alt Hacker NewsAmazon's "digital pacifier" for toddlers
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This feels somewhere between an Onion article and one of those vintage ads for giving children cocaine.
Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
This reminds me of the Kid Beer sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepbNahnsE4
Inspired by "Toy Story 5" ... It's amazing how catatonic my 7 year-old can become in a phone or tablet.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,”
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release announcing its Amazon Kids Tablets.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those without. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can't go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
i bought an amazon tablet one time. it was absolutely terrible.
Warm take: a fantastic daily driver for adults as the intended market of the device means all activity on it is a priori subject to COPPA.
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
It's funny how those same billionaires who sell these devices, do not give their children devices until the age of 14.
PS to parents: give your child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
> One product design that concerned me was the handle — like it’s intended to be carried around like a briefcase
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s
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I can see how a tablet optimized for logic puzzles, e-books, drawing etc. could be highly beneficial but these adverts seem focused on the child's relationship with the tablet. I think an art/puzzle machine is a much healthier starting point than an everything machine.
Using gen ai so I have been able to make bite size mini games for my son to learn letters and numbers. Today he said skeletons are just pretend given we’ve been walking around looking at Halloween decorations. So I’ve had to explain that skeletons are real and they’re inside all of us. So in these mini games, now I’ve added a 3-D rendering of the body for kids to show the skeleton and muscles and what a human body looks like. And I was able to walk them through it and explain it to him and he’s been very excited about the fact that now there’s this he understands there’s a skeleton inside of him. All that is to say, I think curated parent led experiences with technology are still a great way to teach, and we can’t just hand them an iPad and say here’s some shows to calm you down
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.