If kids are known for one thing, it's their ability to watch and re-watch the same piece of content over and over. We have decades of good, high quality, children's media. Why do they need the latest and untested greatest?
I credit some of my unpopularity in elementary school with growing up without cable television. All of the other children would watch Nickelodeon after school and the prizes on Legend Of The Hidden Temple would instruct them to ask their moms to buy them Jansport backpacks and AirWalk sneakers. I wasn't able to discuss yesterday's episode and didn't know how to dress to fit in.
As I discovered watching our kids go through school, if you had cable and the "in backpack", kids at school would almost certainly have found something else to dig at.
Those that react get picked on. If they can't single out lack of clothes, or knowing current music, they dig at too fat, too thin, wears glasses, wrong hair colour, wrong accent, you name it. In short if you react you lose.
I am much less open to the having all the same things to fit in argument than I was when I started on the parenting journey.
Parent wasn't concerned about being picked on but not being able to participate in the culture of the other children without cable TV.
There's a big personal preference there about whether or not you want your kids (or you yourself regret being or not being) involved heavily in the mainstream pop culture of your peers as children.
Experiencing more than just whatever is popular is important, but being very isolated can have effects as well. Whatever choices you make will have a strong impact, and there are very often not clear rights and wrongs.
Picked on or not able to participate is part of the same grouping that goes on in schools. For the most part is little to do with how much they are enabled or not to fit in.
Before being a parent I'd have inclined to agree with GP. The experience of seeing my kids progress, and their differing experience, through school leaves me believing it's nearly all down to personality. That of course is far harder for parents to influence. Course a kid with a sensitive disposition might well blame the lack of the right things as the reason to feel an outsider.
So true. I will do the same for my kid when time comes, he's only 0.7yo. How about screen time, do they watch them on tablets/devices or on a media player on a TV?
I do not restrict screen time in any way. If they want to watch videos (from our scraped collection on the NAS), they can. If they want to play with the carefully chosen educational apps/games on our phones, they can. We've never restricted them since they first became interested, and it has worked out fine for us.
They barely ever watch shows or play with the phones, and most the time just want to colour in, play with Lego, or play with toys. They use the phones maybe for an hour every 3 days or so (or if we're waiting at the Doctors office or on a road trip), and watch shows maybe half an hour to an hour each day (usually in evening when they're too tired to physically play and we're preparing dinner). YMMV of course.
We regularly make sure they get experience doing nothing too. My wife and I are big believers in the importance of doing nothing, for imagination/creativity and also just because it's an important skill to have in life, to be able to sit and wait.
They're very imaginative, and we regularly find the eldest just sitting in a sunny spot in the room and "dreaming in the warm" as she calls it.
The only problem we struggle with as far as technology is that a lot of her friends already have unlimited access to TV and talk about shows she's never heard of because we don't watch (or have) TV. We purely do Netflix/Stan and YouTube, so she gets a bit upset not knowing what they're going on about, but she's starting to understand that everyone has different things they do.
>How about screen time, do they watch them on tablets/devices or on a media player on a TV?
Sorry if my comment implied I had kids, I do not. But in terms of access I see a lot of other comments further below talking about downloading everything locally and serving it through plex, which seems like a solid idea.