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Teens, with mixed feelings about their own phones, say their parents need to log off
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Everywhere I go now I see young parents glued to their phones and ignoring their children. Or worse, they gave their toddlers tablets and it's a family of zombies.
It’s a hard balance, being parents right now. I’m going to make an assumption and guess you mean you see them in public, yeah? The thing is (I say this as a parent of currently 9 and 7 year olds), our society — at least, my society in the US — still feels a bit like it expects children to be “seen and not heard” while in public. If even seen, to be honest. I don’t see it as much here on Lemmy but I saw anti-kid posts on Reddit all the time. I don’t mean childfree; I mean they constantly complained about other people’s kids. Yes, sometimes that can be due to a lack of structured parenting, but kids are also just little socially-inept, impulse-driven creatures who are still figuring the world out. The urge to hand them a magical little device that will occupy them and keep them “seen and not heard” while you are out somewhere is perilously strong.
All that being said: just last week I was sitting to the side at my son’s martial arts class, and next to me was a mom on her phone who had a young girl, maybe 3 or 4, next to her. The girl was squirmy but quiet. I could not help noticing that the mom barely looked up from her phone the whole time. I felt really bad for the girl.
Yea it's the same for us, the complaints from people when they see a kid in public on a tablet are weird to me cause I know as kids we always had stuff like toys we brought into restaurants (or we went to restaurants with like coloring maps and stuff).
Parents have been desperately trying to find things to occupy kids while they're in public so they don't disturb the people around them for years and now that smart phones/ipads are universal it seems like there's finally something that will just keep the kids quiet for awhile without a lot of effort.
I think it's important to pay attention how much you/your kids are spending on "screen time" but it feels really disingenuous to say stuff like the current generation is cooked because of ipads.
There's a huge difference between kids playing with toys or coloring books and watching tiktok on their iPads. Not even remotely the same, and it's concerning that so many perents don't seem to understand that.