When I am out shopping or visiting people with children, I notice that so many of these small children are watching or playing with their parents phones. We were out for dinner last night and a show/movie was playing in front of a baby! Last week a toddler was watching something on the phone while being pushed around in a shopping cart. I was not perfect with my kids (I couldn’t wait for Barney to be on so I could start dinner) but I tried to monitor their tv and later computer/gaming use to a limited time a day. I think technology can be great, but worry that its use takes away from other things necessary for the little ones’ growth. I know that I “babbled on” with my kids when I was shopping, talking about the color of a box I picked up or just pointing out and naming different foods. I also worry that the constant stimulation will hurt their imaginations and, worse, make it harder for them to sit and learn in the classroom when entering school. Is this something to worry about?
Constant stimulation too early?
Wasn’t the whole idea behind mobiles over the crib that it gave them constant early stimulation (which was good)?
Agree 100%. I think so much screen time starting that early is terrible. I don’t know if I would ever want/have kids, but if I did, I would absolutely not allow smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. when they were very young. I feel very strongly about this issue. I feel even people my age (20’s) could benefit from not staying glued to the screen all the time.
It will be interesting to see if all this screen time will effect their eyesight.
I also severely limited my chidlren’s time on the tv/computer. I encouraged reading, creative play and time outside over screen time of any type.
I’m as addicted to my devices as anyone, but I, too, worry about the “parenting by handing the kid the phone/ipad to shut them up” technique that I see so often. I’m glad I’m not parenting now, for sure. My kids watched TV- but not a lot. It seemed like activities and homework took up most of the time, and we were an active family living in a pretty nice climate, so we were outside a lot. Neither of my kids got hooked on video games, and I felt I had dodged a bullet there. They had one of those Sony Playstations for awhile but mainly used it for car trips. Things are a LOT harder to manage now (my kids are 28 and 30).
I work in a primary school, and it is very, very easy to tell the kids who have had prolonged overuse of screen time (more than an hour a day) from those who have had the chance for imaginative, inventive, self-directed, age-appropriate play, language, and social activity, not to mention rest and quiet time adaptability. No question in my mind, it rewires their brain at a very vulnerable time. Screen time is stimulation with no human interaction, and too many modern parents use it as a pacifier. Everybody’s all “oh, I love vacation when we unplug, etcc…” but it’s not as if the devices descend on a child without parental input. Exercise some discretion and adult judgement, for heaven’s sake. I love the opportunities media present – great stuff is out there – but moderation in all things.
I hate seeing little ones in a stroller, staring at some device instead of looking out at the world.
It’s also hard for older children, say 7 - 10, when they go to summer camp or some other activity. I have friends and family with kids this age and they don’t let them bring phones or iPads to use at lunch time or other times. But other kids do, and the children without devices end up watching the other ones play video games!
It breaks my heart when I see babies and very young children in a stroller or restaurant mesmerized by a screen.
My 22 yo thankfully wasn’t exposed to too much screen time during her formative years. I had reservations when DH gave my now 18 yo a phone with wifi access in ninth grade. For someone like my daughter, who is forever trying to find the line so she can stick her toe over it, it was like opening Pandora’s box.
The scary thing is that as @greenwitch said, even if you are careful with your own children you can’t control what they do on other children’s devices.
I don’t know. What if the phone is smarter than the parent?
It’s scary, especially when we don’t know exactly what it is doing to the brain development of a young child.
Fellow Barney parent here . . . relied on TV way too much. If I had it to do over I would hold the line on video games longer too.
In the 1960s, everyone watched a lot of TV, including things like Gilligan’s Island reruns. What do you think people did while they ate their TV dinners? A lot of us turned out OK.
People might hand their kids a phone in a store (beats dealing with public temper tantrums which can happen to the most engaged parents with best parenting skills), but still be very engaged in their child’s development. The ideal child-rearing approach has changed many times over the last decades. We could bemoan things like Erector sets in favor of CAD-for-children, but then again adult life has changed too. We now have things like sports teams that really bolster teamwork more than some less organized activities. High-quality child care can provide a lot more stimulation as well as socialization than even the most engaged parent can provide while also providing various mom services.
I don’t think kids need 12x7 chit chat with their parents, but I do think they need engagement and some one-on-one time. Feeling guilty about putting on Barney while emptying the dryer is probably a bit excessive.
I really don’t think say 2 hours of screen time would make Jack a dull boy, but it probably correlates well with disengaged parents.
There are also lots of Pandora’s boxes for a 9th grader.
And short of a few Wii or Kinect type games, I think screen time is a fine training for sitting still. Barney at least encouraged kids to dance and sing, I don’t see much other than tilting a phone going on.
