Months ago I was visited by a relative who brought their eight year old. She’s single and her boy is ever so slightly mentally not there. He’s smart enough but just not there with everything. Plus the mother is not capable of looking after him. So many wrong things and I hate to judge anything about it … both mother and son are having and will continue to have a hard life.
As we talked, the son spent the entire time with their device looking at YouTube videos.
At one point I wanted to try to make friends and asked him what he was watching … he mumbled and ignored me. I looked over at his video and it was just a completely nonsensical animation of characters running around like in a video game … I couldn’t understand what was happening or why, the cartoon animals were just mumbling nonsense, laughing, running and flashing lights and constant cuts to new scene after new scene. I looked at the kid and he was two steps away from just drooling.
I couldn’t believe it and it scared me. This device was melting any amount of brain power the kid had.
It made me think about myself and what the hell I was doing with my time.
It made me think that the world is all doing the same thing to one degree or another. Some are better, since are terribly worse.
Mechanisms of manipulation and control are getting more and more sophisticated and it’s really fucking sad.
Its like watching someone overdose. It sucks. And we don’t have language about it, even shitty language, like we do for drugs, so it’s hard to even talk to people about.
I have friends with kids like that, and it’s scary. I’m obviously a fan of technology, but critical thinking might go down the drain if children spend all day in front of a screen at such a young age.
I genuinely think there should be a legal limit to when children are allowed independent access to JavaScript & Internet enabled technology. I would suggest twelve years.
Having it be law would remove probably the biggest reason children are drawn to technology initially today: social pressure and anxiety.
I didn’t grow up with anything like this (and I’m pretty young… or I was at some point) and thank fucking God I didn’t. I barely read today as it is, instead wasting time with screens and YouTube and shit like that; I’m happy I had the opportunity to consume hours and hours of time with reading as a child. Not just reading: I learned basically every knot that exists (I still have my copy of Ashley’s Book of Knots), learned an absurd amount of physics (with textbooks! for fun! I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that today), learned to program and use Minix (ok, that was highschool, so a little later), and even got into Marxism.
These are all opportunities I don’t think I could replicate today, because I don’t get bored in the same way today. Now, if I’m bored, I automatically look at my phone (…lemmy…), or open YouTube, or do something else equally stupid. I didn’t have that option when I was young. We didn’t even own a TV. I was forced to do interesting things, and I’m really happy I was, because I’d be an exceedingly illiterate boring moron if I hadn’t read those novels and learned how the universe worked and understood why capitalism sucks.
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds and people will become interesting through other means, but it really frightens me how much dumber I’ve become. I don’t want to imagine how much harder it will be for masses of gen Z and Alpha.
Ok, I feel like I got a little off topic there. Rant over…
Adults today are, at least wherever Western media and culture has taken over, mostly mentally challenged and vacuous consumerists. What hope do their kids have? I feel bad for my future children, ngl, but they might die in the water wars regardless so maybe they won’t have to tolerate nonsense for long, lol.
That’s not developmentally normal even for a tablet kid, fyi. I would help them seek immediate evaluation…
I have a family member who was a tablet kid when they were 8. However they engage with me, their favorite thing is to play the addictive tablet game in my lap and they love when I or others play it with them, especially if you make a story out of it. They watch way too much YouTube but they were delighted when I watched with them, we did thumbs up and thumbs down and talked about what we were watching. They sat in my lap and while laser focused and addicted to the content, were also primarily engaging with me. They sadly are a bit attention starved from their neglectful parents but that’s a lot more developmentally normal imo.
Good god this hits home
Months ago I was visited by a relative who brought their eight year old. She’s single and her boy is ever so slightly mentally not there. He’s smart enough but just not there with everything. Plus the mother is not capable of looking after him. So many wrong things and I hate to judge anything about it … both mother and son are having and will continue to have a hard life.
As we talked, the son spent the entire time with their device looking at YouTube videos.
At one point I wanted to try to make friends and asked him what he was watching … he mumbled and ignored me. I looked over at his video and it was just a completely nonsensical animation of characters running around like in a video game … I couldn’t understand what was happening or why, the cartoon animals were just mumbling nonsense, laughing, running and flashing lights and constant cuts to new scene after new scene. I looked at the kid and he was two steps away from just drooling.
I couldn’t believe it and it scared me. This device was melting any amount of brain power the kid had.
It made me think about myself and what the hell I was doing with my time.
It made me think that the world is all doing the same thing to one degree or another. Some are better, since are terribly worse.
It made me think that humanity is doomed.
Mechanisms of manipulation and control are getting more and more sophisticated and it’s really fucking sad.
Its like watching someone overdose. It sucks. And we don’t have language about it, even shitty language, like we do for drugs, so it’s hard to even talk to people about.
we have it. but its too technical and people seem to have developed an aversion to technical sounding things.
I have friends with kids like that, and it’s scary. I’m obviously a fan of technology, but critical thinking might go down the drain if children spend all day in front of a screen at such a young age.
I genuinely think there should be a legal limit to when children are allowed independent access to JavaScript & Internet enabled technology. I would suggest twelve years.
Having it be law would remove probably the biggest reason children are drawn to technology initially today: social pressure and anxiety.
I didn’t grow up with anything like this (and I’m pretty young… or I was at some point) and thank fucking God I didn’t. I barely read today as it is, instead wasting time with screens and YouTube and shit like that; I’m happy I had the opportunity to consume hours and hours of time with reading as a child. Not just reading: I learned basically every knot that exists (I still have my copy of Ashley’s Book of Knots), learned an absurd amount of physics (with textbooks! for fun! I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that today), learned to program and use Minix (ok, that was highschool, so a little later), and even got into Marxism.
These are all opportunities I don’t think I could replicate today, because I don’t get bored in the same way today. Now, if I’m bored, I automatically look at my phone (…lemmy…), or open YouTube, or do something else equally stupid. I didn’t have that option when I was young. We didn’t even own a TV. I was forced to do interesting things, and I’m really happy I was, because I’d be an exceedingly illiterate boring moron if I hadn’t read those novels and learned how the universe worked and understood why capitalism sucks.
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds and people will become interesting through other means, but it really frightens me how much dumber I’ve become. I don’t want to imagine how much harder it will be for masses of gen Z and Alpha.
Ok, I feel like I got a little off topic there. Rant over…
Adults today are, at least wherever Western media and culture has taken over, mostly mentally challenged and vacuous consumerists. What hope do their kids have? I feel bad for my future children, ngl, but they might die in the water wars regardless so maybe they won’t have to tolerate nonsense for long, lol.
In my experience, it’s either anime characters and flashing lights/colors or some streamer screaming his head off. Both equally nonsensical.
That’s not developmentally normal even for a tablet kid, fyi. I would help them seek immediate evaluation…
I have a family member who was a tablet kid when they were 8. However they engage with me, their favorite thing is to play the addictive tablet game in my lap and they love when I or others play it with them, especially if you make a story out of it. They watch way too much YouTube but they were delighted when I watched with them, we did thumbs up and thumbs down and talked about what we were watching. They sat in my lap and while laser focused and addicted to the content, were also primarily engaging with me. They sadly are a bit attention starved from their neglectful parents but that’s a lot more developmentally normal imo.