[liontender]

It has been absolutely fascinating to see my 3 year old interact with his grandparents as he "helps" them play Scrabble on their iPad.

Together they decide to watch in-app ads; try installing some free-to-play game apps that seem like they might be amusing for an adult to show a child how they use; and otherwise explore the bounds of what you can do & learn on the modern walled-garden Internet. The grandparents are pretty media savvy ("this is an advertisement -- they want to sell you something") but are overall a little less conservative than the parents about screen time and are occasionally willing to, for example, try new apps that turn out to be scammy shovelware.

I've been thinking about getting the kid a non-networked desktop PC with a keyboard and seeing whether he derives any joy from the kind of basic, actual applications I grew up with -- a word processor program and a printer; literally QBASIC and gorillas.bas; etc.; with the understanding that this is an amusing anachronistic toy.

To be honest the biggest thing I'm trying to think about with the kids is not so much about screen time but about dealing with information more generally. Ads work really well on kids, but so does any organic, confidently stated information.

How do you convey the idea that that "just because you read something online doesn't mean it's true"? What happens when adults in your life (including sometimes your own parents) don't model a safe level of skepticism?

[wvenable]

A lot of dinner time conversation revolves around stuff that any of us, including the kids, have read or seen online.

A few months ago (while school was closed and we were quarantined), my son relayed to us all information about COVID-19 that he had come across online (likely via YouTube). I was expecting a bunch of misinformation but all of it was spot on! We've also talked about Flat Earthers. The other day we ended up discussing why Wikipedia isn't allowed as source at school.

> I've been thinking about getting the kid a non-networked desktop PC with a keyboard and seeing whether he derives any joy from the kind of basic, actual applications I grew up with -- a word processor program and a printer; literally QBASIC and gorillas.bas; etc.; with the understanding that this is an amusing anachronistic toy.

We grew up in similar times and from my experience as a parent it doesn't really work. We did a lot of that stuff because it was what we had. I did introduce my son to emulators and classic Nintendo games; the idea of 3 lives and your dead was a bit of a shock. But he eventually got Super Mario Maker and making your own classic Mario levels is more fun than playing someone else's.

[user5994461]

>>> The other day we ended up discussing why Wikipedia isn't allowed as source at school.

Because Wikipedia has made obsolete all research tasks given by schools? One search and the wikipedia article will tell you everything there is to know about a subject.

[zpeti]

Yeah, try searching for anything even mildly political, and see how much of "everything" there is to know you see about it.

[pyman]

Kids between 2 and 11 years old spend an average of 5/6 hours per day in front of a screen. And kids between 2 and 3 see an average of 25,600 ads a year.

This article is not about restricting the use of mobile devices or parenting, it's about regulating the software industry. Parents don't want their kids to be exposed constantly to advertising on their day-to-day lives, or pressured into buying things all the time.

The European Union is doing a good job regulating businesses, however, Apple is doing a lousy job regulating their own ads and payment systems. And this is because the AppStore makes $60 billion a year thanks to ads and subscriptions.

In my opinion, Apple and the AppStore should be regulated more by the European Union.

[wvenable]

My kid sees more ads now that he watches YouTube on his Switch but between 2 and 3 and I don't think he saw a single ad. We don't have cable (just streaming) and I always have browser ad blocking enabled. Even on mobile devices, I greatly dislike apps that have ads.