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

The guidance is about unsupervised screen time though- more than an hour unsupervised for under 5s is actually quite a lot.
Ours used to only watch tv with us at that age, or sometimes have CBeebies on the tv while we were making dinner
I wouldn’t have thought to give them a tablet and leave them to it when they were that little - being busy is no excuse for that.

There's a real tension here between people saying that (1) they work full time so have to put children on screens and (2) in the past adults just used to wilfully ignore their children.

Which is it? How did adults in the past just ignore their children without screens?

It feels less than an hour per day becomes impossible once they go to school though, which they do at 4 in the uk. The board is a screen. They play games on screens. They win cartoons for good behaviour. We're still in KS1 and feels like the majority of school is hours in front of a screen of some description. Appreciate it's supervised screen time, but it's still a lot!

I find I am stricter at home because they have so much at school and childcare where I'm not in control so it. Sometimes I'd love to be able to put the tv on after school, esp when the weather is crap and everyone is knackered, but feel there's no capacity for it when I have no idea how much they've already had at school/nursery so I don't do it. My sons old school they used to watch supertato and youtube, and when parents complained to the head she said her official policy was that if children need a break/quiet time teachers should be reading a story to them or something, but we're in the middle of a recruitment and retention crises so her hands were largely tied.

Evidence on how bad it is is growing (think it was sweden who have just decided to invest in providing classrooms with less tech because it's better for development). Wonder how long it'll take for us to catch up.

As I said in my comment, mother would be at home because women didn’t often have a life outside of the home so they could give their children more time. Actually though, my Mum said they’d often just be shut outside and told to go play with the rest of the neighbourhood kids till tea was ready…

You are so right. Screens constantly is lazy parenting and it risks affecting their children reaching their full potential in life. How many of these screen children can’t sit and listen to make steady academic progress when they go to school?

Hot water and electricity don't fuck up our kids brains.

This.

My kids late teens - we didn't use screens and we don't drive so buses and trains were common events in their childhood - if they couldn't behave well they did long walk back to house on last stetch- eating out they did colouring and hospital appointmets where had to take them - well they were very well planned out so they had time to run off energy and food/drink/toys and books and attenion kept them happy to suprise of many initally hostile HCP.

I got told by fmaily member I had no idea how hard it was with an active child - I now suspect our situation more kids no support meant we were in much worse situation so I just had to plan much more to accomodate.

The argument here is not to say your parents were better than you as a parent. You have an opportunity to give your children a proper childhood, and unrestricted screen access to five and younger is not it.

It isn't in my experience either.

If only it was that simple, we have had screens for nearly 70s - the Television was the babysitter before phone screens. We have moved away from extended families and households where only one parent works outside the household - all of this makes it much more difficult for parents. Failure to acknowledge this adds to the problem.

It's certainly complicated when fathers hand kids a device by default meaning that it's a tool that is less available to mothers, who in general are already trying to multi-task and carry a greater childcare and domestic labour load. A lot of it comes back to time pressure. I agree that it's easy to say 'just don't give them devices' but it's another thing again that shows how unsupported mothers often are.

We also need to look at WHY so many parents are turning to screens and tablets.

I honestly don't think it's that complex...parents are turning to screens and tablets because it makes their lives easier because it keeps their children quiet and distracted so they can do other (yes, sometimes necessary) things. It would be the easiest thing for most of us to do but a lot make the effort not to - just like it would have been easiest for our own parents to sit us in front of videos all day, but they mostly tried not to.

Parenting young children is hard work and there is now an easily-available 'get-out' in the form of phones and tablets, which tbh are far worse than TV due to the addictive and quick-change nature of what they hold.

Yes it is a lot more effort not to use them and if a child is used to them then there will be a period of difficult 'withdrawal' which will be hard on both child and parent, but honestly it's possible to raise children without them.

OP is really showing how addicted today's parents have become to screens, and how much they rely on them to keep their kids quiet and happy. It's very depressing to think that they are raising their children to be completely unable to play by themselves, keep themselves amused and stimulated just using their own imagination. What preparation is that for life?

Its the parents who are the screen addicts and their children will suffer the most.

Definitely the case for many families. But to play devils advocate there are also loads of examples of families with two working parents going back generations. Dual-earner families became the dominant family model in the United States starting in the 1970s. So, for the majority of millennial parents having a working mother was perfectly normal. Certainly was for me, and my mum.

Can go back even further if you wanted to, according to this article https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/womens_work_01.shtml

"female employment in the 1850s, 60s and 70s appears to have been higher than any recorded again until after World War II. Family budget evidence suggests that around 30-40 per cent of women from working class families contributed significantly to household incomes in the mid-Victorian years. This might have been even higher during the industrial revolution decades, before the rise of State and trade union policies regulating female labour and promoting the male breadwinner ideal."

