Most of those iPad babies you're seeing are probably sick of that fucking tablet too.
A lot of parents are very bad at parenting and don't like their children. They don't want to talk to them, be around them or do anything with them. You know, the things kids need and will remember the most once they're grown.
So they train them from an early age that they should always be distracting themselves with something as to not be in the way or annoying the adults.
For me it was books and TV when I was little, and computers later on. That's all I did because it was all I could do without getting yelled at, and it was the closest to human interaction I could get most of the time.
Everyone loves to make fun of & complain about iPad kids but nobody thinks about the struggle of navigating life as an adult when you were forced to spend your entire childhood keeping yourself distracted so your parents didn't have to acknowledge your existence.
This was reposted to YouTube shorts and I would like to point out some comments in the video
Please give your children some damn playdoh and crayons and oversized bits of craft paper to color on. They need something more concrete and tactile than smooth glass.
Maybe they do need something tactile, but you've missed the point of the post. It's not the Ipad itself that's bad, it's the fact that the children are being neglected. You could hand a kid a whole library of books, several kilograms of play dough, a mountain of crayons, and all the craft paper in the world. But, if you don't spend time with them and you simply expect them to use those things to keep themselves busy so you don't have to deal with them, you're still neglecting the kid, and they're gonna end up with the same issues.
IMPORTANT
Running across this post almost immediately after reading the article about how some parents are letting fucking ChatGPT tell their kids bedtime stories now feels serendipitous in a way.
#so this is actually what i wrote my final thesis about for my bachelors in psychology #i ran an exeriment on kids below 5 that measured their social cognition levels (eg. understanding others emotions and needs etc) #and i also asked the parents about their kids screentime habits #and there was obviously a negative correlation between the two - so more screentime meant lower social cognition on average #BUT there were quite a few outliers with high amounts of screentime but also a higher level of social congition #and the explanation for that is that for these children screentime isn't there INSTEAD of interacting with the parents #screentime only affects the child negatively if parents use it as a distraction for the kids instead of interacting with them #so if a child watches some cartoon then the best a parent can do is sit with them and watch with them and talk about it with them #and then (limited) screentime can actually be beneficial for the development of other cognitive skills #so there is a large amount of scientific research out there that proves what ppl said in this post
That's really it. You'd probably have gotten similar results 30 years ago if you studied kids who are left to read books by themselves alone in their room for multiple hours a day vs kids whose parents read with them, or at least in the same room and talk to them about what they're reading. Because the former are most definitely also being neglected in other ways.
It's not as much about the tablets, it's about the fact that these children aren't being played with and talked to enough. Parents are using them as a get out of parenting tool instead of a parenting tool.
