AIBU that reducing under 5s screen time is way more complicated than just issuing guidelines?

[Lovelygreenpen]

This guidance is welcome. We need to know facts and risks to make informed choices. But choices often aren’t made entirely freely. Think about healthy eating and exercise guidance and how complicated these can be to follow due to costs and time.

How would following this under 1 hour rule change your daily routine?
Most parents need to work all the hours with COLC and decades of rising housing costs. working life also often expands to expect parents to be in contact from home outside of paid work hours.
How are busy parents supposed to manage? How are solo working parents specifically supposed to manage? Any family with more than one child?
And what about the screens used in childcare settings?
What are the responsibilities of the makers of the crazy overstimulating content for babies and kids?

We know women often have to do more domestic labour than men, even where they live with a male partner. Also, that the makers of the content aimed at kids specifically employ addictive techniques.

So how is this pressured wider environment going to change to make this recommendation more realistic?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d936n7445o

How on earth did parents manage before screens? Maybe parents should ask their parents?!!! Why even buy the things? Parenting is about spending time with dc and parent needs come second. Parents seem to have become idiots in the last 20 years. Why? No one is busier than 20 years ago. Most people are having fewer dc. Ban the screens and start interacting with dc. It’s what parents have done for millennia!

Your posts are all about what the parents ‘need.’
A break, to work etc
They didn’t ‘need’ to have kids- but they chose to so now their own needs are secondary to those of their children imo.

As a primary teacher, it is obvious that the impact that screens have had increasingly on young children.

No patience, little attention span, little imagination, not to mention lack of interest in reading/ books.

I am appalled actually that people need this advice, let alone that they are complaining about it!

Mine had 1 hour screen time max a day as under 8s, and that was only TV as other screens hadn’t been invented - so much easier to keep an eye.

We didn’t have to entertain them all the time. They played inside and out, together or on their own or with friends - often easier with friends round! They read and listened to stories, did drawing, painting etc.

Parents can still let their children do all those things.

My eldest is 32, so grew up without screens. Of course TV, but no phones / tablets. Youngest 18 and she had her own laptop at 8. Under 5’s do not need a device at all. It’s perfectly ok to manage travel, restaurants, waiting rooms without tech. Many just choose not to now. Its quite sad when you see a child in a pushchair on a tablet and parent on phone, zero interaction.

I don’t understand the argument that busy parents ‘need’ screens to allow them to do things, or have a break. My 2 DDs (9&6) have never had a tablet or similar. Didn’t watch any TV at all until about age 2. Now they can watch a couple of episodes of something before dinner, and sometimes a longer film at the weekend. No screens any other time, even on long car journeys- they will read / chat / listen to music & audiobooks.

DH & I both work (although I am PT) and often have to catch up on work at home too. Our DDs play, draw, make things, and don’t stop reading. Occasionally, they are a pain in the arse, but most of the time they just get on with it and entertain themselves. We go out for dinner / lunch a couple of times a month and they have never had screens. When they were younger, this was harder - lots of reading to them and little toys at the table. Now, they will do some drawings, but we will mainly just talk, and sometimes play dobble or similar if it’s a long wait.

It probably would have been easier when they were toddlers to give them a tablet whilst I was trying to cook dinner, or reply to emails. However, I wanted them to develop the skills to play independently, and that comes with time and support. I’d have them ‘helping’ with dinner, or setting them up with some crafts etc. Over time, they were able to play independently for longer and longer.

I’m in no way a perfect parent and get so much wrong, but this has always been a hard line for me.

Nail on the head there. I cringe when I see kids in prams being handed a phone/tablet to shut them up! Previous generations of parents/children managed just fine without them. Yes, I know parents are busy and have other things to do, but they're still, first and foremost, parents and should be parenting their children, not fobbing them off with a screen. Nothing else has changed - screens are just a "go to" easy option for a lot of parents and that entire mindset needs to be dialled back to the times before screens. Newsflash - being a parent IS hard, being a good parent IS hard. If you don't want to spend time with your child, do activites with them, teach them things, etc then don't have them!

Sad but very true for a lot of parents these days. Standards of parenthood have fallen and continue to fall. But it's generational. If today's parents had poor parents themselves, then they won't know how to be a better parent in turn to their kids, and so it goes on.

Amazed how so many of us managed to bring up our children with no screens, no 24 hr TV and my children were not allowed TVs in their bedrooms. Same, no tvs for my grandchildren and hey ho we have all survived. Be creative- that’s the problem with society today- too reliant on screens to be creative. Very often children don’t know how to play or entertain themselves.

60 years ago children spent time around their parents , watching and being involved in what they did.
Children developed patience and resilience gradually, waiting their turn ,for Mum to finish what she was doing, to learn delayed gratification etc
Screens are instant reward, huge dopamine hit and addictive and we are being sold stuff through them

So much behaviour is labelled and pathologised these days when its the direct result of poor parenting and addiction to screens

Agree
Mine were born in 1994, 96 and 98

Screens were an absolute no for under 3s at the time

Actually, the amount of time parents spend with their children is at an all time high. A UK mother now spends on average 150 minutes per day with their child, compared to roughly 75 minutes in 1990. There’s some definite rose tinted goggles in this thread.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-now-spend-twice-as-much-time-with-their-children-as-50-years-ago

Let's say today's typical under 5 parent is 30 years old, so born circa 1995. This means they were possibly the first generation of children to grow up with easy access to the Internet, watching silly videos etc. Cable/satellite/free view tv was standard in most homes. Screens were part on 24/7 life in always it just wasn't in the early 80s when children's tv was an hour in the afternoon and another couple of hours Saturday morning. I'm rambling, but I think I'm trying yo say this has grown with each generation. It has snuck up on us. It's not that suddenly parents are lazy. Tv content has changed massively too. Way too overstimulating, and that goes fo4 adult tv too. We need to fight back but it's a bit like shutting th3 door after the horse has bolted.

