I know, I'm a shitty parent, and I'm solely responsible for my kids being exposed to shitty things in the world. I should throw out their iPads and read books to them constantly (more than the 20m/day I do every single day after 2h dinner & bedtime process) as well as have a large assortment of crafts and novel activities for them to engage in every morning while I do stuff like bathe and eat. Sorry for being shitty.
Don't mind him/her. Distracting a single-digit-aged human long enough to put dinner on the table or get some work done is hard on the best of days.
I don't have kids so I'm curious, why youtube? I assume most families don't have the time for a full time parental distraction but is there really no other alternative? I'd imagine Disney or some other media giant would have figured something out by now. Is youtube content just so practically endless and passive enough that no one can compete? Or is it just that they don't like gaming or TV shows that much (or you dont allow it)?
Kids will adjust to whatever their circumstances are though. If you just pull all media, kids will complain for a few days, but eventually just get used to it and play with their real toys. Hell, kids don’t even really need toys to have a good time, take those away and they’ll go dig in the dirt, jump off couches, and make pillow forts.
It’s not hard to “distract toddlers”, my daughter is three and LOVES to help cook. She fries eggs pretty well and I figure the worst that’ll happen is she’ll burn herself (which she hasn’t). Given the right opportunities and structure children can actually be much more helpful than we give them credit for, especially in the USA we’re just sort of taught that children are useless ingrates that are wholly incapable of the most rudimentary tasks (I mean I was certainly treated that way).
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.
>It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.
I think this is true for all humans in general. I actually think it is worse for teenagers who have more unsupervised time and don't know any better.
--
FYI.. there was a program on about kids in Costa Rica or maybe Honduras where they all had chores. Even the 3 year olds. I thought it was interesting as the kids themselves were very well behaved.
> my daughter is three and LOVES to help cook. She fries eggs pretty well
Maybe I'm over protective, but hot oil around a 3 year old sounds like a bad idea. I get it that they can do it, but it only takes 1 accident to scar them for life and 3 year olds are super uncoordinated. I have been called a helicopter parent before though, so maybe it's me being a bit weird.
So you’re right, it is a bit scary. We cook on low, with just a little bit of butter. I certainly wouldn’t deep fry ANYTHING with her around, and when I have the kitchen is a no go zone. To me it’s about calculating risk, and a small amount of ~175° with a closely supervised child is not that risky.
I get some judgy looks on the playground for studiously ignoring my kid and letting her play for three hours and everyone else stays for maybe 15 minutes being super engaged with their kids before they get super bored and leave, so I guess I’m not really normal. I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted. I’m not super optimistic, I may end up moving to a small town to make that possible, if I can get a good remote position eventually.
"studiously ignoring my kid"... haha you sound exactly like me. I've got a two year old so a bit behind you guys, but same exact philosophy. The anti-helecopter -- give kids just a smidge more responsibility than they can handle (rather than hovering), make sure they don't get seriously injured, but let them learn from the scrapes and bumps. It's crazy how fast they learn and how capable they get at such young ages.
>I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted.
Are you maybe misremembering your age at the time? I have a 4.5 year old at home and there is no way that I think he will be ready to go the park a couple of streets away on his own. By not ready I mean, in no way capable of judging when to cross a street safely and may get lost on the way, especially if he gets distracted and absentmindedly wanders in an unfamiliar direction.
There was a recent study [1] that showed that kids have a highly elevated risk of accident when crossing the road right up to the age of 14 (!! was surprised to read this). Some points from the research:
- simulating traffic showed accident rates as high as eight per cent with six-year-olds
- Even those aged 12 were hit by vehicles two per cent of the time
- It was not until early adolescence that children crossed the road safely
Just thought I'd point this out in case you were not aware of the research.
Kudos for promoting self-reliance and independence though. I am a long way in the other direction where I do way too much to try and ensure my kid's safety. I know I need to ease up so that he can start to make his own mistakes.
In Japan they send their kids shopping at 5-6. It's Super safe in Japan, but the point is kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..
I wonder if these kids need to cross any streets and what the accident rate there is. I'm assuming Japanese 6 year olds are developmentally very similar to western 6 year olds. So according to the research that I linked to above they have an 8% chance of getting hit by a car when crossing the road.
Would you cross the road if you were hit by a car for every 12 times you crossed?
> kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..
An acceptable level of risk awareness can't be taught to kids under a certain age because their brain development is not yet at the level where they are capable of learning certain things. For example: do you think there is any level of training that you could give a 5 year old to safely handle a loaded gun? Do you think there is a level of training you could give a 5 year old to then leave them unsupervised with a gun? Crossing a street is no different. It's life and death.
If you've ever spent any time around kids 6 and younger you will know that they have very intense tunnel vision and very poor situation awareness. It's not their fault. They literally don't yet have the brain development necessary for accurately predicting future events and predicting the consequences of their actions.
