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

I'm pretty sure people never said this about books!
They did, however, say it about tv.

I have three. The oldest is a teen and got things like iPads etc. later then peers but still got them. Honestly, it’s my biggest parenting regret.
I knew better 10 years later when next two came along and they get a bit of tv and that’s it.
We have no phones at kitchen table rule for anyone and it’s strictly enforced.
Screens used by children is probably only half the problem. If a parent is constantly on the phone then the children are then just interacting with a blank face. So not perfect but I make sure that I keep my scrolling until I am not with them.

I agree. So do we ban tablets for children under a certain age?

This should not even be an issue for under 5s . You just don't give it to them. Ok a bit of tv but what else do they need.
It is lazy parenting nothing else.

We often set out very late or very early so they’d sleep a lot of the way. They later listened to music, audiobooks and podcasts with us in the car. Our John Williams playlist got a lot of use on trips like this.

The days you drive to France arent tbe issue. It's all the other ones....

Exactly. We need to model the type of behaviour we want from our children. We also have a no screens at the table rule and my dcs are 20 and 25!

It's a mystery isn't it!

Part of the problem is we now have a generation of young parents who they themselves are addicted to their phones, and it's their normal, they don't see an issue. It's going to be difficult to get the message through to them I think.

Audiobooks are great. My kids have Yoto and we play it in the car for travelling - I’ve actually learnt a lot from the Ladybird ones 🫣😂

"Consultation" thread
There are some really thoughtful comments on this thread, it's a shame that the representative of Best Start in Life never interacted at all after requesting comments. It makes it look like starting the MN thread 2 weeks before releasing the guidance was an afterthought so they could tick a box saying that they'd consulted parents.
No way was anything about these new guidelines informed by that request for feedback. I'm now extremely cynical about anyone trying to engage MN users in this way.

I agree that structural, or even blanket, solutions are much more effective than encouraging each individual parent to make the 'right' choice. In a way I think it's like food and obesity - you can wang on and on about how people just shouldn't eat it but at some point you need to look at how we've ended up with a world where the 'bad' stuff is ever available and pushed at us. It isn't realistic to expect people to solve that with willpower alone.

I think it is sometimes not acknowledged that in previous generations it wasn't that people were just more morally upright and engaged parents - screens was a choice they didn't have to make. They probably would have made similar choices if they could have - in the nineteenth century there was a lot of concern about parents literally drugging their children to make them more docile, which says to me that there have always been people who want to minimise the requirements on them as parents! The issue with screens now is it is literally ever available - in and out of the house, at all times. My parents had absolutely no rules around tv for us, but it was fine because kids tv was only on for a limited time each day, and obviously the tv couldn't leave the house with us, so in practice we had a pretty reasonable amount of it. Now the only thing that stands between a child and constant screen time is a parent enforcing boundaries, and clearly not everyone is doing that.

It really is easier if the boundaries are there for you. For instance, I know lots of people who say it just would not be possible to take their children in the car for more than a short journey without a screen. We have never ever had screens in the car because my eldest gets car sick - and we honestly find it no problem, including when we drove to Normandy. That kind of blanket no is much less mental effort in the end for a parent than a negotiation over 'you can have this much, but no more' - but the hard bit is that you then need to have it from the start. I don't think many people, for instance, set out to have a child that will only eat watching a screen - but I know people who started out using a phone to make feeding a toddler easier 'just during a difficult phase', who now have exactly that.

They manage the way we managed before hand held screens were invented. It’s not difficult. That said, the kind of parents who think under 1 hour is unreasonable are likely to ignore the rule.

I agree - as a childminder in dont let my EYFS children have tablet time/screen time.... but i was marked down by ofsted for it. Make of that what you will

You were marked down for not having screens?? Can I ask what reason they gave?

That’s crazy about OFSTED

I am a teacher and the number of children that come with issues from the use of screens is appalling. I had a kid that before starting school, spent all his waking hours with an iPad. Doesn’t speak at 5 years old. I had another one that when she started school, would only talk to the characters on the screen, but never interacted with real people. None of these children have SEN but started reception with significant delays. I had children that owned their own phone, no restrictions or filters, at the age of 2 and 3.

The funny thing is that many of the young children that are obsessed with tablets and YouTube, Italian brain rot and all these things, come from families in which one of the parents doesn’t work, so it’s not only about parents being stressed from work and needing a few hours of peace.

This guidance is very necessary and it needs to be spread better. We did a workshop with early years parents at school and most of them knew nothing about the consequences to their children brains and development. But yes, when the children start being dysregulated everyone wants a diagnosis, when the problem is that we’ve been using screens as dummies to suppress all emotions that are uncomfortable.

The problem as well is that parents are as obsessed with the screens or more than the children. YOU are the one that need to watch some reels to decompress, not your children. And I’m saying that from the same boat, I hate the amount of time that I spend with my phone.

Anyway, it might not be easy but believe me, it’s possible, and extremely necessary.

I watched shitloads of TV as a child and I I turned out all right. I also read loads of books and loved imaginative play. It’s not one or the other.

