what ppl defending kids on ipads donât seem to understand is that there are other ways to keep kids occupied. my mom had a whole bag full of little toys and games for me to play with while waiting in lines at disney world. once your kid is like 7 or 8 they can read a book. they can color. or they can literally just sit there and imagine things. i did that a lot as a kid.
thanks for putting your wrong and bad commentary in the tags where i still have to read all of it. most of what you said is untrue.
OP: giving children too young to process things so much access to ipads isnât good for them maybe.
People in the notes: So you hate moms??? Youâre ableist?? You think we should go back to the Dark Ages?? (My personal favorite because it makes no sense) youâre poor shaming??
Why is it so difficult to explain that children not developing fine motor skills and losing their attention spans is bad actually??
also children can end up being entertained by just about anything. I remember building "bird nests" with sticks in the backyard when I was like 7 years old. That was it. It took up my whole afternoon and I was entertained the entire time.
I worked at a kindergarten for a year, and Jesus Christ these kids are falling behind on so many milestones
Everyone knows who the iPad kids are
I've seen it all from kids who don't know how to use scissors, and can't perform the motions right compared to other kids in that age group, to kids who can't write the alphabet or spell their names (the older ones)
And one of the most startling thing I encountered was every now and then we have a country day, where we choose a country, color in the country's flag in the colors and watch a little film about said country.
And I was overseeing the coloring, and one boy just refusing to color
It happens, stubbornness, bad days, 'just don't wanna' s happen, but I sit with him and continue to try and encourage him and figure out why he doesn't want to
And he keeps saying he doesn't know how to color
And I'm like ??? Just pick up the pencil and put it on the paper buddy, cmon
So I'm showing him how, and he refuses to try over and over
So then I try like, coloring while guiding his hand, and again this is a flag were coloring it's a giant rectangle, not much precision is needed
And I realize while I'm helping him, literally moving his hand to color for him, he's CLEARLY never colored before. He's 4, there is no excuse for this when kids start coloring at like, 2 maybe younger.
By 4-5 kids can generally color inside the lines well enough and draw recognizable figures like people and landscapes and pets
Eventually he got into it, understood how to do it and requested to continue on by himself, which was great! I told him I was proud of him and we continued on with our day but it absolutely shocked me that these iPad kids are so beyond stunted like jesus
He didn't know how to grip a pencil, he didn't know the wrist movements and motions, he didn't understand the pressure control, he had no control over where or how he was coloring like, these kids NEED TO learn these things it's STARTLING how many kids don't have these milestones and are just not developing these fine motor skills
Ask any kindergarten attendant and they'll tell you the same thing-
The best thing you can do for a kid is buy them a shitton of construction paper, decorative child-safe scissors, and coloring books
Please please please kids need to cut paper up and color. It helps them develop so many fine motor skils
Now don't be mistaken, the percentage of these kids are low, for now. It's definitely not every kid, and thankfully not the majority but it is still a problem
Even if a parent SAYS, 'this is my son's iPad,' it's not his. it's an expensive piece of electronics with opaque rules, it has other functions than play, it needs to be charged, maybe it's parental-locked, and the parents control access to it at all. In the past, 'computer time' was different from 'play time', however much privacy a kid HAD using the computer because:
Toys, on the other hand, belong to the child. A specifically nasty parent may say otherwise, but children experience toys as their own. As stated above, anything can become a toy in a pinch, beyond the parents' control. Even if we just discuss electronic toys there's a serious difference in dynamic between "my son's gameboy" and "my son's iPad."
Even if we aren't talking about 'motor skills' and 'imagination', replacing toys with an ipad definitely sounds bad for kids because it pretty much eliminates the agency of 'my things!' and changes it to 'thing my mom lets me have/use!'
And compared to a desktop computer and even to a laptop, an iPad is REALLY easy to revoke, you don't even need to say 'no more computer time!' You can simply take it away, physically. It's hard to take EVERY TOY away from a kid unless you go to extremes.
And also, an iPad is a computer that doesn't teach any computer skills while using it.
This all seems like a good prep for being an eternal renter of all things, though.