I agree and wouldn't push my own kids for that type of activity, simply not safe here.. But as other people's comments, there are lots of ways to make kids responsible and independent even in the confines of your own home such as cooking, cleaning, other types of chores, etc
I suggest you read David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood. If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood. No parent can watch even one child all the time and it’s possible to kill your self getting out of bed.
> “Perhaps the most persuasive evidence regarding the attitude of adults toward children acquiring culture through play – without the need for adult guidance – comes from widespread reports of parents’ indifference and even encouragement of toddlers playing with machetes and other sharp and dangerous tools (Howard 1970: 35). For example, from the Kwoma of Papua New Guinea: “I once saw Suw with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him” (Whiting 1941: 25). Aka mothers regret it when their infants cut themselves while playing with “knives but they don’t want to restrain their exploration and learning (Hewlett 2013: 65–66). The Aka provide scaled versions of items in their tool inventory to their very young children and enjoy observing (and, occasionally correcting) their practice strikes (Hewlett et al. 2011: 1175). Four-and-a-half-year-old Okinawan children readily peel the outer skin off a length of sugar cane with a sharp sickle. When a mother was asked how the child acquired this skill she was at a loss for a reply. “‘I don’t know! He must have watched us and learned himself by trying it out!’ she said” (Maretzki and Maretzki 1963: 511)”
>If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood.
They're not stupid and I didn't say they are. They lack experience and do not have the skills (brain development) that are necessary to cross a road without significant risk.
> "The researchers found 6-year-olds were struck by vehicles 8 percent of the time; 8-year-olds were struck 6 percent; 10-year-olds were struck 5 percent; and 12-year-olds were struck 2 percent. Those age 14 and older had no accidents.
Children contend with two main variables when deciding whether it’s safe to cross a street, according to the research. The first involves their perceptual ability, or how they judge the gap between a passing car and an oncoming vehicle, taking into account the oncoming car’s speed and distance from the crossing. Younger children, the study found, had more difficulty making consistently accurate perceptual decisions.
The second variable was their motor skills: How quickly do children time their step from the curb into the street after a car just passed? Younger children were incapable of timing that first step as precisely as adults, which in effect gave them less time to cross the street before the next car arrived."
Your quote from David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood is an anecdote. Was there a study done to measure child mortality and injury in this community? Would it be acceptable by modern standards?
My dad was raised in an eastern European village in the 1950s. From his stories child supervision was non existent. He has many stories of children who died due to accidents, e.g. children who misjudged the thickness of a frozen lake, fell through and drowned. Of course most survived into adulthood, but by modern standards child mortality rates were completely unacceptable.
Your associations with the word stupid are your own. If children were as poor at dealing with the environment as you believe they are I would not be unable to name a classmate who died during primary or secondary school.
I haven’t read the article you quote and I won’t because the conclusions you’re drawing from it are insane. Maybe the internal validity is good and if the experiment was replicated the same results would be obtained. The external validity is obviously not there. They are attempting to measure how traffic mortality from independent road crossing and they get numbers so high that it’s obvious their experiment doesn’t generalise to the question they’re actually interested in.
If we pretend that children do not cross the road until age 12 and assume 0.99 chance of surviving one crossing a day, after 100 days 63% will be dead.
Or I could just examine my own experience. My father and I both grew up within 100m of a main road with heavy traffic and we survived unscathed. The paper does not support your conclusion.
There may be a sensible conversation to be had on child supervision but my father grew up in the 50s too and it was not the hellscape you depict. If you look at deaths per 100,000 young children 5-14 they’re at worst three times current levels. By the 80s they’ve dropped to less than double current levels and people weren’t going insane wrapping their children in cotton wool and depriving them of all contact with the real world then. Deaths in childhood are so low that accidents are a minority of childhood deaths.
You’re advocating depriving children of freedom under a model of the world where childhood is so dangerous no one would survive when the trends in death rates are pretty much the same across industrialised countries while the insane helicopter parenting isn’t.
It really depends where the kids grow up. Free range parenting is possible, but in metropolitan neighborhoods with lots of traffic and psychos the risks are quite high. Im a parent and would love for my kid to grow up the way I did, free range and all. But there are always risks. I remember being hit by cars twice. The first time just a bruise, the second time broken leg, double fracture, from which I developed a slight scoliosis. Some kids I grew up with died in stupid accidents so I keep the risks in balance. Are you a parent yourself? Would you let your kids free range in a city like NYC?? Yikes..
Barry has a point, one piece of research does /= the absolute truth. Research is the scientific process of moving closer to the actual truth through experimental investigation. While you may believe this study, do not be certain that it can't be falsified.
