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

50 years ago it was the test card, open university, watch with mother at lunchtime and children’s tv from 4pm until 5.30. No, parents did not rountinely plonk their kids I front of the tv.

So is her df interacting with her or is he online too sending you pics or else how would you know what she was playing with?

I'm all for limited screen use but parents must also learn how to interact with their kids and give them attention even they'd rather be online.

Even more recent than that. I was born in the late 80s and have memories of playing on a Saturday morning waiting for the test card to go off and on bad morning watching the open university first!

By then there was a little more kids TV but still limited to 6-10 am at the weekend and 3.30-6pm on weeknights.

I think one of the things that has changed is that there is now the expectation that the entertainment is around the children and TV and screens are for when parents need to do other things rather than joint time. I have very fond memories of getting home from school and watching watercolour challenge followed by 15 to 1 and then countdown with my grandad. He was also a keen watcher of sports so we spent many hours watching snooker, cricket and tennis after school. It was a social time whereas now so much now it about keeping the child occupied and contained.

We are trying to emulate bits of this with my daughter and we try to have an hour at the weekends with social watching once or twice a month. We have an iPlayer account just for family watching. We do entertainment shows such as taskmaster or gladiators but also nature documentaries and how things work type shows too. She also loves watching sports, especially rugby, gymnastics and diving. She got into these when I was sofa bound with hyperemesis during the Olympics and it was something that could keep me entertained without energy and she would come and watch it with me

The social media one in the states? I would imagine perfectly fine. Social media can be harmful is incentivized towards hostility and conflict. I let my kid on screens but not social media.

@JustGiveMeReason It had. Swap Shop on at about 9.30 am on a Saturday. Not school days I think.

Parenting, to my mind, isn’t about the government being the nanny state. Parents need to read about the issues and raise dc without screens as far as possible. Spend time talking to dc. Even if you need to get on with things, talk to dc, eg during cooking. It’s not difficult!

It is not difficult to not give children screens.

The parents who will struggle will be the parents who find themselves addicted to their own phones.

Some barely look over at their children to interact and model life without a screen.

It’s really not that hard. I never handed mine a phone on a bus, a cafe or in a waiting room. We chatted about what we could see. Or I had a little bag that I had a few toys in to keep them entertained, eg colouring book and crayons, Lego, a small playset, a book, cards for snap etc. Sure, it’s more work to engage with your children than to just hand them a screen, but that’s the choice you make.

I did the first half of the journey with the kids, he did the second, so I know what toys she had out and what her plan was when we swapped for daddy time. We very rarely use phones around them.

We always have a pocket sized colouring book and a handful of wax crayons (no need for a sharpener!) in my bag. If we go out where we know she will need to potentially have longer distractions like being on a train or at a restaurant we have an age appropriate puzzle book and some blank paper. We rarely do more than a page or two as we involve her in the conversation and she can learn about patience and social skills from us too. One half term we spent a lovely 59 minutes in the city train station after watching our once an hour train leave the station as our first train pulled into the station. There was someone playing the piano for a bit so she watched them and then she spent quite a bit of time people watching.

I wonder whether part of it is a practical thing, most people always have their phone on them so they don't need to be prepared. The amount of my friends that buy their children bottles of water when they are our or snacks rather than travel with a water bottle and a handful of various snacks. I would say the cost of convenience has come down a lot. As a child my parents would never have had the spare money for buying any food or drink out of the house so we always had something with us. Whilst house prices in the UK might have been lower in the 90s there was a cost of living crisis in the early 90s when the interest rates jumped to 15% my parents still have their bank book from that time and the highest mortgage payment from that time was £550 a month for a 3 bed semi. For contrast the mortgage payments on my 3 bed semi in an adjacent town in 2017 was £650!! It was a huge part of their income.

Whilst my daughter does have a tablet at home it never leaves the house unless we are travelling more than 100 miles when it's useful to have it is a back up option for half an hour or so in case for unexpected delays. Journey times to the grandparents can be anywhere from 4 to 8h and we drive to France which can be 800+ miles over two days, each way, and we acknowledge that it can be dull and tedious to be sat on motorways for that length of time.

Sitting and finding peace with your surroundings is a skills to be taught too. I find quite often it is the children that are readily passed the screens easily struggle with coping with background noises. I wonder if part of that is the hyper focus and lack of awareness of the outside world that comes from screens .. or maybe the children that need that escape from noise gravitate more to devices that can help them close out the world. Most probably there's a mix

Edit: Wrong thread. I've always wondered how people manage that.

Overall theme of media coverage of this guidance seems to be that it says to encourage more engagement with the child, which is great and is basically what we are all saying. But I still think wider culture around parenting needs to change to support that in reality and this isn’t being recognised enough let alone acted on.

It’s a lot to expect all parents to ‘slow down to the child’s pace’ and fully engage when the harsh pressures of adult life are forcing many parents to go in the opposite direction. This discussion is still framing this as pure ‘choice’ not looking at the wider environment of many parents in the UK right now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk1e11ek8v

Also they seem to underplay other negative aspects of screens, not telling parents more loudly about the effect of screens and not getting outside to play enough on kids. This negatively affects children’s eyesight development. I had no awareness of this as such a widespread problem until recently.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m099zm4wyo so parental engagement is great but it’s not everything. Parents not having the money and time to get out to a park or safe outdoors place to play, for example, is still going to really affect kids.

Totally agree, family TV watching where you are having a shared experience and talking about it at the time/afterwards is completely different from individual staring at a small screen. Also watching actual programmes or films is different for attention span than endless short clips. When mine were little we all watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth together on a Sunday evening. Even now with teens we all sit down together to watch shows or films.

That's shocking

@GrillaMilla Eye sight is a well known issue I thought. It’s hardly a surprise surely?

Getting outside? More difficult for some but others don’t centre their lives around dc. Dc are in cafes with a tablet. No conversation. There is time but parents prefer tv sport or doing nothing. We’ve got family members who don’t drive so didn’t go anywhere. Noon to dusk sky sports! It is lazy I’m afraid. It’s also all about them. Just putting dc in front of the tablet or computer keeps dc quiet.

@OhDear111

Not an aspect I'd ever thought about to be honest. Makes you wonder what else will come to light in the future. It's terrible parenting.

@Lovelygreenpen but is it really that difficult? So many aspects of modern life are easier and faster than ever: Internet food shop, paying bills online, communication to and from school..
moreover, we aren’t expecting adults to slow down to a child’s pace. Read your child a story, watch tv together, do an activity together, go out to the park, to the library- it doesn’t have to be expensive.
why do we keep making excuses for poor parenting?

@GrillaMilla YR teachers will already have a long list of the issues dc have brought about by screens. Lack of language is a major one. Plenty more!

TVs are hard to escape for everyone unless they are switched off.

When I was a child, our TV was a small thing well tucked into a corner. When my kids were little, it was a 22" TV in an alcove. Nowadays, some families have 60" super-bright TVs over the fireplace is a small living room. A cinema is more subtle.

That’s a good point that screens are so much more normalised in our homes now. They’re the focal point. Our ancestors used to gather around a fire and talk to each other and entertain each other.