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This same topic came up on HN 3 years ago, and I took some shit for saying that I thought 2-year-olds shouldn't be playing with iPads[1] without having any kids

• facepalm 11y ago
  Does that mean you have tried giving your kids an iPad and found that it has detrimental effect? Or how else has having kids given you more insights into the issue?
  • nothrabannosir 11y ago
    You're right, good question. Just the mere having of kids doesn't make you an expert. But in this case, the beauty (or ugly) is not that OP can now say this without backing it up; it's that when you don't have kids, the roles are reversed. You don't have children? You don't know what you're talking about. You do? Now suddenly we want proof and all that jazz. He put his money where his mouth was, good on him. If he wasn't entitled to an opinion for not having kids at first, then, now that he has them, I say let the man have his hour.
    • facepalm 11y ago
      I don't exactly understand your argument, to be honest. Surely the majority of people who care about that kind of rules are parents anyway? If parents would agree that kids shouldn't have iPads, then no legislation would be necessary? So ultimately it is parents opinion vs parents opinion... He is completely entitled to his opinion, of course. I just don't see how merely having kids gives you any insights on the impact of iPads on kids, unless you give them an iPad.
      • yawz 11y ago
        > So ultimately it is parents opinion vs parents opinion... I'd argue that, while parents controlling their young kids' exposure to electronics are doing it deliberately, some (most?) of the parents giving their young kids access to electronics simply can't be bothered to have an opinion.
  • yawz 11y ago
    Nobody sane would experiment on their kids that way so I assume it's a rhetorical question. iPads and TVs are results of lazy parenting, especially at early ages. Kids should develop playing with parents, siblings, friends and on their own. At a later stage, banning is probably bad but I believe exposure to electronics and their content should be controlled by parents. When you start to have kids, you notice your social circle is full of other parents (on the one hand your friends are around the same age so they're having kids and on the other hand you tend to be with people having kids - usually the same age). You can clearly see the differences in kids getting (uncontrolled) exposure to electronics at various ages and their reaction to being deprived of them etc. So you certainly develop some awareness and some idea about their effects.
    • facepalm 11y ago
      There is also a point where kids are exhausted from playing or from too much human interaction. Many HN users are probably introverts, they might understand. When my kid watches certain TV shows or uses certain apps, he can be extremely focused and extremely happy. I myself also have some fond memories of my favorite TV shows as a kid. There are some TV shows that explain things very well. Of course we do not let him use these things indefinitely, and he doesn't even watch normal TV where you could do mindless "zapping" between channels. Maybe if studies find children who are allowed to do worth computers whatever they want for an unlimited time, they also find parents who generally don't care at all. So that might be the root issue, and excessive iPad use might just be a symptom.
    • golergka 11y ago
      > Kids should develop playing with parents, siblings, friends and on their own. I don't see how these statement is opposed to kids using iPads.
    • yawz 11y ago
      I certainly agree that it also depends on the children. However, let's not forget that the original post is about 0-to-2-year-olds. I've a 4 year old and we control his exposure to TV and tablets. I'm against banning it for many reasons but controlling the amount of exposure and the content seems important.
  • veidr 11y ago
    Yes, basically I do mean that. It's not exactly that I gave him an iPad as an experiment, but the times he somehow got an iPad I 'experimented' with not taking it away. Eventually, I felt like I should take it away, though. (And I did.) The reasons basically boiled down -- as much of being a parent does -- to gut feeling. The way he played with most iPad apps didn't seem healthy. He plays with blocks, builds a tower, it falls down... sometimes he is upset about that, sometimes he laughs. But his experiments with blocks and trains somehow lacked this obsessive quality. I mentioned it in my reply to jasonkester elsewhere in this thread, but I felt like he was a kitten and the iPad was a laser pointer. He couldn't/wouldn't stop himself from using it, even when it was obvious that it had passed the point of being fun and became this frustrating, negative experience. At such a young age, under two, the brain really is working on the basics. Weight. Gravity. Hard. Soft. Big. Small. Etc. As he has grown, some of the things he can do with the iPad are getting pretty neat (painting, music, etc) and he does get a little bit of (supervised) iPad time now. It's hard to say at this stage, but I wouldn't be surprised if we let him do iPad for an hour a day (or an hour or two every few days) by the time he is say, four. It depends on what we see him doing with it, and how observing that makes us feel as parents. I'm just speaking from my experience here, because I am not an expert on brain development and things like that. But I do really think there is a qualitative difference between e.g., physical wooden blocks and blocks on a screen. In general, younger than two just seems self-evidently too young.
• retube 11y ago
  Yup couldn't agree more. For young children iPads, TV etc destroys development of imagination and concentration, and by extension creativity, resourcefulness etc. Plus the ability to actually cope with being bored is a vital life skill.
• jasonkester 11y ago
  You never explain why you're denying your kids an iPad. Is it because you think you won't be able to stop them using it 24/7? Is it because you don't think there are good apps for kids? You might want to try. There's something pretty cool about watching your 2 year old doing addition on a screen so that he can make his cartoon fish eat each other. Moderation is not really an issue. You're bigger than them, and you have shelves they can't reach. Getting too attached to the iPad gets it taken away. You're the adult so you get to win. Most of the day, you'll find my kids out in the yard digging up the flowers and trying to injure one another. But there's good stuff to be had on an iPad these days. It's not something you want to toss out because you're scared.