So you refuse to read the study because you don’t like the conclusion and instead rely on your own personal anecdote. Your reasoning has no place on HN.
One thing that's different is that in many places in Japan there's a 2- or 3-foot high metal barrier between the sidewalk and the road. It's impossible to just wander out into traffic except at crossings.
Those are the exception, not the norm. Just about all residential neighborhoods are filled with streets that have no sidewalks, much less barriers between car and pedestrian traffic.
> I get some judgy looks on the playground for studiously ignoring my kid and letting her play for three hours...
If you are watching your child for three hours on the playground then it is obvious you either do not have a regular job or only doing this on the weekends.
Check your privilege before you lecture others on how to parent. Also the hot cooking with 3 year olds is idiotic and dangerous even if it’s “just with butter” (??).
Problem being they lectured that it’s “not hard” to occupy kids everyday.. not just on the weekends. Parenting is hard and takes lots of resources and tons of time every day optimally.
risk vs reward. Have you spent any time around a 3 year old? They are super uncoordinated at this age and can't take off a sock without falling on their butt. GP clarified that it was supervised cooking with low heat and without oil, so that sounds safe to me, but certainly wouldn't have any other pots with for example, water boiling around since they don't have the experience to avoid it and the results can end up catastrophic.
Reportedly one of my first words was "hot!" after I stuck my hand on an electrical stove top burner that was on. I don't remember it. Scarred for life? What do you remember before age 4? Edit: ah, you meant physical scars.
>Scarred for life? What do you remember before age 4?
A 2 year old in my wife's mother's group got 3rd degree burns from tipping a hot cup of tea on himself. Luckily it missed his face, but his neck and chest are now permanently scarred (and disfigured). The child required 6 months of physical therapy because the burn was down the neck and under the arm so movement was affected due to scar tissue. Any liquid over about 60 degrees C is a very real hazard for small child.
It really depends on context. A closely supervised 3 year old "cooking" using very low heat without oil and without a boiling pot around? Yup that sounds ok.
To be fair, she's frying eggs, not deep-frying them. I'm sure the parent in question is taking appropriate steps to keep her safe. Kids are more capable and resilient than we give them credit for. Give them a chance to excel.
I think small accidents help kids learn. Splashing a bit of oil on yourself isn’t the end of the world for adults and I don’t think it is for my toddler either.
We don’t have a yard, my kids can’t cook eggs while I’m getting ready, and pillow forts get old. Maybe there is another solution to improving online educational content than shaming parents who find mornings “hard”.
Why is isn’t it shaming when we tell people to get vaccinations, then? The current medical research suggests that children 2-5 should have no more than one hour of screen time. The current medical research also suggests children should be vaccinated on schedule.
Your parent-shaming was not about exceeding one hour of screen time, it was about any screen time at all. Not all of us are able to spend our mornings frying eggs with our kids before taking them to the park for three hours (which means you probably have a working partner who is considerably less involved.. shall we judge their parenting?). My comment was about improving the quality of educational content on YouTube, not skipping vaccinations.
> Distracting a single-digit-aged human long enough to put dinner on the table or get some work done is hard on the best of days.
I don't doubt that it is, yet this is a problem that humans have been solving literally since the dawn of time. I doubt very much that YouTube is necessary.
Kids like to watch other kids. You can sometimes get them into a cartoon or an educational program... But they really like to watch other kids do things invent and play.. and they learn from them.
Nobody really has a right to tell parents how to parent. Parenting is hard.
Personally, I don’t let mine near YouTube unless we’re looking something up together. They’re allowed kids Netflix but even that has plenty of content I don’t let them watch. Annoyingly, there’s no way to remove a show from Netflix. I’ve been meaning to make a chrome extension so I can blast the likes of Horseland into another dimension.
Yeah except that in everything else people take advice but you say boo about someone’s parenting and you might as well have suggested they’re literally abusing their parents. There are plenty of things that are known to be suboptimal.
The American Association of Pediatrics recommends no screen time under 18 months except for video chatting, and only 1 hour a day for children 2-5 [0]
Most of us are engineers here, but as soon as parenting comes up people become so superstitious and irrational.
That could be for the simple fact that all it takes is a couple of concern people to make phone calls, and not only are you a bad parent, but you're in the system and have to do a bunch of remedial work. It's not hard, happens every day.
I have a fair amount of experience with this system. Not due to those phone calls but due to other things I did, foster care being one.
I cared for kids, who got placed with us. Some of those people earned that. Not good. Obvious.
On those, my wife and I did a good public service. It is hard.
But, I saw many cases where a disgruntled person ruined families too. Those kids should never have been with us at all. Yet they were, and worse, we had to hold a terrible line or it gets worse for the kids and potentially us!
