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Parents putting screens in front of their kids is more about their own stress than other factors
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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"Parents putting screens in front of their kids is more about their own stress than other factors"
Nah. Really? You don't say. And here we all thought it was because the parents really believed that watching random shit on youtube for 15 hours each day was educational and healthy for 2 year olds.
It doesn't feel righteous to judge the parents about it now when you frame it like that though!
I've grown up and gotten over judging my parents. Reading "Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. really helped with putting things into perspective.
The parents didn't choose to be born either. None of us did. None of us got an instruction manual for this bullshit we were forced in to without our consent. As far as we can tell none of us have ever done this "living as sentient meat" thing before. We're not great at it because we're all just making it up as we go.
As kids we tend to see our parents as the authority who should know what they're doing, but they're not. From their point of view they're young people who are trying to juggle jobs and kids for the first time and get overwhelmed and sometimes do things they know aren't the best things to do to get a bit of relative peace for themselves.
The parents aren't monsters who want to neglect their kids. In previous generations they said it takes a village to raise a child, and that tight knit small community is gone in most places. There is no village. If two parents are both trying to juggle jobs and pay for daycare and make dinner and do all the house work the stress and exhaustion makes sense. It's natural. It's the large changes to society failing them.
~~Yes, it does. What is the alternative? Judge the kids? They did not choose to be born. Their parents chose to create them despite having no clue how to care for them.~~
I could've used a /s.
Woosh. Imagine a /s on the comment you responded to
I mean these people exist too. I worked for that lady who was probably around 40, but she really tried hard to be 25 or so. She had like 5 girls at home, not all hers. All the pictures on their walls had a super weird filter on. If you like that, more power to you. But tge way she talked about social media and screens in general was just downright weird as fuck. She was really proud that all her girls already had an instagram account, because when they are old enough, the good handles would be already gone. They practiced posing for the camera at home, and she was weirdly proud to not have books at home, because they all had tablets and you don't need books when youtube exists. I didn't even want to know ANY of this, ahe told me that like ahe was mother of the century. When she eventually asked me for my Instagram, to get her kids some followers i told her i don't do social media, i find it dumb and creepy.
I remember all the years of people saying that Idiocracy isn't a documentary sent from the future as a warning to us all. Look where their smug bullshit got us.
Anti-intellectual? I've seen plenty of articles over the years about parents giving young kids screens to keep them busy, and they all knew the reason for that was the parents being stressed and using the screen as a way to lighten their load.
What did you think the reason behind it was? Someone hiding in the parents bedroom who threatened to murder everyone if they didn't give little Timmy an iPad? The genuine belief in the educational value of random youtube videos?