@Giraffesandbottoms
The absolute narrow minded hostility on here is bloody horrible. Even if the baby is given a screen EVERY meal it’s in no way going to stunt their growth or give them a massive developmental delay. There’s far worse things a parent could do to a child than give them Bluey at the dinner table
I actually disagree and I think it would be quite damaging for social and developmental reasons to do this. But I also don’t think something “not being the worst you could do” is a fantastic bar to set, parenting-wise 🤷🏻♀️
No, not being the worst thing you can do isn’t the bar to set but every single parenting act or decision results in a trickling effect.
If we put aside every level of judgement here what do we have? We have endless parents coming on and saying ‘I do that better’ we live in a society of one up man ship. ‘I never give my child a screen’, ‘I never let my child watch television’, ‘I never ignore my baby’, ‘I never let them cry’, ‘I never XYZ’ and the result is we now have a society where parents feel they can’t be seen to do wrong for the resulting judgement it caused.
How many posters have come on this thread to say ‘I did the same I just needed five minutes’? Ten? Twenty? Not everyone can attentively parent 100% of the time. It’s draining and exhausting and that ten minutes sitting watching a phone with everyone getting a break instead of parents expecting to be mr fucking tumble every waking second could be the difference between that mother or father having a breakdown or simply snapping.
In cases of shaken babies the number one reason given is ‘I needed the crying to stop’. Does that seem a far jump from a baby sat at a table watching a tablet? It’s not. We’ve all reached breaking point with our own where after months of broken sleep, tantrums, a complete loss of self and endless crying and ‘mummy mummy mummy mummy’ we snap. We shout or we storm out the house or we say things we didn’t mean and we snap. What helps? Space. A simple bedtime, a quiet evening, a night from being simply parents or a period of rest be that a meal or a full night sleep.
No sitting a child down with a screen isn’t ideal. Talking and chatting would be better but it’s also far better to have a baby sat safely in a high chair as mum and dad eat calmly and have a quarter of an hour or twenty minute recharge than they keep pouring and pouring what they cannot give from an empty cup until that cup shatters and that little baby is in the firing line of getting cut by the glass.
There was a thread on here the other day asking why is suicide and mental health SO prevalent? THIS. This is why. Because parents and adults are not allowed to be seen as anything less than perfect, they cannot sit their child with a screen, they cannot let them cry, they cannot struggle or fall down and be human and what’s left? A shell of them that is barely functioning that drags on trying and trying without any help or support or understanding.
7 months old? Bloody hell. My little boy didn’t sleep for a year to be sat in a restaurant with no one crying was an achievement.
Imagine that mother is on here. She’s suffering with post natal depression, she’s tired and she feels like she’s a shit mum. Her baby doesn’t sleep, her marriage feels broken, she can’t remember the last time she wasn’t mum. She went out with her husband for a meal and she reads this thread. How would that make her feel? Shit. Like a shit mum. ‘Shit parenting’ ‘fucking awful’ ‘that poor baby’ ‘I never did that’ ‘developmental delay’ ‘neglect’ all terms that have been thrown around on here that whilst seem minimal would add another chip to that mother’s broken cup with every single word.
God forbid mothers on here absolutely SLAMMING these parents are anything less than perfect. Sometimes we all do what we have to do to survive.