My 3 year old watched TV for the first time for 2 minutes in her life (it was hard hiding it from her in an airplane on an overhead screen) and I can tell that TV is generally bad for kids at that age.
I find the type of show makes a big difference, finding something thoughtful is important (and hard). We also like to set a time limit, usually 1-2 episodes to make the transition easy. Also, no tablets, just commercial-free TV so we can watch with them.
They re-enact fun/positive stuff from shows and don't get locked in or desperate for TV. Seems to work for us.
An easy at home setup is Raspberry Pi running Batocera and Zaparoo with NFC cards. If you buy a three ring binder you can neatly organize the NFC cards.
Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers for the cards.
External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet. I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Sony TVs are some of the most sane options in the TV market right now. Generally decent, and they don't fight you if you want to use them without connecting them to the internet. Still not perfect and they'll cost you more, but it's a worthwhile trade to me.
There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space: https://us.yotoplay.com/ https://us.tonies.com/ I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seem…
We have a yoto for our son, and its a great experience, but be prepared for pricing of content to match what we used to page for cds/tapes. e.g., the pout-pout fish card is $8 USD for 10 minutes of content [1]. I think that's ok, as he actually would get a lot more than 10 minutes of use out of it, and its great to pay the creators while not having to worry about ads manipulating my kid. But it highlights how expecta…
Tonie boxes are extremely widespread in Germany, and while the media are similarly priced, there's a huge used market and public libraries have them as well. Nothing is tied to a specific account or box, so there are no restrictions on resale or lending. Almost shocking in this day and age.
Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too expensive. A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
i quite like you idea. floppies are pretty easy to destroy, especially by kids. i wouldn’t trust that to last that long.
My 3 year old watched TV for the first time for 2 minutes in her life (it was hard hiding it from her in an airplane on an overhead screen) and I can tell that TV is generally bad for kids at that age.
How can you tell? What's the thing that made you say "this is bad for her", and why is it not the same for you?
not that guy, but it would cause our kids to completely emotionally deregulate, and become fixated on the TV for a while.
and most TV is not great for people. there is a reason depression and anxiety correlate with TV time
An easy way to do this is to get an inexpensive DVD / BluRay player and disks. My (expensive) BluRay player will turn the TV on and select itself via HDMI.
But that would teach children to expect the same deterministic output for a given input. Surely we can’t have that in the age of artificially reseeded LLMs?
My 3 year old watched TV for the first time for 2 minutes in her life (it was hard hiding it from her in an airplane on an overhead screen) and I can tell that TV is generally bad for kids at that age.
similar observation here, with a 2.33-year old. In small doses we've exposed him to videos[1], never unsupervised, never as a parental substitute, but there are a class of them (which happen to be the lowest-effort, highest-contrast, most insipidly soundtracked CGI dreck I can possibly imagine) which are absolute baby crack. He watched some a few months ago and now he can't get them out of his head. It has gotten to…
we had generally the same experience but with disney princesses
was sort of a crutch for a sick kid or when things were slammed (e.g. kid 2 or 3 was also sick or we were otherwise busy) but we had to limit them heavily.
we also made the mistake of playing her the soundtracks, which ended up with listening to Aladdin or Frozen on repeat. All told not bad music compared to the drek they're putting out on YT now...