Ask HN: Parents, what's your iPad policy with your young kids?

Crying or screaming to get your way because they don't recieve something isn't acceptable behaviour, so you shouldn't reinforce negative conditioning.

if the child wants the ipad at the table that's up to the parent. taking a small child to a restaurant without things to entertain the child, especially if the adults are talking is not really fair on the kids, and honestly with kids you should be considerate of their feelings and perspective even if they also have to do adult things or make concessions to the adult world. in the same way don't take and put them in unfair situations like a restaurant dinner for 2 hours and expect them to sit there happy.

i wanted less screen time for ours, then the pandemic happened and everyone stopped handling cash and i needed my phone with me everywhere and everything runs thorough an app. kid sees phone and we're not going to be hypocrites and we regularly use it for 15 mins of sanity breaks. we recently introduced an ipad at about 3 or 4? though of course we still control and monitor everything on both phones or ipads. so no YouTube and only apps we vet: there's some good painting, learning and science/ natural world apps. And time and place is of course up to us.

honestly it's fine. he'll often grab it and come into bed with us for half an hour in the morning since he wakes up earlier than us, i have no problem with that (except having to hear some of the games while trying to sleep). he usually gets bored and moves on after a bit and we get up.

i don't find any evidence that ipad or screen use is correlated with temperament or behaviour. if it exists as a substitute for parenting or teaching behaviour and self control it'll be bad. if it doesn't it's fine imo. and like all things in moderation. whether by design or circumstance we don't use it just before bedtime, so of course there's lots of sensible rules and habits to instil and do with screens and electronics just as with all things.

You see, screens are really great at capturing kids attention and it will give you a moment of peace, but you pay the price the moment you want to turn the tv off to leave the house/eat dinner.

The worst part of it is that screens allow you to be emotionally quite detached from each other.

I think the educational value of an ipad is also very much exagerated. Learning for young children is really a full body experience and i dont think an ipad is a value add until much later in life (possibly never).

That said, parenting is not something you figure out before you start really. Kids will grow, you will grow and the balance will constantly shift. The most important thing is giving your children plenty of thoughtful attention throughout life..

I am planning to only introduce screen based devices after several years. First would be offline media like comics, later maybe videos. Access to the internet should be highly regulated, i am myself disgusted by what i see on (a-)social media. So when she's gonna use it i will block all social media for my whole network for a long time. I myself have stopped using it ages ago and i have to get my partner to accept that. But i think there is a huge difference between getting data from the internet and social media. Also playing a game might be a thing, but _never ever_ a free to play game, they are the worst and only live off the addiction they are creating in the early game time.

The only device i'd like to give to her pretty early is a ebook reader, but i dont really think she's gonna love it ;-) Lets see whether i will be able to get her reading early on.