5 ms·

I don't quite understand where people are finding the time to let their kids watch over 1 hour of TV (much less read to them) each day. My wife and I work a st

I don't quite understand where people are finding the time to let their kids watch over 1 hour of TV (much less read to them) each day. My wife and I work a standard 8 hour day. Kids wake up at 700. We leave for daycare/work by 800. Arrive at work by 9. Work until 6pm. Pick up kids. Get home by 7pm. Prepare and eat dinner. Bedtime routine starts at 8pm. This leaves zero hours of dedicated kid time during the work week.

logical_proof 7y ago
There are quite a few stay at hone parents. Also what do you think is happening at most day cares? There is craft time for sure and recess but also at the understaffed places that are lower cost a lot of movie time.
- riffraff 7y ago
  may I ask what do you mean with day care, and where do you live? In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Our daycare (Montessori school for whatever that's worth) never showed videos, ever. Our very-good-for-our-city and excellent-for-our-state primary school, however, shows them quite a few movies (every indoor recess, for one thing, which... WTF), and puts the kids (yes, even kindergarteners) on the iPad a ton. Our first kid's reading ability actually dropped significantly for a while after the transition, and I largely blame all the "reading practice" in an iPad app that would read the book to the kids at the press of a button. Yeah, very, very few kindergarteners, even ones who are advanced readers, will choose to read over being read to, and being read books that are already under their current reading level (which is another topic) is doing approximately nothing to improve their reading ability. They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK. It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
polishdude20 7y ago
I'm not the one to get between a man and his daily routine especially when it comes to family so please take this as a curious question. How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  Depends on the age of the kids, but I would go with pretty bad. Daycare was mentioned which suggests preschool. Kids of that age need 10-12 hours of sleep (it really depends on the child). Even starting the bedtime routine as late as 8pm sounds too late to me.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Sleep is incredibly important for kids and its also extremely hard to perturb - if we miss our kids bedtime by an hour he is a wreck.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  They’re supposed to sleep 12ish hours, give or take, until a later age than you’d think. Lots of people do put their kids down later and get them up just as early but it’s not clearly the better choice.
- zrail 7y ago
  Depends on the kid but my sample size of two says very bad. If they don’t get at least 12 hours they’re a mess the next day and it starts a horrible cycle of not enough rest leading to it being hard to sleep.
- syedkarim 7y ago
  My data should not be considered normal. I have a six year-old who goes to sleep at around 10pm and wakes up at 7:30am. Sometimes later than 10pm. She's been doing this for at least a year. When younger, she wasn't a napper. Extreme attitude if she goes to bed after 11pm, but bed time between 9pm-10pm yields a fairly consistent mood for the day. If left in a dark room by herself at 8pm, she'll be awake for at least an hour. Now we just let herself read herself to sleep. The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later. The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.
adamredwoods 7y ago
I don't understand this comment. Why do you expect us to have the same schedules and lifestyle?
- tw1010 7y ago
  People generally seem to have difficulty thinking about the diversity of types of lives on a population-level scale.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lonelappde 7y ago
There's the 2hr commute that some people avoid and can use for TV. There's all the weekend time. There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch. There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour. There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.
magicalhippo 7y ago
Depending on where your daycare is, you could fit in half an hour of commute to and from, where the kid could watch something on the mobile phone... Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad. At least that's what happens with some kids I know.
vnnkov 7y ago
I do almost everything like you said. But my kid wakes up at 700, and we could play or read chapter from a book for 30 minutes when my wife working on breakfast. When i came back from work at 1900 i'll either play with wife/kid in the yard, or i could read books/draw/play with kid, while my wife working on dinner, or we switch here (i'm cooking, she playing). And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.
lr4444lr 7y ago
A 6 PM pickup is pretty late. Mine wake up between 5:30 - 6:00 typically, and the screen time eases the separation from parents when the babysitter arrives. (Yes, we tested to see if they were faking it to get screen time.) wife takes over again at around 4 PM, and bed time is at 7, which leaves about an hour for wife to get stuff done. She gets up at 5AM leaves the house by 6AM, so asking her to wait until 7:30 to start prepping for the next day would not only be impractical as relates to her having dinner and getting to bed, but would be too mentally exhausting to start doing evening work, leaving her no time at all to mentally unwind.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I remember when I first tried to schedule my days after we became a family of 3, thinking "A bit of organizing is going to sort this madness right out!". Cue my dismay when I realized that no, I'm simply 1.5 hours short each day of getting everything done and sleeping 8 hours. It did get better later on as the kid grew up.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Can confirm, kid three is where it all goes to hell and there's not much you can do about it. I hear the difficulty levels off after that but damned if I plan to find out. No way.
  - lr4444lr 7y ago
    The hope that it improves is the only thing keeping me sane, hah!