We aren’t big on screens, our youngest is four, she doesn’t have access to a tablet or smartphone at home, we don’t have the TV on very much for the kids apart from film night fridays. We’re on a train right now and she’s playing with a train and two plastic horses, not being loud or banging them about.

Children don’t need to be entertained all the time or listened too instantly, if we’re busy at home they have to wait while we finish whatever we do before their request is answered etc, being bored and learning to wait without kicking up a fuss is really important.

'We’re on a train right now and she’s playing with a train and two plastic horses, not being loud or banging them about'

She's playing on the train and you're online? I think parents need guidance too .

Ds is 16 and had very little screen time (as in phones/tablets) when he was little.

Then covid hit and between school, keeping in touch with people and keeping entertained it did increase a lot more than I would have liked.

He spends a lot of time on his iPad now but most of that is researching his interests and memorising maps (he is autistic!). Thankfully he is very anti social
media so that’s not a battle I have had to face!

The trains fairly full, she’s in the next carriage with her dad and brother.

“In my experience you could buy decent sized houses in areas that weren’t shit holes for this amount”

Your experience in the 90s - when you were at primary school…

I get the argument that the government may be overstepping in making these or other parenting guidelines and questioning their motives in doing so.

I don't get wanting the government to be making 'realistic' recommendations that read to me like just detailing what parents are doing. I don't see the point.

Treating these as guidelines - the government isn't the only one who have made similar recommendations - having the information on current understanding on this largely has benefits, even if we're not ideal ourselves. Part of life is accepting our limitations and making intentional choices where where we want to adjust towards the ideal - and where we don't. We can only do that intentionally with the information available.

I’ll also add that for some children with SEND, screens are a means to self regulate. After eg a long day in childcare which can be very loud and overstimulating they do need to get home and zone out.

If someone is dealing with overstimulation, most types of screens aren't a good way to recover from that. It's just more stimulation. Just because we're physically zoned out doesn't mean our brains are.

That's part of why it works to regulate for some people - but it's the understimulated/hyposensitive ones. One of my disabled teens is like this - he'll merrily watch the flashiest videos at 2x speed - it's not to relax, it's a dopamine hit of stimulation more than he could ever get naturally that he does sometimes when he's had a long, boring, under stimulating day at school.

Electronics are a means of self regulation for far more than disabled children, largely because they're designed to be easy to use and to become habituated to their use. They're also can be adapted to their user. Plenty of nondisabled adults use electronics to self-regulate, including the many difficult emotions that come up in parenting. I think it would be better to just admit that rather than using disabled children as a gotcha.

No child - SEND or otherwise - is born using electronics to self regulate. We parents are the ones choosing it, largely because many parents - disabled and not - are doing it too. There are pros and cons to this. Many of the negatives come about when it becomes the main or only form of self regulation or relaxation. For young kids, most who sleep a near majority to a majority of the time, the amount they do makes up a greater percentage of their waking day. Using screens for much of that is how we end up with kids who scream or start throwing things when their screens are taken away - other ways to regulate and be have to be taught as well no matter how good - or not - screens are for this purpose. Those other methods can take more time than easily used screens.

How on earth did parents manage before screens? Maybe parents should ask their parents?!!!

My parents managed by sending us out from the age of 4-5 and doing drugs, both prescription and recreational. That was largely seen as normal then, there were songs about it - it's pretty frowned upon now.

We can recognise some parent are overreliant on screens for parenting and regulating their kids, and that that has consequences, without pretending that things haven't changed a lot over the last few decades for parents and without pretending everything before this trend was so much better.

To be clear, by "sunny", I mean that it has to be genuinely very warm and bright for people.to take their kids there. Dry, warm enough but a little overcast doesn't cut it, it seems.

But if you don't keep your kids indoors all day watching screens, more powerful to your elbow, choose what you like. But I know a lot of people who main about being stuck indoors with Bluey and kids climbing the walls all day just because the weather is mildly inclement.

Hrft. They did, but I bet the majority of working parents 50 years ago plonked their kids in front of the TV.

I know mine did. We did lots of other stuff but early mornings TV was on our play lounge..

@Sadworld23 my parents didn’t. No morning tv for us, unless ill. First time I had a tv in my room was when I moved into my own home after university

This 👆

Daytime TV whole day scheduling didnt start until 1986
My parents never watched TV until the evening until they retired then only after lunch so DF could watch the sport on Saturdays.

People did stuff like cleaning,baking,reading, crosswords, crafts, puzzles etc

There's also a massive difference between watching TV and scrolling on a phone etc. I've always struggled with tv. As a kid I used to play/ draw whilst watching a programme. I don't really watch much TV now. But my phone...... I can be amused for ages because it's quick, quick, quick. And wherever my brain wants to go, my phone can take me.

Watching TV didn't affect my concentration span, but my phone definitely has. And that's as a fully fledged adult, with years of academic training.

Don't know whether I was more aware today or what, but I encountered 3 under 5s on phones in aldi today. 1 in a trolley. 1 in a pushchair. 1 wandering round the shop, phone in hand, staring at the screen. Mum next to him, only interacting with him to stop him putting his hands all over the cakes. I've seen kids in pushchairs on screens a lot, but walking round a supermarket? Just why?

50 years ago, early morning TV hadn't even started, if you are in the UK.