#ipad babies

Parents have been showing kids movies and shows for decades at this point.

The problem with parents now is that they're not even putting on anything even resembling educational entertainment, they're literally just loading up Youtube and letting their kid watch endless, endless nonsense built around clickbait and marketing which very very quickly goes from

"random but relatively harmless cartoon"

and then abruptly swerves into

"horrifying AI generated content full of things extremely inappropriate for children but presented in a cute cartoony way so the inattentive parents don't even notice what kind of fucked up shit their toddler is absorbing"

If you're going to hand your toddler a tablet to play with, you should, at minimum, have it disconnected from the Internet, and pre-load it with offline shows, books and music they can listen to according to whatever age they are.

Have a drawing app for them to color with, and get a bunch of cheap digital styluses to keep in your purse so they can practice holding a drawing/writing implement instead of just their finger on a screen.

Put a bunch of coloring book pages on the tablet that they can color in as many times as they want in a free drawing app.

Play a game where they try to draw the things they see, or practice their letters as you're grocery shopping to write out their favorite foods.

Have a bunch of children's books for them to read.

Have some children's audiobooks and radio plays on the tablet.

Have some fucking like. Bill Nye The Science Guy downloaded to the tablet that they can watch.

Have some normal kids cartoons and movies on the tablet they can watch.

You don't need to be shoving high-brow media at your kid every second but for gods sake, you shouldn't just be normalizing them mindlessly absorbing AI slop from infancy onward because you can't be bothered to interact with your kid. Give them things that, at the very least, have plot and characters and arcs.

Give them actual stories , not just things that are literally designed to train their brains into being more susceptible to algorithms and mindless content.

I am not the first to talk about this, nor will I bring anything new to the table. But dang it, I need to get this off my chest.

Australia is the latest country to implement a social media ban for anyone under the age of 16. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo)

I agree that kids having unrestricted internet access is a problem. Hell, I was once a kid with unrestricted internet access myself, and in hindsight, this was probably the biggest mistake my parents ever made. I agree that it is a problem that must be addressed, together with the rise of iPad babies/kids.

But good lord, this is the worst way to “solve” it.

Because let's be honest… what will prevent a teen from lying about their age? According to my YouTube account, I am a 38-year-old woman (I am actually 29). Lying about your age online is a tale as old as the internet itself.

Unless you implement an online ID-verification system — which would just be the death of the internet and drag your country closer to a surveillance-state dystopian nightmare. And it doesn't even work, look at the UK!

And then I read this line in the article:

Children and parents will not be punished for infringing the ban – it is social media companies who are charged with enforcing it.

And I have to ask myself… why are we not punishing the parents? IMO, excessive screen time and not monitoring what your kids are doing online is neglectful at best, and abusive at worst.

What happened to personal responsibility? Why don’t we go after the parents whose six-year-old kids still can’t form coherent sentences, have massive behavior problems, and have zero motor skills — not because they have any disorders, but because they’ve been shoved in front of an iPad the second they could sit up as a baby?