@GoldenOmber
Well, okay, fine, take it up with the RCPCH. I suppose it's progress in a sense that we have moved from 'everyone agrees that any amount of screen time is inherently damaging to children' to 'what does the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health know anyway'.
Gosh, what a wonderful collection of straw men! You could start a lovely scarecrow farm.
What a crass misrepresentation of what I (didn't) say. I explained in great detail why I think the RCPCH advice is damaging and disadvantages those who are already at a disadvantage in terms of education and child development.
Of course, those writing the RCPCH advice will be highly-paid and highly-educated professionals who can afford high-quality childcare, so it's not going to impact them.
You don't 'control' a 1-year-old, and tbh it is coming across a bit oddly that you keep describing parenting in that way. 1-year-olds might vaguely understand that 'being quiet and obedient and unmoving for several hours at a time' is a desirable thing that adults want, but you cannot 'control' them into shutting up and sitting still for hours without doing various things to entertain them, and nor should you realistically try. Most of us travelling with 1-year-olds try to entertain them, not 'control' them.
Of course your job as a parent is to 'control' your child's behaviour. Especially in public around other people. How odd that you don't understand that. Entertaining a child is a way of managing their behaviour.
You trying to distort that into pretending I am talking about strapping babies into straitjackets and beating them with rulers if they make any noise is a very impressive reach.
I think that if a parent buys their child a McDonalds meal for one trip away from home as a reward for or to encourage good behaviour, they are probably not damaging said child for life. Ditto, playing a game on an iPad.
That may be what you 'reckon', but the reality is that the children who are having iPads stuck in their hands at the age of one are not 'playing an [occasional] game'. They are spending most of their childhoods in front of a screen and it's wrecking their brains.
Just like the 41.5% of children in deprived areas who are overweight or obese are not having an 'occasional' McDonalds, but are having their bodies destroyed by a constant diet of junk and no exercise.
I feel really sorry for all of these children, and I think it's shit that a body like the RCPCH gives out "hey, mum and dad know best, it's not for us to tell you what to do" advice like that, which flies in the face of the actual evidence in that BMJ review, which is unequivocal that screen time is very likely to damage children in anything other than very small amounts.
Anyone who thinks it's OK or normal to stick a one-year-old on a fucking iPad already has an extremely distorted idea of normality. It's very obvious - and backed up by that meta-analysis - that it's not a good idea. It's the equivalent of people putting Coke in their babies' bottles, and it's a hugely privileged middle-class "I'm alright Jack" sense of entitlement that leads people and organisations like the RCPCH to give advice which in practice is hugely damaging to those who can least afford it.