My kids watch a lot of TV and I do feel bad about it. But frankly I’m struggling with working, doing a masters degree, kids being constantly ill, endless chores and household tasks, feeling totally wiped out (I struggle with chronic fatigue – not diagnosed). I never use screens in the car or in restaurants, but at home we do probably use them too much. Sadly I’m not Mary Poppins and don’t have the energy to do endless playing and crafts. Plus they’re both tired after school/nursery (where they do active play/learning all day) so I think it’s OK for them to relax and watch TV at home. There aren’t any easy solutions but I know it’s not ideal.

Yes I agree that it's good to have the screen as a special treat. I know some homes where the TV is always on in the background, and where the kids are barely focussing on it. I think it's better to actually put it on occasionally (once or twice a day maybe) as a treat and let them properly focus on it then.
However, I now speak as a mum to teens who are constantly on screens!
I feel I was pretty good at the toddler stage re keeping it as a treat. I didn't have a smart phone back then, or ipad/tablet, and I don't think we had iplayer on the TV, so we just watched fave CBeebies episodes when they aired.

This has been an interesting topic for me to think about this morning, and my first reaction was "I'm glad I raised young kids in an era before screens were so commonplace". But actually, should that make any difference really? The toys and other non-screen activities that we used back then are still available now. The issue is partly that we adults have in recent years become so addicted to (and reliant on) screens ourself and we're projecting that onto our kids.

I think it is sometimes not acknowledged that in previous generations it wasn't that people were just more morally upright and engaged parents - screens was a choice they didn't have to make. They probably would have made similar choices if they could have - in the nineteenth century there was a lot of concern about parents literally drugging their children to make them more docile, which says to me that there have always been people who want to minimise the requirements on them as parents!

This is an excellent point.

It also tends to get missed out that until quite recently, parents outsourced a lot of the work of entertaining even quite small children to the other children in the vicinity. I'm an elder millennial, and in the 80s even at 3 and 4 I had little friends next door and two doors down and we would play in the gardens. Go back a decade or two before then and the streets were full of kids playing, plus there was more likely to be a sibling in the home than there is now.

You’re posting this in completely the wrong place. AIBU is basically the home of perfect parenting....kids no screen time (or a strictly rationed 10 minutes), organic homemade meals every day, hours of wholesome exercise, and not a McDonald’s in sight. It’s full of smug one upmanship and people presenting a very polished version of family life.
I haven’t read all the replies, but they’re usually very predictable, so you'll more likely get a distorted view than anything resembling real life.

I’m now confused whether screen time means TV screens and/or IPad devices and laptops/mobile phones?
I think I put TV in a different category because it’s been around for 70 years. It needs to be rationed.
But though the content is faster paced now, TV often doesn’t noticeably have the same engineered addictive qualities as devices do and the constantly rolling onwards short content endlessness that’s built for watching on those devices.

I think experts on child development fail to see the bigger picture .No of course children shouldnt have unlimited time on screens .However it always is presented that children "years ago" having a wonderful childhood packed with opportunities .Reality being that many were left alone in playpens, while Mum cleaned. or older siblings expected to amuse them .Its always trotted out that screens will harm their development .Truth is that not every child will be an A grader ,and many busy parents will be able to catch an e mail or go shopping knowing babe is amused .Most parents already feel guilty without more pressure heaped on them

This has been an interesting topic for me to think about this morning, and my first reaction was "I'm glad I raised young kids in an era before screens were so commonplace". But actually, should that make any difference really? The toys and other non-screen activities that we used back then are still available now.

I think this is my point - it really is easier to not have the choice. It's a bit like when older people get self-righteous about how when they were young they didn't waste their money on iphones - my answer to that is always that, to be fair, young people today are showing similar restraint by not wasting their money on hologram technology and hoverboards.

All the research shows that willpower is a finite resource. You can blame individuals for not having endless reserves of it, but at some point you have to look at the environment that makes them constantly choose.

Yes, I think tv is different.
No parent is perfect, and everyone is under pressure of course, but it's wise to consider how much time on phones and tablets little children have.

We adopted a child who was used to watching tv, holding a tablet with cartoons playing and sometimes being given a phone. It massively impacted his behaviour.

We’ve largely undone this by having a hard ‘no phone for you’ rule, iPad has been used a handful of times when travelling (first flights, long time in a queue to get on a delayed ferry) and a change on tv rules - we allow it but aim towards older, less stimulating content. We use live tv sometimes so everything isn’t immediate and programmes don’t just move from episode to episode. And we add a clear limit.

I understand that people are busy and iPads etc are easy but small kids are so easily entertained. Pots/pans, crayons and paper, make believe, cars, dolls. My DS’s current favourite thing to do when left to his own devices is to collect random stuff around the house in a basket and pretend to scan and buy it from his pretend shop.

Similarly when out, a basic toy/colouring book can keep them busy.

Fundamentally I think the mistake we’re all making is to eradicate boredom in children. I’m sure if you think back to your childhood,
you spent part of it bored. It didn’t kill you, it made you invent silly games and dances etc, it made you talk to people and pay attention to what was happening around you.

It’s the same as a lot of other things. Some people will care about the guidance and some won’t.