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42% of Americans Under 8 Have Their Own Tablet (axios.com)
A reader shares an Axios report: A whopping 42% of children ages 0-8 have their own tablet device, up from less than 1% in 2011, according to Common Sense Media's newest national "Media Use by Kids" census. Families with young children are now more likely to have a subscription video service such as Netflix or Hulu (72%) than they are to have cable TV (65%). 10% of kids age 8 or under own a "smart" toy that connects to the internet and 9% have a voice-activated virtual assistant device available to them in the home, such as an Amazon Echo or Google Home.
8-year-olds are the only ones who still find tablets useful.
Meh, give it another 50 years and it'll still be kids being raised by [different form factor]
I'm not injecting much snark into "raised", feel free to substitute that word with "occupied" or "babysat". I have other parenting bones to pick if I feel like it.
Not too surprising. Just as the Boomers, were suck in front of the TV, Gen X were given Video Games, Menials have Cell Phones. It makes scene that today's kids have the newest technology to pacify them. We can tout bad parenting... But in truth having an outlet where the child is out of your hands for an hour or so, it overall beneficial. Kids before that technology were just beaten if they were too much of a problem... So having a kid, watch a movie on a tablet in terms of perspective is a good thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My kid does just because it's an older device that I can't get much for anyway. It's helped him feel confident about doing activities himself at a young age and feeling like he can discover how things work. He's better with letters and numbers because of it, and knows certain things about animals, bugs, colors, shapes, things like weather and planets and everyday life such as various jobs and things people do, in a kind of vicarious way that he couldn't do otherwise. He does about 20-30 minutes a day on there since he was 2 and it's been a positive experience. I make sure there are no ads and put it on airplane mode, and of course review any apps before I let him play them. It also helps me know what he's talking about when he tries to relate his experiences.
Resistance was futile.
Amazon has been selling child-proof tablets for years.
We are all DEVO.
All the kids in my school district have iPads from Kindergarten on. They use the heck out of them, too. Make music, little stop-motion videos, a little coding stuff, and some math/reading games. I don't even have to push them to play those things.....they are just better than Mavis Beacon when I was younger.
Only covers kids whose parents have email and are on some unspecified email list. "Methodology. This report presents the results of a nationally representative, probability-based online survey of 1,454 parents of children age 8 or under, conducted from Jan. 20, 2017, to Feb. 10, 2017. The survey was designed by Common Sense and VJR Consulting and fielded by the research firm GfK, using its KnowledgePanel©, a probability-based web panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population." https://www.commonsensemedia.o... Aren't surveys fun?
In the 80's a sign of wealth was having multiple TV's. Main set in the living room and smaller sets for the kids and maybe in the bedroom.
This is the same thing except it's a tablet and not a TV
... then use it as an alarm-clock/potential WhatsApp/Facebook backup. ... That's what my daughter did with my old tablet anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Families with young children are now more likely to have a subscription video service such as Netflix or Hulu (72%) than they are to have cable TV (65%).
That's because cable TV is shit value for the money. It's (generally) tied to a physical location, requires special hardware to record and view at a time convenient to you (which they charge extra for), has a huge amount of really crappy programming, they refuse to make ala-carte channel selection an option, their streaming options (generally) suck, and it's very expensive. $40/month gets you a very basic selection of channels with not a lot of interesting programming and no archive of content to watch.
In short:
Hard to time shift
Hard to location shift
Expensive
Crappy assortment of programming
Wall to wall advertisements
No archive of content to watch
Is it really any wonder people are dropping cable?
Parents need to remember that your kid is learning from your behavior. If you have your nose in your phone and tablet all day every day, you are teaching your kid that that is acceptable behavior. No matter how much you try to restrict their access to it, they are very likely to mimic you in the end. If you use a phone and tablet sparsely and put an emphasis on doing other things, the kid is much more likely to do the same. So, giving them a tablet isn't that huge of a deal so long as you yourself don't have one surgically attached at the hip.
Big deal, I had a tablet when I was 8 years old (57 years ago) too. It had 64 pages of lined paper and I put it to good use. Now get off my lawn!
Kids before that technology were just beaten if they were too much of a problem... So having a kid, watch a movie on a tablet in terms of perspective is a good thing.
Are you seriously arguing that access to tablets (or other electronic gadgets) is the reason children aren't being physically beaten? You have a very twisted view of the world my friend.
Almost all of them, 100% of them had an amoxicillin tablet sometime or the other. All it takes is one ear infection.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ruining their eyes before they are even 10!
There is a reason for the nearsightedness epidemic and it is mobile internet devices like tablets and cell phones.
In Seoul 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.
The US is approaching that number.
42% of Americans Under 8 Have a... Digital Device to Do Parenting and Handle Any Amount of Attention for them so they can dabble on their device(s). Shameless, really.
Reminds me of a Geoff Ryman sci-fi short I just listened to not too long ago about BESTsi doing all-things-parenting because mom was to pre-occupied with her own life.
