Submitted 1 day ago by kingpepe8006@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
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People when kids screech at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
People when kids run around at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
People when kids use an ipad at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
There’s no winning here. Children just aren’t allowed to exist.
We are the exception because we most definitely weren’t like that at all as a kid. /s
#2 is shitty parenting. Kids running around a restaurant puts them and staff in dangerous situations with hot food and steak knives etc
I’ve recently gotten a hold of an older ipad. I’ve been installing apps and stuff on it and playing with all the things.
And godDAMN that os has problems. I’m back on my android phone and it’s so much smaller, but Jesus Christ having a back button and responsive apps and ui and os feels like coming home.
Android isn’t without its problems though. The apps are all definitely aimed at a poorer/cheaper demographic, the audio drivers suck big fat rectum, and the hamburger-scrolly-floating-button design philosophy is straight up garbage.
But there are so many missing QOL and presumably standard features on Android. On iOS, I get so lost in the loose ux standards that often end up bewildering me. I used procreate for like 8 hours today, and by the end, I had memorized a ton of really really bad designs. They work, and within the app, they’re… Mostly consistent. But I have this deep down rage for whoever made some of these decisions.
It’s entertaining, at the bare minimum, to see UX and UI slowly develop over the years, and neither OS (or Samsung’s OneUI) are perfect. It’s fascinating to see what the other camp is doing.
But yeah… Kids crying over having their ipad taken away? Shame.
Get them something better.
Like a desktop computer.
Fuckin squeakers
Don’t judge the kid, judge the parents. Parents who should not be parents prefer to make their kids less of a burden to them by handing them over to the overstimulation square
100% My kids have tablets. The only time they get them is on road trips and plane rides. Some parents we know bring them to restaurants, family gatherings, you name it. It’s fucking annoying. Make your kid socialize or they’re going to grow up weird AF.
When I was a kid, we’d get together with family and do our thing. Then we’d all eat a meal, and usually after the meal it was all right, everyone go do whatever you want, and the kids would usually go down the basement and play toys or video games, and adults sit around digesting, having some drinks, etc.
Fast forward to now, I’ll bring my kids tablets or whatever, and when the party is entering the food coma stage, I say do whatever you want, you’ve spent the last couple hours talking to people, or just existing around people who are 30-60 years older than you.
I feel like it always comes to this, but everything in moderation. I played a lot of Nintendo as a kid, and I grew up well adjusted (enough), and I don’t doubt my kids can do the same. For me, the whole tablet thing just stretches out the amount of time I get to hang. Kids get antsy. Shit, I get antsy and I’m an adult, but if letting them do whatever for 30-60m at the end of a party let’s me unwind with my family and friends, it’s fine.
Yeah or they’re really introverted they’ll at least use their imagination to disassociate.
Like I used to look around and imagine little beings making their way around objects and walls. Or looking into the distance and imagining things farther away were right in front of me, but the same size — so now you’ve got a miniature waiter running around the table, trying to catch the little beings.
My ability to zone out probably masked a lot of brain problems, but it did also make me a champ at sitting in waiting rooms while having the time of my life.
I was at a friends and family barbecue recently, and it just so happened none of the parents there brought tablets for their kids. It was just kids running around the backyard being kids. The parents generally let them do whatever but were attentive enough to prevent them climbing on the shed and stuff.
I can’t remember the last time there wasn’t some kid glued to a screen at that type of party. It was a joy to see.
My child is autistic.
The only way to get him to be calm in a restaurant was to give him earphones and play something comfortingly familiar.
Now that hes a bit older, it’s a bit better. But he still frequently needs something similar in those kinds of situations.
Good god this hits home
Months ago I was visited by a relative who brought their eight year old. She’s single and her boy is ever so slightly mentally not there. He’s smart enough but just not there with everything. Plus the mother is not capable of looking after him. So many wrong things and I hate to judge anything about it … both mother and son are having and will continue to have a hard life.
As we talked, the son spent the entire time with their device looking at YouTube videos.
At one point I wanted to try to make friends and asked him what he was watching … he mumbled and ignored me. I looked over at his video and it was just a completely nonsensical animation of characters running around like in a video game … I couldn’t understand what was happening or why, the cartoon animals were just mumbling nonsense, laughing, running and flashing lights and constant cuts to new scene after new scene. I looked at the kid and he was two steps away from just drooling.
