use.
In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general identified parenting stress as a public health concern.
Researchers, clinicians and policymakers were called to action to better understand parents’ needs, with the goal of supporting them in raising children and maintaining a healthy family.
I like the saying that “it takes a whole village to raise a child”. The problem is our way of life, in nuclear families, with weak social network. We are just no able to do everything, work, raise kids, mantian home. It’s too much for a nuclear family.
The atomization of society feels like it is responsible for so many problems, this one included
My cat just got up, walked to the edge of the beds, looked around, and then walked back to where he was, and laid back down in the exact same spot.
And you noticed.
In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general identified parenting stress as a public health concern.
Yeah, no shit. We’re raising kids with zero future prospects while our own future keeps getting rugpulled over and over. It’s stressful being a parent as it is, and the dismal outlook isn’t helping.
It doesn’t feel satisfying to judge parents from that lens, why would I take that perspective?
/s
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My partner’s older sister is Rasing 3 kids with a husband. the Husband works his ass off fixing trucks so the mom can afford to stay home. The trouble: they have a little one who is on the spectrum for sure and is displaying phychotic tendacies. (clinical not the arm chair/ gennralization) docs are not legally able to diagnose him with it because science has shown the brain has to develop. What sin did these parents do? Not a thing, no drugs, no booze, no crimes, just trying to make it work as a family. And the universe still said: here is a kid who has zero empathy. Sometimes the iPad is the only way to prevent him from tearing apart live bugs, hitting his sister (1.5 yrs) and hitting his younger brother (4mths). They go to therapy, they talk to professionals, they don’t get anything nice for themselves, everything they do is for them… And it’s still not enough.
They do limit what he sees, so they are aware of the content, thankfully it’s just floating carrots and instruments, but heven help us when that kid figures out how to get to regular YouTube.
“Parents putting screens in front of their kids is more about their own stress than other factors”
Nah. Really? You don’t say. And here we all thought it was because the parents really believed that watching random shit on youtube for 15 hours each day was educational and healthy for 2 year olds.
I mean these people exist too. I worked for that lady who was probably around 40, but she really tried hard to be 25 or so. She had like 5 girls at home, not all hers. All the pictures on their walls had a super weird filter on. If you like that, more power to you. But tge way she talked about social media and screens in general was just downright weird as fuck. She was really proud that all her girls already had an instagram account, because when they are old enough, the good handles would be already gone. They practiced posing for the camera at home, and she was weirdly proud to not have books at home, because they all had tablets and you don’t need books when youtube exists. I didn’t even want to know ANY of this, ahe told me that like ahe was mother of the century. When she eventually asked me for my Instagram, to get her kids some followers i told her i don’t do social media, i find it dumb and creepy.
I remember all the years of people saying that Idiocracy isn’t a documentary sent from the future as a warning to us all. Look where their smug bullshit got us.
Clearly Idiocracy is a fan made movie about the simulation that is our reality being run as a satire of a much less poetically fucked up Earth in the far future that was accidentally leaked into the past!
No, it was a real life documentary that somehow had parts recorded before he got frozed for so long and then at the end they found the real time macheen and used it to send it back to let us know. Duh.
That is what I am saying, but they messed up and accidentally sent it back in time to the satire simulation, not reality!
Wait, none of this is real? Thank God. I always sort of thought I was the only real person since I can’t hear no one else thinking. Now that you let me know I’m right I’m gonna go live out that dream I had last night where someone drove past a cop and I smashed him in the head with something. The dream must have been trying to tell me none of this is real and it’s ok to do that, like in Vanilla Sky.
No don’t do that, it will be bad for your credit score.
It doesn’t feel righteous to judge the parents about it now when you frame it like that though!
I’ve grown up and gotten over judging my parents. Reading “Timequake” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. really helped with putting things into perspective.
The parents didn’t choose to be born either. None of us did. None of us got an instruction manual for this bullshit we were forced in to without our consent. As far as we can tell none of us have ever done this “living as sentient meat” thing before. We’re not great at it because we’re all just making it up as we go.
As kids we tend to see our parents as the authority who should know what they’re doing, but they’re not. From their point of view they’re young people who are trying to juggle jobs and kids for the first time and get overwhelmed and sometimes do things they know aren’t the best things to do to get a bit of relative peace for themselves.
The parents aren’t monsters who want to neglect their kids. In previous generations they said it takes a village to raise a child, and that tight knit small community is gone in most places. There is no village. If two parents are both trying to juggle jobs and pay for daycare and make dinner and do all the house work the stress and exhaustion makes sense. It’s natural. It’s the large changes to society failing them.
Yes, it does. What is the alternative? Judge the kids? They did not choose to be born. Their parents chose to create them despite having no clue how to care for them.I could’ve used a /s.
Woosh. Imagine a /s on the comment you responded to
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Anti-intellectual? I’ve seen plenty of articles over the years about parents giving young kids screens to keep them busy, and they all knew the reason for that was the parents being stressed and using the screen as a way to lighten their load.
What did you think the reason behind it was? Someone hiding in the parents bedroom who threatened to murder everyone if they didn’t give little Timmy an iPad? The genuine belief in the educational value of random youtube videos?
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I’m gonna come out with a newsletter called “Duh Quarterly” and collect all these fucking OBVIOUS articles.
Yes I have a yet to see a baby go to the Apple store and buy an iPad and hook up that sweet YT colorful squiddly doo
Pre-tech you just popped a “soother” in their mouths and it worked way better than a “screen”. We weren’t connected to all of the world back then but I’m certain there must have been an “anti-soother” faction.
So… like ADD in the 90s, then?
edit: Not only from personal experience, that era (nevermind those before it) treated neurodivergence according to the adults’ convenience, not the ND person’s needs. In case you weren’t aware.
I was going to say: so many parents in the 90s let tv raise their kids, too. It’s a time honor tradition to have a square or rectangle keep your kids calm. Acting like this is a new concept entirely is laughable.
Selfish idiot people continue having children they cannot care for, sustaining the cycle of abuse.
Thanks, mom and dad. We will spend the rest of our lives cleaning up after your wretched, monstrous asses.
Selfish billionaire idiots hoard the wealth so that the general population cannot dedicate the care that they are entitled to give their children.
And dumbasses like my parents focus only on their own satisfaction. They fall in line and abuse their children instead of opposing the systems that keep us all enslaved.
You had a shitty childhood, but instead of trying to do better for your kids, you gave up, and didn’t have kids at all. Obviously its OK to not want kids, but to me this seems like you are extrapolating your childhood trauma to everyone else. My childhood wasn’t perfect, but it makes me want to strive to do better, not to avoid kids ans shane people who have them.
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How old is your kid?
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So… no kid?
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He’s confused.
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God these kinds of comments are dumb. Here let me explain why:
If you downvote this you support drowning puppies.
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Hey. Not everyone had/has the same experience as you. I get that you’re angry but stop purity testing the entire planet because you had a bad time.
“Every person who doesn’t agree with me supports child abuse” sounds a lot like, “every black person is a criminal” or “every gay person has AIDS”. Don’t let your trauma turn you into the people who hurt you.
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go
touch
grass.
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