I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.
That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.
I am a parent myself and I know very good the cost of it, and yes - I think if you enable cartoons on YouTube for your few months old kid - that’s the laziness. You always can find a way to attract and engage your baby without electronics.
A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.
With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.
The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)
I had same intention. Even practically largely managed. And then, when I shown toddler first fairy tale, toddler started to have way more varied and imaginative games.
Turns out, it does not destroys them at all. It can actually add quite a lot.
The harm can happen if you overdo it a lot. But some watching or playing is not destroying them at all.
no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books
And I think it is a valid concern even today. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad or dangerous with books, videos or computer games. But too much of anything steal time that is needed for other parts of a well rounded upbringing. If you spend too much time in front of a screen or books, you won’t spend enough time being outdoors and being physically active, or being with friends practicing social skills and conflict resolution. And the opposite is of course also true: if you spend all days doing sports or just hanging out with friends, there won’t be enough time for reading or other types of experiences.
Some behaviours are more immediately rewarding than other. It’s rare to find anyone eating too much broccoli or having problems stop rehearsing German irregular verbs.
But surprise for you — I have. And I know that it is more than possible to develop your young ones without engaging them to electronics until they reach at least 2 years old.
> There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on work, day care, extracurricular activities, etc.
Happy to read whatever evidence you have on this topic. I’m keenly interested and sure as shit not “lazy” for allowing our children time to play age appropriate games on a tablet.
Would that affect lower socioeconomic status more? Could go either way. I would guess it's an observer/awareness/diagnosis effect. (Lower SE getting progressively more access to child cognitive monitoring; consistent with more attention during covid)
That seems methodologically quite questionable for the conclusions drawn. Like many blind semantic analysis attempts which consider language of a crash report for bug testing toxic due to the instances of "does not work", and "kill" and "fail". Meanwhile "I hope you enjoy eating your family then." is positive.
Falsely presenting subjective viewpoints as objective would appear more rational. It isn't the trappings which make it rational or even distance from emotions. One can rationally make "non-optimal" decisions from subjective personal costs.
Antivaxxers tend to use scientific/rational language though, as opposed to new age vibes or what they heard from their priests. They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong.
I doubt that, most of them just copy & paste parts from studies or headlines shared in social networks
One of my latest memories is the introduction of a test that can be used to test for Corona and flu at the same time. The relevant article headline spoke of a test to distinguish flu from Corona.
This then turned into the antivaxxers saying that previous PCR tests could not distinguish corona from flu.
"They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong."
They are certainly not using a scientific mindset - they are just using language that sounds scientific, so it sounds smart and solid.
But is not, when you look closer and try to find their data and sources. But common people does not do that - and fall for it.
It is basically fraud, in most instances.
Would be curious to see data on this. I most frequently see an emotional appeal against authority, vague anxieties and fears and/or slippery slope arguments.
Use of rational language does not mean that the conclusion is reasonable, nor free of fallacy. For example, people saying the covid shot interferes with long term immunity is rational and modern, just not based in fact (or misapplying fact).
There are mechanisms that could cause that (“original antigenic sin”) and it does happen with dengue fever. Of course, it’s not true here, but it was reasonable to think it might be in 2020.
And covid vaccines being spike-only may be less effective against variants than whole-virus vaccines or actual infections. But flu shots manage to be ineffective a year later with whole viruses in them, so maybe that wouldn’t help.
Antivax is literally as old as vaccines are. There’s an enormous Victorian corpus of antivax literature, complete with crazy claims that vaccines were causing leprosy. In this respect, nothing has changed.
Nor does it evince the collapse of rational thinking. If people just suspended their critical judgement and did whatever they were told unquestioningly, there would also be no antivax movement, but their compliance would not speak to their capacity for rationality, only their bovinity.
Funny enough I expect Venn diagram of antivaxers and people who don't let their kid use screens to have a significant overlap. Sometimes raw distrust is justified.