I couldn’t believe it and it scared me. This device was melting any amount of brain power the kid had.
It made me think about myself and what the hell I was doing with my time.
It made me think that the world is all doing the same thing to one degree or another. Some are better, since are terribly worse.
It made me think that humanity is doomed.
Mechanisms of manipulation and control are getting more and more sophisticated and it’s really fucking sad.
Its like watching someone overdose. It sucks. And we don’t have language about it, even shitty language, like we do for drugs, so it’s hard to even talk to people about.
we have it. but its too technical and people seem to have developed an aversion to technical sounding things.
I have friends with kids like that, and it’s scary. I’m obviously a fan of technology, but critical thinking might go down the drain if children spend all day in front of a screen at such a young age.
I genuinely think there should be a legal limit to when children are allowed independent access to JavaScript & Internet enabled technology. I would suggest twelve years.
Having it be law would remove probably the biggest reason children are drawn to technology initially today: social pressure and anxiety.
I didn’t grow up with anything like this (and I’m pretty young… or I was at some point) and thank fucking God I didn’t. I barely read today as it is, instead wasting time with screens and YouTube and shit like that; I’m happy I had the opportunity to consume hours and hours of time with reading as a child. Not just reading: I learned basically every knot that exists (I still have my copy of Ashley’s Book of Knots), learned an absurd amount of physics (with textbooks! for fun! I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that today), learned to program and use Minix (ok, that was highschool, so a little later), and even got into Marxism.
These are all opportunities I don’t think I could replicate today, because I don’t get bored in the same way today. Now, if I’m bored, I automatically look at my phone (…lemmy…), or open YouTube, or do something else equally stupid. I didn’t have that option when I was young. We didn’t even own a TV. I was forced to do interesting things, and I’m really happy I was, because I’d be an exceedingly illiterate boring moron if I hadn’t read those novels and learned how the universe worked and understood why capitalism sucks.
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds and people will become interesting through other means, but it really frightens me how much dumber I’ve become. I don’t want to imagine how much harder it will be for masses of gen Z and Alpha.
Ok, I feel like I got a little off topic there. Rant over…
Adults today are, at least wherever Western media and culture has taken over, mostly mentally challenged and vacuous consumerists. What hope do their kids have? I feel bad for my future children, ngl, but they might die in the water wars regardless so maybe they won’t have to tolerate nonsense for long, lol.
In my experience, it’s either anime characters and flashing lights/colors or some streamer screaming his head off. Both equally nonsensical.
That’s not developmentally normal even for a tablet kid, fyi. I would help them seek immediate evaluation…
I have a family member who was a tablet kid when they were 8. However they engage with me, their favorite thing is to play the addictive tablet game in my lap and they love when I or others play it with them, especially if you make a story out of it. They watch way too much YouTube but they were delighted when I watched with them, we did thumbs up and thumbs down and talked about what we were watching. They love me and sadly are a bit attention starved but that’s a lot more normal.
App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.
So them put some effort into acquiring good health media for your kid to watch and put that into the tablet and remove all other apps so they can only engage with content that has been pre veted by you, parenting takes effort
Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.
Set YouTube kid to only show selected channels. My kid is actually bored of youtube now.
Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.
So don’t give a tablet then. Or if you do, don’t have Apps like that. Get an wifi only android tablet, install VLC and specific shows and games. Real games and real shows. Not short form shit or bs mobile “games”.
I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.
Ted Ed, Vsauce, CGP Grey.
Somewhere right now there is a iPad kid watching skibidi toilet that will one day be president.
Somewhere right now there is a President watching skibidi toilet that will one day be dead.
you jest. fox news would never stoop so low to play that garbage.
they stoop lower by playing fucker carlson, or other fascist talking heads.
And their parents allow them to blast the sound in public with no headphones. I can’t fathom the lack of give-a-fucks for their fellow humans (to include their own children).
