I've just seen the most depressing thing

A 3 year old intermittently choking? Sounds like a made up story to me, I've worked with many children and cared for many in my own time. Choking is a rare event, especially at 3. It's also a life threatening event so it is odd that you sat judging so hard and had to post on MN but didn't actually do anything to challenge him and protect the child's life.

I would say, as others have, remember that you are seeing a few moments out of someone's life and unless you think someone is in some kind of danger, it's not your business.

I take my 16yo DS out to lunch in a restaurant about once a week. If you saw us you would likely be very judgmental, as I can feel some people around me are. We are both eating sitting looking at our phones on the table in front of us (me reading a book on Kindle, him most likely watching YouTube clips about the Ukranian war, or alternatively about other people playing Roblox games).

So:, this is what is really happening: He is autistic and non-speaking, and the way he talks is by typing into a text-to-speech app on his phone. So if he wants to talk to me he has to put down his knife and fork, lose his concentration on his food and type out what he wants to say. Given that he likes pontificating at great length about things he is interested in, this would probably mean his food gets cold and he never actually finishes it. And if he just had to sit there not watching something he would very quickly get bored and restless and start disturbing other people.

So we have agreed he doesn't talk while eating unless it's something urgent. I dont feel it is right for me to just talk at him when he can't reply, so we eat in companionable silence while enjoying reading or watching what we want to. When we get back in the car we chat all the way home.

If you judged me negatively by just what you saw in the restaurant you would be dead wrong.

Not saying that the situation here is necessarily anything comparable, but I would ask people not to be so judgemental when observing a few isolated minutes of a person's life.

Intermittent choking over a meal at 3??

How do you know he hadn't spent the previous few hours playing with her one-on-one, taken her to soft play or gone swimming with her? Bit judgemental, really.

Who made you the boss?

That's a very odd thing for the father to say to a 3 year old about it being his weekly visit before going back to her mum. A 3 year old wouldn't understand how long a week is surely.

I don't agree with screens for young kids.
But if I was your dd I'd be telling you where to go, hopefully she won't be daft enough to let you do this.
Her child her rules.

Second thread in 24 hours where apparently the only two options are screen or running riot. Were all kids feral then, twenty years ago? Concentration spans are, SEN notwithstanding, what you make them. If you always instantly whip out the phone the moment child starts to fidget, no, they'll not develop the ability to sit and be amused. To the pp who said it's no different to a book, at least with a book the child has to engage imagination, comprehension skills, focus, actual reading skills, not just a thirty second fast moving clip of inane crap.
As for parental downtime, that's fair in the case of an RP who has them most of the time but a NRP on a once weekly visit, no.

I think things must have changed literally beyond recognition since I was a child, and hardly surprising given this would have been a good 60+ years ago.
All the same, back then my parents, like everyone else, had no expectations about date nights, time off from being parents etc. The relationship necessarily expanded to include kids, so to speak.

OP’s observations just made me recall how my dear old Pa would have handled that time, in charge of me and my little brother.
We lived in London, which at the time was still full of craters, mountains of twisted rusty metal, huge great gaps between partly wrecked buildings.
On the Overground into the city, he’d be pointing out this and that spot, telling us that this crater was once his school; that mound of girders was where a famous man had lived with his pet monkey; that there pit used to be his own father’s famous dancehall, and so on.
We’d be goggle eyed at all this thrilling history……and never thought to wonder how any of it stacked up with very similar tales he tell on holidays over in his native Ireland (for years I believed he’d been brought up in Blarney Castle as a kitchen scullion 🤣)
He must sound like a weird fantasist, but it was simply absurdist entertainment by a man with a Goons obsession, and it made the grimmer aspects of London into a place of endless fascination.
(He and Ma used to perform the Goons’ Ying Tong Song at us as a so-called lullaby. 💡Just realised this must be the cause of my lifelong insomnia!)

My hard to discern point is that while it’s true we Oldies may sometimes look askance at the deadening effect of screens used as childminders, and parents ignoring their kids, it may often be just a moment of nostalgia for our own childhoods, missing happy occasions with our own parents at a time almost lost to memory.
It’s not always just negative judgment, I hope.

Well, I'm guessing this snapshot may go some way to explain why he only gets 2 hrs a week with his kid 🤷‍♀️

This post by the OP is going to get loads of defensive responses, but she's right. It's depressing. Parenting by phone is raising a whole generation of dopamine addicts with the attention spans of gnats, who need their phone 'fix' like a drug addict needs heroin. I can feel what it does to me, let alone an impressionable child's brain! Parenting by phone is going to be viewed in the same light as sticking a shot of brandy into a baby's bottle to help them sleep, at some point in the future.