logical_proof 7y ago

There are quite a few stay at hone parents. Also what do you think is happening at most day cares? There is craft time for sure and recess but also at the understaffed places that are lower cost a lot of movie time.

riffraff 7y ago
may I ask what do you mean with day care, and where do you live? In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Our daycare (Montessori school for whatever that's worth) never showed videos, ever. Our very-good-for-our-city and excellent-for-our-state primary school, however, shows them quite a few movies (every indoor recess, for one thing, which... WTF), and puts the kids (yes, even kindergarteners) on the iPad a ton. Our first kid's reading ability actually dropped significantly for a while after the transition, and I largely blame all the "reading practice" in an iPad app that would read the book to the kids at the press of a button. Yeah, very, very few kindergarteners, even ones who are advanced readers, will choose to read over being read to, and being read books that are already under their current reading level (which is another topic) is doing approximately nothing to improve their reading ability. They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK. It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

polishdude20 7y ago

I'm not the one to get between a man and his daily routine especially when it comes to family so please take this as a curious question. How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?

goodcanadian 7y ago
Depends on the age of the kids, but I would go with pretty bad. Daycare was mentioned which suggests preschool. Kids of that age need 10-12 hours of sleep (it really depends on the child). Even starting the bedtime routine as late as 8pm sounds too late to me.
vincent-toups 7y ago
Sleep is incredibly important for kids and its also extremely hard to perturb - if we miss our kids bedtime by an hour he is a wreck.
karatestomp 7y ago
They’re supposed to sleep 12ish hours, give or take, until a later age than you’d think. Lots of people do put their kids down later and get them up just as early but it’s not clearly the better choice.
zrail 7y ago
Depends on the kid but my sample size of two says very bad. If they don’t get at least 12 hours they’re a mess the next day and it starts a horrible cycle of not enough rest leading to it being hard to sleep.
syedkarim 7y ago
My data should not be considered normal. I have a six year-old who goes to sleep at around 10pm and wakes up at 7:30am. Sometimes later than 10pm. She's been doing this for at least a year. When younger, she wasn't a napper. Extreme attitude if she goes to bed after 11pm, but bed time between 9pm-10pm yields a fairly consistent mood for the day. If left in a dark room by herself at 8pm, she'll be awake for at least an hour. Now we just let herself read herself to sleep. The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later. The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.

adamredwoods 7y ago

I don't understand this comment. Why do you expect us to have the same schedules and lifestyle?

tw1010 7y ago
People generally seem to have difficulty thinking about the diversity of types of lives on a population-level scale.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

lonelappde 7y ago

There's the 2hr commute that some people avoid and can use for TV. There's all the weekend time. There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch. There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour. There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.

magicalhippo 7y ago

Depending on where your daycare is, you could fit in half an hour of commute to and from, where the kid could watch something on the mobile phone... Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad. At least that's what happens with some kids I know.

vnnkov 7y ago

I do almost everything like you said. But my kid wakes up at 700, and we could play or read chapter from a book for 30 minutes when my wife working on breakfast. When i came back from work at 1900 i'll either play with wife/kid in the yard, or i could read books/draw/play with kid, while my wife working on dinner, or we switch here (i'm cooking, she playing). And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.

lr4444lr 7y ago

A 6 PM pickup is pretty late. Mine wake up between 5:30 - 6:00 typically, and the screen time eases the separation from parents when the babysitter arrives. (Yes, we tested to see if they were faking it to get screen time.) wife takes over again at around 4 PM, and bed time is at 7, which leaves about an hour for wife to get stuff done. She gets up at 5AM leaves the house by 6AM, so asking her to wait until 7:30 to start prepping for the next day would not only be impractical as relates to her having dinner and getting to bed, but would be too mentally exhausting to start doing evening work, leaving her no time at all to mentally unwind.

rebuilder 7y ago
I remember when I first tried to schedule my days after we became a family of 3, thinking "A bit of organizing is going to sort this madness right out!". Cue my dismay when I realized that no, I'm simply 1.5 hours short each day of getting everything done and sleeping 8 hours. It did get better later on as the kid grew up.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Can confirm, kid three is where it all goes to hell and there's not much you can do about it. I hear the difficulty levels off after that but damned if I plan to find out. No way.
- lr4444lr 7y ago
  The hope that it improves is the only thing keeping me sane, hah!