Yes that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I understand that sleep deprived parents sometimes need to put their kids in front of their phones. But in recent years I have noticed that they just blast the sound really loud and don’t care about any other human being. I’m really shy but after almost freaking out on a train ride because of two different kids just watching something full volume I have asked parents to tone it down. They were even kind of embarrassed and nice about it. I have no idea how you can be so disconnected to your surrounding… The worst were grandparents with a 2 year old kid during a kids theater and they just let the kid watch a show with the volume up. I mean what about all the other kids who are performing and you sit in the middle with a phone just blasting full volume. They wanted to stop him and then he started throwing a tantrum. They just laughed and were like oh he’s so cute and we can’t to anything about it. Fuck that’s not cute, if you want to watch a tv show with volume, just sit outside of theater with your little brat!
i mean, if they were wearing headphones the kid’d still be blasting it. it saves the kid’s hearing at a minor social cost. tinnitus really sucks and if the parents have to take measures to prevent it, i’ll take being annoyed for a few minutes to keep someone else from getting tinnitus. it’s beyond a fair trade.
Set volume limit then? Lol
You watch skibidi toilet on a corporate-controlled spyware machine known as the “iPad”
I read the anarchist cookbook on my RISC-V PineTab
We are not the same.
But you also watched new grounds and shit like goatse
read … on my RISC-V PineTab
Because it’s not powerful enough to play a video. /s (sorry, just teasing)
And do you trust the people that fabricated your RISC-V cpu?
I’m not having kids, but this always feels like such a missed opportunity to let kids do something more mentally stimulating on that tablet.
Drawing apps and eBooks are right there! Hell, set up Termux and Acode up for them and let them program a bit (or like, I bet there’s a mobile version of Scratch they could use if they can’t read yet). Let them take photos and make little collages. Get them some music Synthesizer App so that they can tinker on their own little beats. Literally just show them that they have the tools to make something great instead of just shoveling in mindless content all day…
I am the donor for a lesbian couple. I’m pretty involved in my son’s life. I took him for his third haircut. Midway through, he was bored, and shooting me one of the angriest looks I’ve ever gotten from him. I took a pic and sent it to his mom.
“Oh god look how mad he is, give him your phone!”
What? He’s being quiet and learning how to be patient while a haircut happens. Some parents think reality is a BAD substitute for devices, it seems.
At least one night a week, he comes to my house and plays without any screens. We talk and explore the world.
Makes sense when even adults use phones as a means to escape even a moment of boredom. How many adults use their phones while driving? That's one of the most mentally stimulating things I can think of, and people get BORED.
Totally agree!
I see the problem more in the parents. First, that these kids can use the iPad so much and second, that they can just consume on it. Like you said: Create, build and explore. Use the iPad, not get used by the iPad.
The thing that would scare me the most is that the parents don’t even know that such things are possible on their devices
Maybe my opinion of others is low, but I find it highly unbelievable most would even realize that something like programming is understandable, or tinkering around with music, or other stuff along those veins. Maybe drawing is still realistic them
But that would just go to show that there’s a lack of all of this in the first place, even for parents
Those are harder than the dopamine of brainrot content though. I struggle with it myself. I know programming is far more rewarding in the long-term, yet I often end up browsing lemmy instead due to the immediate dopamine hit compared to the delayed one.
These kids won’t have any sense of self-control or understand why one is better for them than the other and the kind of parent that gives a child a tablet and just turns on YouTube does so because they don’t want to actually parent. So while this is decent advice for proper parents, these kinds of parents aren’t gonna do that, because it requires more work for them.
If you block any of the unproductive apps, and allow only the productive ones, and give the kid “free” access to what they have on the iPad, they will tinker with what’s available
They might fuss around for a bit if they know there’s other stuff, but ultimately they can’t force your hand, and it should still be plenty fun to do the harder things
If I had termux with ghc as a child I would NOT stop studying math.
“just one more monad, dad”
bet there’s a mobile version of Scratch they could use if they can’t read yet
And for older kids apple made a scratch-like game for teaching their Swift programming language!
Scratch also works entirely in the web browser
This look is solely for the parents.
Not really, it’s a kid, it should know that by using the Ipad it is destroying it’s capability to pay attention in the future, not to mention using an Ipad, a product built in a Chinese factory with suicide nets, really the kid should feel ashamed for supporting such a business practice.
Yeah, time to start canceling toddlers!
and who gave the kid this iPad? Was it magically summoned into existence?
Sometimes that iPad is there for you not the kids, try raising an autistic kid with unlimited energy, when you get them in a restaurant or bus, if the iPad is gonna keep him quiet and occupied, that means you don’t have to hear him complain. Kids aren’t robots, they’re people, and some have special needs and get overwhelmed in the fucked up world we made. If super kitties is gonna keep him relaxed for a bit so be it.
