[l3x4ur1n]

It's hard not to give a smartphone to a kid if you have to work or just can't spend a lot of time with the kid. Kids are demanding of time and attention. So either you have enough time or you pay someone to play with your kid or you have to endure a lot of chaos a kid without a smartphone and a lot of time without attention can do (from screaming and crying to wreaking havoc in your household). Or you give them smartphone and they keep quiet and still and you can do what you need to do.

[lm28469]

imho we're completely missing the problem. It's not so much that kids need our attention, it's more that adults have 0 fucking free time, both parents have to work full time (or often even more) to afford what people could afford on a single salary not even 50 years ago.

Giving a phone to a 5 years old solves the symptom but it certainly doesn't fix the problem.

[em500]

I don't think that's true, at least for Americans. Even in the sub-population of full time working parents, more time is spent on watching TV (1.45h mother, 1.98h father) than on child care (1.41h mother, 0.91h father, where units are hours per 24h on average): https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7-1519.htm

[nucleardog]

Worth calling out that's for "children under 18". If you scroll down to specifically "children under 6", since people talking about "screen time" are usually more worried about 6 year olds than 16 year olds, those hours go to 2.42/1.54 childcare against 1.17/1.79 TV.

But I think I'd look at it the other way. The only category on here that's really "discretionary time" is "Leisure and sports". Across the board, parents are averaging about 12% there. The average across the population (including parents) is 22%.[0] This is also averaging everything across weekends as well. Expectedly, people have more free time on the weekends[1].

I'd also point out the footnote:

> NOTE: A primary activity refers to an individual's main activity. Other activities done simultaneously are not included.

There is nothing I do while my kid is (1) home and (2) awake that doesn't involve her taking up a large part of my time and attention.

When it's a dark evening in the middle of winter and I'm setting up a ladder in three feet of snow to climb up on the roof and run an auger down the sewer vent on the roof... I'm still spending probably a third to half of my time on her.

When I've got two pans on the fire, something in the toaster oven, and I'm trying to mind a pot I'm filling up with water to turn into supper... I guess, yeah, running back and forth to try and clean up some spilled juice and get her changed out of the wet clothes while I don't let anything burn or overflow is still technically mostly "food preparation and cleanup".

I don't even know where "planning child's birthday party" fits into this whole thing, but it's not something I'm doing _with_ my kid so it doesn't seem to be caring for household children by the general phrasing of these options. (And you might think "yeah but that only happens once a year" and you'd be right... but it's always something.)

And yeah, after she was asleep I did a bunch of "housework" and at some point I sat down for an hour and "watched TV" while I poked away at a bunch of other smaller things that needed doing. At some point I feel asleep in a chair so I'm not sure whether my primary activity was "sleep" or "watching television".

So that's a rundown of a recent evening of mine which had around 0 hours spent on childcare and an hour on TV.

Obviously "lived experience" is not "data", but that's at least _a_ perspective--yes, by the numbers I probably spend more time watching TV than caring for my kid but no, she's still the main time sink on my day outside of sleep and work (and sometimes not even sleep) and I certainly do not have a bunch of free time I could be allocating to childcare so she spent less time watching TV.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1-2023.pdf [1] https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a2-2023.pdf

[dsego]

I feel it's easier with with more kids since you can let them play together. It's hard with one kid or kids that are not of similar age, since they have nobody to play with them at home. Of course, there are some kids who can play alone with legos or dolls. I know when I was growing up me and my brother where a year apart and we could play for hours together with legos or toys, we did also watch a lot of TV, this was the early 90s.