I never had cable in the house nor video games. I am glad I am not raising a young child in this day and age. When daughter was growing up it was just a little bit of Clifford, Arthur, or Barney. I feel young parents these days don’t have the patience to teach and discipline kids and to keep them quiet or out of their hair they give them the ipad or the phone to entertain. They are addicted to it. For them it is a punishment to take away the phone or the ipad from them.
What happened to learning how to sit quietly and behaving at a restaurant. Very different from when we were growing up without any of this technology. It seems now everyone’s head is in front of a screen. Everyday as I wait at a traffic light on major intersections I see these young kids crossing the street looking at their phone unaware of the traffic around them. I remember when only doctors used to have a pager or answering service so that they could be contacted for a patient emergency. Now in church, a movie theater, or a graduation you see young people busy texting when usually at the beginning they request everyone to shut their phones off. Is checking the text messages every 10 seconds for kids that critical? What is so important that it can’t wait. The sad part is these kids aren’t aware of what’s going on right in front of them because they are so engrossed with what they are watching. I see kids eating dinner with their gadgets. Where has picking up the phone to call someone or spending time talking to each other gone. Where are the communications skills being built. It is so easy to misinterpret messages that are sent through email or text. So easy to misjudge the tone. Something that can be resolved in 5 minutes over the phone is done through messaging back and forth and waiting for responses. At the end of the day you still need to know how to talk to people and have good communication and writing skills.
I can’t believe all these people had their kids watching Barney! I couldn’t stand the voices or the songs even from the next room. Mostly my kids watched TV before school because they got up so darn early - IRC that’s when they watched Pokemon.
My older son got interested in dh’s laptop at 6 and about a year later we had a desktop and he started programming. He’s at Google now. He also spent a healthy amount of time in the sandbox.
Each generation worries about the new technology. When novels were new people were horrified by them. I hope that we’ll get this technology right or rightish too.
Oh we went through a huge Pokemon phase too. To the point that even I know some of the character evolutions. 
Jiggly-Puff or Jiggly-Tuff anyone?
We used to tell our kids that kids disappeared from Barney’s gang because he ate them. Does that make us bad parents?
Clifford, Arthur, or Barney = nice, but did they teach anything at all or were they just cleaned up versions of Nick shows. Now if you mention Magic School Bus or Cyberchase or even Sesame Street, maybe that is something. I was big on PBS too, but don’t fool yourself it was something magical.
What happened to learning how to sit quietly and behaving at a restaurant.
If you just look away from their screens and their bowed heads, very few people are as quiet in restaurants as the avid texters. The people in engaging conversations can be loud and boisterous. Why can’t kids be conversing with their parents maybe a bit loudly? People are eating out more, so there are families in restaurants.
I remember not having 911 service, I remember not being able to contact anyone when I broke down on the road, I remember not knowing where my spouse or friends or parents were until we happened to both be back at numbers and call each other (answering machine was a big help). I remember not having good online research materials to do school work or well, my job. I remember not having a computer to accurately do all the calculations related to my job. I remember typing everything on a typewriter and using lots of white-out.
I think human nature will likely result in things like Meetup or even the dread Tinder, because people are social.
If you are really engaged in some on-line activities, say for example CC, your writing skills could really improve quite a bit.
And while everyone bemoans the email back-and-fro, part of is that in writing, it is harder to agree … exactly because you have to hash out the details. Without that, there is bound to be an issue in 2 weeks, which is when I get done with something that you don’t want or can’t use. Is that better?
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At the end of the day you still need to know how to talk to people and have good communication and writing skills.
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@Hunt - there is something a little sinister about Barney now that I look back . . . 
Research has shown that having family meals together where conversation, not television, rules has tremendous benefits.
My family was fairly dysfunctional in many ways, but my Mom did insist on nightly meals together free from TV, answering the telephone, etc. Looking back, that was a good thing.
We didn’t do as well due to sports practices and other EC obligations, and it is a big regret of mine. We can’t ever get that time back.
Obviously that doesn’t mean that everyone who spent their entire youth staring at the TV during dinner turned out badly. Nothing is absolute.
http://thefamilydinnerproject.org/resources/faq/
http://www.cfs.purdue.edu/cff/documents/promoting_meals/spellsuccessfactsheet.pdf
S2 was an early riser, usually between 4 and 5 am. We hit a turning point in life when he was old enough (about 3 1/2) to go downstairs and turn on the tv himself without waking us up.
Without cable and no game system, he had the choice of Jerry Springer or Magic Bullet infomercials. It made for some interesting conversations with him, plus lots of cooking tips. We did have a VCR and pretty much every Disney movie.
D1 fell in love with a Richard Simmons Dancing to the Oldies video. For a while, it was the only way I was able to cook dinner without worrying about her getting into something (our kitchen wasn’t open to the family room when D1 was a baby/toddler). I did feel a tinge of guilt to let her watch TV every night, but she never seemed to tire of that video.
I’d check on her and she’d be totally grooving to the tunes and following the dance moves pretty closely. It was actually kind of funny.