Most often the iPad is not for the kids but for inattentive Parents that just want to doomscroll in peace and not deal with their offspring.
I used to think exactly that and judge that heavily, but after my sister became a mother, we talked about this and she said essentially, that you don’t know them, you don’t know the day they’ve had and what they have done all day and what happened before. And that having a child is so hard that sometimes you just need to do things that are maybe not optimal, like giving them coke or letting them be on an iPad in public to avoid another hour of screaming, but that doesn’t mean they are not doing super much before. Because everybody has a breaking point and you cannot be perfect, but you don’t know the arguments or deals or time spent earlier, and sometimes it’s necessary to also keep care of yourself and relax a bit when you’re done.
My colleague is real nice and all, but exactly why she gives iPad/phone to her toddler is exactly for the reason you mentioned. A lot of parents are lazy. And we wonder why the younger generation is turning right, because techno-fascists know how glued we are now to digital devices.
Parking them in front of YouTube kids isn’t the right idea though… The content they show is just ridiculous.
You don’t know that it’s “most often”.
That’s just how you feel about it. You’re being judgmental but don’t have any idea.
Thanks for this thoughtful and considerate response. As a parent myself, your kindness is so appreciated!
Hey, super kitties is quality content compared to YouTube. We have a YouTube ban in my house - the only exception is if it’s an actual show that can’t be found on streaming services.
The rest of this is spot on. We use iPads to keep our kids quiet in public places that are boring to them, like restaurants or planes.
We’ve all experienced an annoying kid in a restaurant, or a crying baby on the plane. It sucks, but usually that’s short lived. This post just seems like child-free snark/elitism signaling to me.
You’re on lemmy. Such hypocrisy.
Me when a friend of mine who’s an engineer who sometimes works for the CERN unironically watches Mr. Beast and listens to Papa-a-pate (?, this nonsense k-pop song, it was popular some months ago…).
Like, yeah, you have the hardware, why fill your brain with malware! ;-;
Malware for the brain. Best description of brainrot I’ve heard yet.
10/10 reference!
Well chosen character, sorry if that’s you.
Meh, back in the days we’d watch youtubepoop videos and whatnot. Nonsense you like os funny, nonsense you don’t is brainrot.
This is actually me when I’m in public and see someone judging a family based on exactly one frame of their lives.
I know a family with small kids who watch stuff like this on an iPad. One kid figured out how to get onto regular YouTube, and now watches tutorials to bypass parental controls. A true hacker in the making.
It’s been a nightmare for the parents tho, the kid figured out how to turn on all the game systems and plays stuff they’re not supposed to now lol.
Also, for anyone feeling high and mighty about the content from their childhood: youtu.be/EIyixC9NsLI
Baby shark do do dooodododoododo
Parents use to say leave your toys at home. I guess parents need the virtual babysitter with them at all times.
Bro I watch Loiter Squad by choice, who the fuck am I to judge?
Learn to shitpost kid.
Our future. Get used to it.
The fun thing is you pull even worse faces when the brainrot is taken away from them and now youre stuck in an enclosed space with a screaming toddler running away getting wrestled back, jostling against your chair while youre trying to eat.
I find myself in awe on how this much of brainrot can be watched by a little kid every time I encounter that…
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
It’s easy to judge from like 30 minutes in public, until you have an autistic kid and no support network.
RacerX@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Thank you for saying this. I used to judge parents of kids on screens until I had my own. You never know what’s going on and there’s a chance that the 30 minutes of quiet that family is getting from the iPad is the only peace they’ve had all day.
socsa@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I mean there's other things besides brain rot. Also people did raise kids prior to iPads.
Serpent@feddit.uk 11 hours ago
Or it’s the only meal they’ve had out in a month and it coincided with a sleep regression or something.
I have friends without kids tell me how they would parent and what they don’t think is “good parenting” all the time. They have no clue…
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yes, before the existence of iPads, autistic children could do nothing except scream and seize on the floor. Yep. Thank God we have iPads now, there is literally no other way to handle autistic children.
PiousAgnostic@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I mean, you’re kinda being a dick… it’s a better than my generations response to being autistic. Jesus lol, trust me.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Before modern era, they used to do lobotomies and lock up kids that are neurodivergent
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Jesus Christ…
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
No, keep proudly displaying your ignorance. We’ve got time.