Goes onto say many of them were factory workers, so would have been outside the home. I think this perhaps coincides when school became mandatory?

It's terrible! I started looking at MN when I was on bed rest and now click on "notifications" or trending between tasks when working, mostly because the pressure of needing to keep on top of incoming emails means I can never just give myself fully to to the task, so I am in and out anyway.

I am trying to stop, as I am noticing the amount of time I can focus on the main tasks is lessening. It might also be my age, but my concentration was always a strong point, and now I feel I am definitely not as good at it and the screen with all its distractions is definitely apart of that.

Yes adding to their issues.

Life is no more stressed now than in our parents generation, we have all these labour saving devices, instant central heating, most have far more money in real terms, despite recent COL expenses.
I look at the stress my own mum had with 3 kids, people don't know how lucky they are "Got no money, don't want a job? 2 kids?, here you go, have £1500+ a month in UC to live on" more if your kids have SENDs.

Kids need time, time to themselves, time to get bored, time for play, time with their parents and others.

I was a single parent, working FT, nursery - adults who would walk her outside, points at clouds, playing in puddles, at home ripping up paper/drawing whilst i cooked, sat on work surface as i cooked eating baby tom's (yes she did once fall off)
No smart phone until Comp school.

My DD rarely had over sb hours screen time at that age and I was single teenage mother who was working and studying in the evenings.

Of course screens are more stimulating now - they used to be quite basic and kids shows cut off after a certain time but now they’re full of bright colours and loud sounds and of course there are games and kids shows always available.

But I would still say that most kids would want to play with toys rather than a screen.
They just end up choosing a screen as it’s there and it’s faster to stimulate them.

If you simply take the screens away/turn them off then they’ll go and play with their toys.

We used to do painting, colouring, baking, messy play etc etc - yes these all take more parental input but you shouldn’t have kids if you’re not willing to do this.

100% agree. I find it much easier to go cold turkey can to apply limits. For example when term ends at Christmas I tend to turn my phone off and I see how long I can last. I switch to an old dumb phone so people can still call me, but no apps or web access or anything else. My record is the end of Jan, however that was before school and a child with a January birthday. Find now I have to turn it on earlier to organise his party and get notifications from all the school related apps. Bleugh.

You don’t need to take it literally OP. Just do what works for you. What’s more important is having a balance. We had CBeebies on all day long but we also went out to play, to baby groups, long walks and did loads of arts and crafts.

I invested a lot of time helping DS to play alone. I was also careful with the toys we bought - multipurpose sets like Duplo, wooden train tracks, and later Kapla bricks, Playmobil and Gravitrax.

As a family we play board games and spend time outside. He also does sport.

We also introduced audio books early on.

Although his TV time has crept right up, at 9 he still doesn‘t own or want a tablet or a console.Instead, he‘ll go to his room, switch on an audio book and play.

Yep. At least I’m ok around my dc- unlike dh. Just another thing for us to argue about now.

Apparently, Generation Zed is the only generation that is not smarter than the preceding generation (Millennials). Growing up with screens is causing real damage.

Tbh mine were only really interested in screens and tablets once they started going to school and realised other kids have them. DD in particular will have a weekly moan about how I’m evil for not giving her a tablet and literally every one else has one. I remeber saying the same to my mum about a TV and she used to say okay we will sell all your toys and buy a TV, which shut me up pretty quickly.

100%, I certainly wouldn't say parents in previous generation focused and played a lot more with children - I definitely play with my child more than my mum played with me - but it's more that the alternative when the majority of us were young was not screens, which are very addictive and isolating, but some other form of imaginative play or interaction with the world/others.

Being sent out to play with other children and experiencing the world is 1000 times better than being sat absorbed in a screen. Even for adults, we are better off in the company of others rather than sat at home on our phones.

But having women at home hasn't happened for a long time. In the 1990s 65% of mothers worked - that's only 10% fewer than today, which is 75%.

I have 3 kids my eldest nearly 19 my youngest 14. when they were under 5 I didn't have a smart phone or tablets at home, they watched a bit of children's tv in the morning and before bed and that was it. People seem to be going way back when they are talking about no screens, realistically we are talking about as recent as 2010 when most mums did work outside the home including me. My kids just played when I was busy with other stuff. The access to smart phones, streaming and tablets in every household is only in the past 15 years or so. Majority of parents of older teens did not use them as entertainment for their kids as much as parents do now so I have no idea why parents of u5s now seem to think it is impossible not to use screens.