OMG. Twice.

Oh and saw a Mum recently scrolling as she walked. It was a very busy road. Her toddler was so far behind, that I could have stopped the car, abducted him, and she would have been non the wiser. Or he could have walked into the road. Zero fucks given. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I think parents who usually engage but are using screen as a temporary diversion, won’t be able to help but pay intermittent attention to what the child is doing - that’s how they parent. That’s not what’s being described here. It looks different.

I can't believe it either. Surely there's nothing so important on your phone whilst your child is intermittently choking ffs

My previous comment also goes to @Blondiebeachbabe. A forward facing pram once a day for nap time doesn’t mean a forward facing pram for every outing.

And I’m sure you’d be complaining if they hadn’t given the 2-year-old the phone and he/she was running round the restaurant screaming, bashing into your table. Honestly when I go out to a restaurant and see a toddler on a device I think thank fuck, my nice quiet meal won’t be disrupted 🤣

Why would it be one or the other? 🥴 Ours are early 20s, so screens weren’t a thing. We took them to restaurants all the time. We talked, played and interacted with them. They never once ran, screamed or bashed anything. We taught them how to behave. If we wanted adult time, we arranged child care.

Was the baby facing her or outward facing? My baby went through a phase of only napping in the pram. So I’d turn it outwards facing and walk until she slept.

I absolutely did go on my phone a lot of this time.

Mostly because it was the only time I was getting any semblance of my own time at all and the alternative was to go slightly mad. Also my baby couldn’t see me on my phone as they were outward facing, and needed quiet so no interaction so they could sleep.

It IS utterly depressing. And it's Mum's too. I see many women pushing prams and pushchairs, where the baby is forward facing and the Mum is on her phone. Just fucking put it away! When my kids were little, we always had pushchairs that faced us, and we would talk whilst walking - pointing out things, like cows/sheep/trees - whatever - never see that these days.

Me and DH were in a restaurant recently, and we were the only 2 people not staring at a phone. The table next to us, was Mum, Dad and a girl of about 8 years old. Both parents doom scrolling and the little girl had her forehead on the table as she had no one to talk to. Honestly, I could have tipped their table over and hit them round the head with it. WAKE UP!!!! You fucking Zombies!!!!

So you're more concerned what people think, than having a quiet, well behaved child to deal with? It would be lovely if all children toed the line and behaved themselves in public and only spoke when spoken to, yadda yadda....the fact is, some kids need a distraction, at the airport for example or waiting in line for that, I'm not going to apologise for giving them a device rather than having a stroppy, loud child wreaking havoc..... In the OPs case, yes that snapshot of interaction seems sad, however that's a very blasé comment from you, I hope none of your grand children have additional needs.

Maybe but out and let your daughter parent her own children.

Personally I can’t think of anything worse than children being given a screen to entertain themselves. I bet you could think of at least one or two things worse than screens though, if you attempted to think really, really hard.

Awful, OP. Judge away, I'm with you. We sat at a cafe on the seafront this Sunday morning, gorgeous day and the beach just a few metres away. A man arrived with three children, the oldest a girl of around 8, and two young boys who were very lively and noisy. The father told them they couldn't go and run around on the beach, told his daughter to supervise the boys, then got his phone out and spent the next half hour scrolling while his daughter did the parenting. The boys were running wild around other tables, chasing seagulls, shrieking, while she tried to get them to behave. He pretended he wasn't there. Bastard.

Ironically it's exhausting for your kids to be dashed about every weekend doing sports competitions.

And I’m sure you’d be complaining if they hadn’t given the 2-year-old the phone and he/she was running round the restaurant screaming, bashing into your table. Honestly when I go out to a restaurant and see a toddler on a device I think thank fuck, my nice quiet meal won’t be disrupted 🤣
Also, maybe they never get a chance to have a nice meal just the two of them because they can’t get childcare so have to take the kid with them. Maybe the rest of the day he’s not on any device and is fully engaging with his parents. It’s not bad parenting to want to have some quiet adult time, people no longer have ‘the village’ to entertain their child whenever they want. It’s all on the parents. Kids also don’t have the attention span to sit quietly at a table for an hour and have a conversation. Without the device he’d just be running around disturbing other diners. The parents are being considerate to other customers by providing their child with entertainment in a space that it’s very hard to entertain a child without being disruptive to other people