My kid is almost 12, iPad only. I do worry about her overall time but most of her time is spent in this huge group chat with all her friends on Discord. We had landlines pre-voicemail when I was growing up and our chat time was limited by that. Her grades are good, room stays clean, and she’s in two extracurricular activities. 4 hours of chatting with her friends is ok by me, it’s at least social interaction, not spending hours sucked into YT or TikTok algorithms. She also has kids messenger. Nothing else.
I guess the one thing that could be better is actually seeing her friends, but that depends a lot on where you live. Being French, all my friends lived within 10 minutes walking distance so we would see each other basically every single day after school ! I think that was a lot better than being on discord, I wish everyone had the opportunity to do that too. It was a lot of fun !
( Also, we played video games like constantly 😆 so I wouldn’t be shocked if our screen time went over 4 hours quite regularly, but at least everyone was in the same room and we also could go play in the garden and stuff. Walkable cities are real, and they’re real awesome, having always lived in one myself. )
Parent your kids instead of constantly demanding the government do something. Obviously it’s hard, two parents working/single parent working full-time, everything is expensive, shit sucks. But you also signed up to have kids. At least try to do them a solid and raise them well, and stop asking the already too large government to try to come up with some more shit.
This is just as lopsided and reactionist of a response as government regulated screen time. We already regulate lots of things for children/minors that could be called unnecessary under the umbrella of ‘parent better.’ Labor, tobacco/alcohol, gambling, etc.
The answer and discussion are nuanced and lumping them into a black and white choose a side debate isn’t reality.
We can have the government do something and have people raise their kids, it’s not either/or.
Good idea now do the same for adults
What are hoops that you chase with a stick doing to children? Demands grow to restrict kids access to hoops that you chase with a stick