  • veidr 11y ago
    Yeah, good point. It annoys me any time this topic comes up (which is fairly often in my life, since I recently had kids) that I don't have a better set of references to back me up. It was decades ago that I studied journalism in college, and I can't find links to a lot of what I learned, including the deleterious influence of television on human development (especially children). Today, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends[1], "Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2." We have pediatric doctors like Dr. Dimitri Christakis doing interesting research to help demonstrate the harms[2]. But I don't have much time to really follow it these days (aforementioned young kids and all...). At the same time, when I hear "show me the evidence! there's no proof TV is harmful to 2-year olds!" it really bugs me. (Not implying that's what you are saying, it's jut something I hear a lot.) It's like one of those "there's no proof dogs have emotions!" things. It's obvious when you watch little kids with TV and heavy and mostly-unrestricted iPad/Nintendo. It's obvious that is not how you should do it (very much). I can't prove it, but I am certainly going to act on that conclusion with my own kids. So, to answer your question, the reason I deny my 2-year-old TV and unsupervised iPad use is because I have observed it in him, and observed it in his peers, and it's just my best judgement that it is better off waiting until later. Example 1: One morning I came downstairs and he was watching TV. He had turned it on by himself; it was an unusual morning in that my wife and I both slept in. He was just sitting there, in a kind of stupor, staring motionless at the TV with a kind of slack jawed empty expression (like my own, probably, when I drink beer and watch True Detective after everybody is in bed). I walked in and he didn't even respond. (The show was roughly the Japanese equivalent of Sesame Street.) I cleared my throat. No response. I grabbed the remote, and jokingly pointed it him from behind (the joke was for my wife, who had just walked in also). With the click! of the TV going off, my son immediately stood up, looked around, and busied himself with his Brio train set (which is what he usually did in the morning at that age (right around 2)). It appeared as if I had used the remote to turn him on. Example 2: We experimented with letting him have limited access to Mom's iPhone, especially she started nursing our second child. For the usual reason -- it made him a lot easier to deal with while Mom did an unrelated but important task. He did these little 'educational' games where you build a train track and then the trains run on it, and you have to build around obstacles, etc. But we soon noticed that when we would take the iPhone back, he would have a very violent negative reaction -- really unlike him, we felt. All kids have tantrums and taking away a toy is always a risk of creating a situation, but we both felt that his behavior seemed unhealthy in some way; to exaggerate a little, it seemed like he was addicted to the little game. In that same vein, when we let him do it for as long as he liked, he would keep doing it over and over until he worked himself into a similar state. E.g., after an hour of doing it he would get so frustrated by the train track building not going well that he would have a similar tantrum of screaming and being very upset. He had this same kind of frustration with the real laws of the physical world, too -- like the wooden block too big for the hole he was trying to fit it in -- but those moments seemed much more short-lived than the iPhone-related ones. (And it wasn't just games -- interacting with the OS itself (dragging apps around, opening things to see what they did) seemed fascinating to him, but also seemed like a laser-pointer-and-kitten thing where he would get too worked up and couldn't stop himself.) Example 3: My friends who disagree with me about this and let their 3-year olds watch TV hours every day have more annoying and obnoxious kids than those who don't. ;-) Bad impulse control, lower ability to accept and move on when things don't go their way, etc. Also, I should clarify that we don't blanket ban TV and iPad. It's not an absolute, just a general rule. With iPad especially, there's a whole lot of potential good stuff there, too. We let him use the iPad when we are supervising, or just sitting with him if he is in one of the painting or music apps. He's pretty awesome at Garage Band, and incredible using EasyBeats. He does a lot of painting in Paper and apps like that. And although he is not allowed to, he is a small and clever homo sapiens and therefore predictably manages to sneak a substantial amount of screen time, whenever somebody leaves an table or phone around with an easily-guessed password. With TV, we watch NHK news around him -- he doesn't tune in to it. We had to stop watching the news channels with commercials though; as soon as one would come on, you could see him stop building his Duplo block tower and swivel his head to focus on the TV. I do let him sit down and watch UFC fights with me, though -- that is the hypocrisy that proves the earnestness of my intentions. [1]: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/media-and-children.aspx https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-ini... [2]: http://www.medicaldaily.com/interview-dr-dimitri-christakis-explains-why-television-bad-babies-brains-241578 http://www.medicaldaily.com/interview-dr-dimitri-christakis-...
• interpol_p 11y ago
  My toddler grew up using an iPad. He is also outdoors playing most of the day (for 5 or 6 hours). Usually he plays with the iPad for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, as well as 30 minutes of Netflix. He also spends time drawing, singing, painting, or reading stories. I don't feel like there is anything wrong with this. The iPad is just another activity.
• staunch 11y ago
  > ...that it makes them easier to deal with mean it's an appropriate thing to do. Declaring something inappropriate is just a way of saying you don't like it.
• vijayr 11y ago
  I've a colleague who said "I was raised by television". Growing up, I didn't have TV until 9th grade, so I couldn't understand. Then I watched kids of my friends and family - one of the easiest ways to make them quiet (so the parents can get their work done) is to put them in front of a TV. It is sad but true