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But your child will not be almost three forever. I have one in the same age bracket myself with three older siblings. The little one has practically no interest in screen time anyway, but it's a completely different story with the older ones.

At some point, they will get in touch with media one way or the other. In our case, once they get into school, they'll be using ipads anyway. So, I agree that for very little children, there's is absolutely no need to expose them to any screen time, but at some point as they get older, they will need to learn how to use phones and media.

We're still very restrictive with screen time, though. It's more like a treat that they get to play with a device for 30 minutes (which I, honestly, find already too long, but I'm not a single parent).




Zero to three are critical years for child development. The brain grows to 80% of its adult size by then.

What happens doing those years has outsized effects on the child the rest of their life.

So yes, I won't be able to shield her from screens forever. But I can still do my best to set her up for success and prevent her from being a screen junkie.


You should absolutely continue to protect your kids from screens (and I think some kind of active role is a good thing), but as someone who was raised in a very restrictive household: be careful not too go too far the other way. For example, I was not allowed a mobile phone until I was 16 years old, and this was incredibly socially isolating and made it hard for me to participate in the shared social life of my peer group.

My suggestion would be to listen to your kid when they inevitably ask for access to these things, and while you should acquiesce every request, you shouldn't dismiss them out of hand either, and should take their reasoning into account.


Seconding this, the same thing happened to me. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34022113 for a take that I like better.

Currently have a strained at best relationship with much of my family for reasons strongly related to this mindset.

E: Moved the last paragraph of this comment to https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=34022364 where it makes more sense in context.


Right on, I think that's a very reasonable approach.




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