Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers (oligarchwatch.substack.com)

The payoff of consistency is worth it. It buys you a sustainable pattern, which is golden.

but thing is, it was not a whole PC. it was just the keyboard...

i played with that keyboard for 1 year before my family could afford to buy the rest of the PC.

in that year i learned the position of every key and would show off to friends how i can find any key, with my eyes closed.

A pre-millennial computing experience would have the benefit of not having that sort of bullshit. For the patience-building experience it could be real floppies, but putting the games in an emulator is also an option. I guess Windows 11's "Install Copilot Edge OneDrive 365? [Yes/Maybe later]" popups means you'll have to go Linux...

It was easier with the older one as phones and tablets were not as pervasive so I can understand it has become harder to do.

I also think another thing that benefitted them greatly was that we did not have a TV ( https://pietersz.co.uk/2008/05/i-have-no-tv/ )

I also thing another issue is that parents are also addicted to devices so pay less attention to children. its not the only issue, but it makes it worse. It was epitomised for me by a woman who, when her son refused to put down his tablet on a train trip, took a photo of him on it and posted it to FB for advice.

The Amazon product is fine. It's really a question of how often they use it, and how early. I agree that any screens before 2 risks screwing up a human's idea of what's real.

Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.

Probably not, but it just adds another measure of normalization for something all the evidence suggests is insidiously harmful to the development of a young brain.

Mine were never exposed to tablets and consumption based technology until they went to university when they were given an iPad and apple pencil. One science grad and one still studying at top tier universities, no cognitive issues or addiction. Their peers, not so much as since the advent of the iPad they were given an unrestricted device to stare at.

So I'm allowed to complain, and then some :). Screens are horrible especially when they come attached to a device made to be addictive, like an Amazon tablet.

But kids don't raise themselves no matter how "easy" they are. Parents have to make unpopular decisions that the kids will benefit from and maybe even understand when they're older. Those decisions suck the life out of you because the kid "hates" you for it, and you have to fill the void with something else that takes more parental effort. Sometimes maybe it's impossible to avoid "the screen" because of some special family situation. But at "3+" these are exceptional situations, don't treat them like the baseline.

The consequences of addiction from such a young age to screens (or sugar, junk food and every other mistake parents make to make their own lives easier in the moment) are documented and lifelong. As a parent you won't escape them, you'll live them through your child's life. Might as well take the hit for them now, even if it costs you. It doesn't get easier anyway, a pre-teen with no phone surrounded by friends who have one is no joke.

We've had an absolutely-zero-screens policy for our almost-3-year-old (and will have the same for his baby sister) and I think it's made things much easier than if he had limited access. It's simply Not An Option, so we as parents and he as a child manage to find other interesting things to do. Currently he's really into listening to music on a 35-year-old Fisher Price cassette player, scooting a toy garbage truck around, and thumbing through books.

Plane rides are difficult (and he's had many) but so far we have gotten through them with patience, lots of snacks, and a new toy or two.

Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.

I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!

It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)

https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox

As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.

As one of them, no, not really.

I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.

And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.

Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).

Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.

Some of them think its safe, others think the risk is overblown, and a lot just don't want to deal with their kid having a shit fit.

In the UK, unless you are adopting a kid with needs, you will not get any parenting training. so you're on your own on how to deal with children. TV was safe when I was a kid, and younger parents who grew up with digital TV also had safe watching, why would youtube kids be any different?

With my kids (and yes this is a boast, I'm middle class, this is how we assert dominance) I was lucky enough to be able to enforce time limits of TV/netflix etc. They also aren't allowed youtube on their own, so never got onto the conversion ladder from crap to exploitative crap.

crucially they don't have tablets/phones whilst bored. TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.

Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.

(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)

Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.

I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.

Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).

Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.

Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..

My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.

If you take these into consideration then it makes sense why one would make such choice. Whether they are aware of building an evil device is irrelevant at this point -- they're making best choice for themselves and their family. Employers love employees who follows orders so they'll craft environment where only those kinds of employees would survive.

IMO this isn't really the problem between employers and employees. They are doing what the system incentivizes them. It's the regulator's role to govern to protect individuals.

The irony is U.S. allows lobbying and SuperPAC which essentially makes the system in favor of those with money.

People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.

Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.

Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.

Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.

TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.

Video/computer games are always played together.

Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.

I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.

(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.

It's all right here. Just add kid.

Maybe it's making the best of bad parents

IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS

The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.

You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.

I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.

Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.

I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.

And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.

So yes it's a great idea.