To think we should spend less time policing 16/17 year old social media use and more time worrying about young children spending their childhood on iPads?

[Frenchspainiard]

Government has apparently announced a social media curfew on 16 and 17 year olds, I’m unsure how this will be policed but it seems insane to me. They can join the military, they have jobs etc. I personally had a child and moved out at 16.

The real issue from what I see is why do we allow people to buy tablets for young children especially toddlers who then become inactive asocial zombies?

It’s not always going to be realistic to give a toddler undivided attention from a parent.

Maybe if you have a full time housekeeper and cleaner and you have only one child, but even then you’re going to need to focus on other things occasionally.

I think there is a middle ground between ‘phones at Disneyland’ and ‘undivided attention from a parent.’

i think some people got very lucky with very compliant toddlers on here. i was very much like that. my parents said you could just put me somewhere and i was happy just sitting there. my ds is not

Are you serious?

Tbh, it depends on the child and also the setting.

We went on a holiday to the Lake District when ds was twenty months. On the way home we got stuck in the most horrendous traffic jam on the m6 I have ever known. We were stuck for hours on end. It should have been a nightmare as ds was due a nap but wouldn’t nap in a stationary car but he was weirdly fine, just sat there and played with some toys and ate some food. Eventually he came and sat in the front with me (we weren’t moving) and pointed out the colours of the cars.

I don’t think DD would have been as patient but then she far calmer in other settings and contexts.

Generally though as much as I don’t like tablets and phones I do think people forget very quickly that toddlers are a law unto themselves. It’s far easier to bring toys and books and games for a five year old than a two year old and I am saying that as a mother to both!

Oh have some critical thought. It must be ok because they did it in the 80s/90s is not an argument 🙄

Wouldn't have been possible without the iPad....lol. Yes arts and crafts came after technology 🤣🙄🙄

As someone who grew up without SM or rampant internet use, who is happily addicted to her smartphone, I think the source of the issue that really needs looking at is the design of the internet to be addictive.

I imagine that in the future, features such as reactions, notifications and infinite scrolling will be seen as detrimental to our health as smoking or alcohol.

LOTS of lazy parents on this thread it seems.

So is it ‘any parent who has turned the TV on’ = lazy parent?

Because if that’s the definition then yep I’m lazy, too right I am.

If screens didn’t exist, what would you do?
In the past children would’ve entertained themselves more.

Parenting has adapted to treat screens as digital pacifiers!!!

Are you seriously comparing entertaining a young child with a book and crayons to shoving a screen into their hands with mindless content and drivel????

Need to get parents off their phones first

Both

I don’t know, we’d have to go back to what, 1950 something maybe? I certainly remember having many a My Little Pony or Care Bears video stuck on for me (1980s, if that wasn’t patently obvious!)

I think I-pads are different to the cartoons and films we had in the 90s (and other eras)- a lot of children don’t even have the concentration to watch a full length film or even a TV series.

It’s scary how addictive phones/tablets and scrolling can be though. I am pretty addicted to the my phone and my own concentration span has reduced massively thanks to reels and shorts, and I was brought up before phones/iPads so had a very low screen childhood. I’ve seen plenty of older teenagers who have had a very strict upbringing screens-wise become really addicted once older with more freedom. Not sure what the answer is there.

We have all this technology (washing machines, tumble dryers, dish washers, hoovers etc) housework has never been easier. How did a mother manage before these white goods were invented? The difference is mothers before, got on with the daily chores with their toddler in tow. She wasn’t being distracted by social media!!!

And I do think cries to the past are largely meaningless ‘what would you have done when …’

Parenting was very different at one point. I am quite hard pushed to think of exactly when it became far more child centric and I suspect that’s because it’s been very gradual.

The ‘good to be bored’ thing combined with a much more free range childhood led to videos like and (we watched that in school when I was five; I was petrified for weeks) and

I don’t want to over egg the pudding as it were but you get the idea. I’m actually not commenting on whether it was a positive or a negative. Certainly, not as many children (as in, under eleven) drown or are abducted by strangers or are killed on railway lines now, but there are other dangers and there are other risks - through the internet of course. But whether it’s good or bad - it’s pointless. That age has gone; you may as well lament the loss of the typewriter or the video tape or the cassette player. It’s just not something that exists anymore. And in any event, how many toddlers are going to happily play for hours unsupervised? So what did people do in the past? Harsher discipline for one thing, bigger families for another. Those things combined probably kept wayward two year olds in check. Or not. This is the issue; I don’t remember being two - does anyone?!

Yeah, I am sure before 2005, toddlers skipped happily alongside Mummy, playing as she scrubbed the kitchen down.

Maybe in a Shirley Hughes book but in the real world, no, they did not! Toddlers have always been demanding, wilful and largely a law unto themselves.

BUT what’s changed? Housework, shopping and washing were arduous tasks. They took hours to complete. These mothers had small children and had to manage. Children also had a lot less toys but had better imaginations.

From what I remember of my 90s childhood we had a lot more freedom, and that saying definitely applied that we went along with/adapted to what our parents were doing rather than the other way round.

And my take is this.

I do think phones and tablets are very damaging indeed. It forces the child to look very closely at a screen and it sort of blocks the outside world out. That being said, I don’t think occasionally matters in the slightest. My worry from a societal point of view is it’s become the default for some whenever a child has to wait for even a short period. That’s not good.

However, TV is different. There’s some stuff on TV that’s benign and some that’s actually valuable. Characters are really important for children in the 2-6 sort of bracket. My son went to school with a Bluey bottle with a Spidey sunhat on 🤷‍♀️ DD went to preschool clutching her Gabbys Dollhouse water bottle. (I am not suggesting any of the above are valuable by the way, although I know there’s a bit of a cult following with Bluey.) Numberblocks is bloody brilliant as is Octonaughts. Problem is again a lot of toddlers just aren’t into those sorts of programmes. They are more for four plus and by age four they usually can manage a sticker book or to colour on their own and be entertained by it for longer than two minutes .

It’s the toddler age. It’s hard. I’m in my last week of parenting a two year old; I can’t wait to hang up my toddler mum badge 😂

What’s changed is that children used to get a bloody big smack if they kept pestering and disturbing mum. It was also perfectly acceptable to give your toddler to older children to look after.

If we are looking to a rosy age of childhood I don’t know that one exists, quite frankly.

Exactly!!! Children went along with what their parents wanted to do. I remember going to a cider museum when I was very young. It was very boring (for me) but my parents wanted to go.

A fundamental difference is that children in the past spent significantly more time with their mothers than nowadays. Historically, children typically spent their pre-school years entirely at home with family and engaged in unstructured, self-directed play.

i imagine it was a lot more common that if a child was throwing a tantrum or fussing at a young to just leave them to it something that is not really done these days i suppose