A few samples:
Baby sitter feels she can do better, phones the father in. Boom. He spends 6 months being psych evaluated, his wife does not know what to think, and part of his struggle is having his johnson in a clamp while being shown suggestive kiddie pictures. That family got past it. We helped once we were free of the system. Labor of love and justice there.
They left the State the moment they could. Cannot blame them.
Ex wife hated step mom. Similar thing, both parents end up in some program. Never did get right. Just a mess, kids with relatives.
Dad loses his mind in the store. Brats got under his skin. Delivered a quick swat, lets go home. Ended up in all sorts of trouble for essentially getting a toddlers attention. Concerned people trump up abuse case. Never did see that one conclude.
People lose their kids these days. It does not take much. You should also know all public servants, teachers, many coaches are obligated to report or face charges in many places. The report bar is very, very low. An angry kid can get another kids family in the system. I saw that happen.
Having frank conversations about parenting carries grave implications these days. It was once not like this, but it is now. Among a trusted peer group it still happens as it always has.
Out in public? Internet? People are crazy to mention specifics. Just don't do it. Ever.
I do not have answers. I wish I did given what I saw.
I can help share hard won understanding. So I have.
Just know the touchy parent convo is systemic, not so much people being snowflakes or something.
Downvoted because this is your personal struggle and trauma, whereas the “bad parenting” discussion was really just about screen time. Just letting you know. But please talk to someone about it if you’re not already.
I have no struggle. Those events were hard. No doubt. Not the point.
It was an answer to the question of why bad parenting discussions often are met with angst.
People get questioned on parenting, and suddenly they are in the middle of a mess and they are there because other people said, "bad parent" essentially.
Understanding how that can happen is germane.
Here is all it would take in many States:
Those parents just leave their kids with an iPad, and do not watch their kids. Follow that with just about any scary scenario and it is likely to trigger people at your door asking questions.
What I did here was share a little from the other side of some of those events gone bad. None of those should have happened. They all were rooted in literally, "bad parent" allegations created out of thin air with basis as thin as "screen time."
Parents here should be aware of what can happen. Comments to the effect of, "WTF is it with parenting discussions?" These potential events are part of WTF.
Frankly, I only shared difficulty to underscore complete disapproval, and I should have shared we quit due to how out of control and abused it can be, and is regularly. Some if those families were of non trivial means too.
"It won't happen to me." Know I have seen otherwise, and that is all.
By the way, I really appreciate you giving the reason for the downvote. Kudos!
I rarely downvote myself, preferring to promote signal out of the noise instead. But that's just my preference. What I appreciate is knowing why, that's some understanding right there. I can use it, it's got value. I wish more of us would understand that.
My kid doesn't and will never have iPads until he is able to buy it for himself. Kids adjust and find ways to entertain themselves. It's an important skill they should be developing. You'd be doing them a service to just give them some inanimate toys to play with and leaving them to self-explore.
Don't worry. Everyone have this idealization of what type of parent they will be until they actually have kids. There are no rule book to say what good parent looks like.
Sounds to me like you're doing fine. Usually the people most critical of how others raise kids have no kids themselves (and/or are idiots), and therefore have no idea of the constant trade-offs you must make to keep them safe, fed, clothed, entertained, educated and also keep yourself sane.
In general no, but when it comes to plonking them down in front of a screen and turning on YouTube, that’s very much your choice. I don’t think that makes you a shitty parent either, but I think you’re misplacing your trust and it has a good chance of coming back to haunt you.
I dunno. My kids like to take YouTube things and bring them into the real world in imaginative play. You have to block peppa pig Spider-Man dentist but it’s not specifically bad. My kids are great at iPads fyi and there are a lot of educational apps. The only downside is my kids want to make YouTube videos now. Which when I was a kid my cousins put on plays and my friends and I made home made videos too.
Yeah, my oldest is actually brilliant and has learned many advanced things from YT educational videos way ahead of the curve. It's a powerful tool for self-directed education.. and also for junky toddler crack.
The problem is these content farms and ultimately the low payouts. Listen up YouTube: I would happily pay for better quality kids content. I'm about to trial Amazon FreeTime...
Why do they even have iPads? At least with a $100-200 laptop/chromebook they can learn things and build typing skills. Tablets are literally impossible (even for adults) to be productive on.
This is a very weird response. iPads are breakthrough child computers. They can use them prior to typing, reading or even fully speaking. And you said it is “literally” impossible for adults to be productive — like, not just slightly challenging. There are approx 80M iPad users. It is literally impossible to take you seriously.
This is even weirder and outright nonsensical. Observing the fact that a child can use an iPad at age 2-3 does not imply anything about expectations for their speech development.
He obviously likes the iPad more than the laptop. As a kid, I would tear the keys out of mechanical keyboards all the time out of curiosity and boredom, but that didn't break them.