I am a parent and my children use tablets daily. Each child has their own LeapFrog tablet full of educational apps and games. My toddler can count forward and backward from 1-50, understands there's a number zero, can actually count items, can recite the alphabet forward and backward (backward is a bit more difficult), can recognize numbers greater than 10 on signs and products, can draw some letters with varying success with pencil and paper, and a number of other impressive feats such as recognizing animals and dinosaurs by name when out at museums and other locations.
My older child also saw a large improvement to vocabulary and educational factors when they were first introduced to a LeapFrog tablet.
I don't say this to brag. I say this because the technology is powerful for parents so long as they harness it for good and supervise it.
Yes, it can be used as a pacifier, but if it is a pacifier, why can't there be a big upside? Why can't kids learn while being entertained? My older child almost knows more about prehistoric eras and creatures than I do, because they've been provided with the information through apps, games, and educational television shows and documentaries.
Any technology or advancement becomes what you make it. You can let your childrens' brains rot on mindless cartoons, or you can take advantage of the innumerable educational resources out there and put them in front of your kids' eyes. Make them learn. Learning is the only responsibility a child has, but it's really your responsibility as a child to take them to the water and offer them a drink of it.
Just like the numbskulls who claim video games make people violent, anyone who discredits technology and childrens' use of it without considering what the children are consuming is a fool. Don't be a fool. Your kids can benefit from early exposure to fun apps.
I say this as somebody who didn't let their children consume any technology or television in the first year of life because research indicates that exposure too early is also harmful. There's a balance at play here. Once your child begins showing signs of outward intelligence after the first year, that's about the time when it's okay to start introducing tech, nature shows, and educational content that goes beyond toys. Take advantage of the time you have because children's ability to learn diminishes after the age of 6 (their brain growth slows down by quite a bit, so language and other complex learning becomes much more difficult).
Embrace technology that benefits your children and reject the technology that hurts them. That's plain as day.
First, this is now news. Second, could you possibly find a worse source of information on the subject? For example, how about this article from 2013: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com...?
Anyone that has a child knows not only that young children regularly use smartphones and tablet but also that school systems are regularly using tablets as educational tools. In fact, the school system my daughter is in requires it and has done so since the 2nd grade. This is not a new thing. This has been going on for several years. My daughter has been playing video games since she was 2 and started using a tablet around 4. By the time my daughter was 3, she was pretty good at Mario Kart for the WII.
Some other things you might be surprised to know exist: 1) After school clubs for writing video games, 2) After school clubs for building robots, 3) Teachers using mobile apps to teach kids basic programming skills like hopscotch. Young kids soak this stuff up like a sponge and they're going to be running circles around many of the adults that are around now when they become adults.
This should come as a surprise to no one, especially slashdot. The good paying jobs of the future are largely going to be in the STEM fields. School systems have modified their curriculum accordingly.
We'll make great pets
They can't appreciate it on as many levels as I can.
42% of Americans under 8 will grow up to be socially awkward/avoidant/have social anxiety issues because they weren't properly socialized by age 8.
What about the health effects from the immediate proximity of the table to the child. While it is great that they have a learning and experience tool at their disposal, I.E. YouTube Kids, at what cost does this come.
2.4 GHz is the same frequency as a microwave oven which is 1000 watts, while the tablet is 1 watt. So in effect, you are slow roasting some part of your body. What does this do to a child's DNA?
Go to mobileread.com to read about ereaders. I use 5 year old Kobo and Sony ereaders.
Do I take the red tablet or the blue tablet to get the hell out of here?
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Moses would be so proud.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Its generally better than TV, however. While kids might have Sesame Street to watch for an hour a day and the rest was regular brainless content, you can load up the tablet with a lot of educational apps to keep them "pacified" today other than just dumping them in front of Netflix. And even if it is Netflix, there are a lot of educational kids shows available on Netflix as well.
When my kids got old enough we canceled cable TV. They get some game time on the phones and moms' ipad and watch some kid tv on dads' laptop but they go to the f&*(ng library and aren't allowed to use the pin to rent a terminal and they can talk world history well beyond their peers (for whom, like their parents, nothing interesting happened before 9/11, Obama or Trump depending ... ) Books are still the best medium for ideas [insert Medium diss here].
I've lectured adults, who don't have to listen to me of course and usually don't, to stop the OCD Facebook and confirmation bias blog surfing and read something that's longer than a web page.
I did, except f#$@ng slashdot of course - luckily the comment threads here are generally troll fests these days - and get a lot more done. Stackoverflow and a few to remain nameless popular science aggregators and google news throughout the day to keep track of major disasters and have a cursory knowledge of whatever partisan outrage du jour might come up at work so I can sidestep.
"This should come as a surprise to no one, especially slashdot. The good paying jobs of the future are largely going to be in the STEM fields. School systems have modified their curriculum accordingly."
There is not a tablet in our house, just three phones (mom/dad/house - house phone just for calling/texting mom/dad), one laptop, and one TV (on about 2 hours a week). Our 10-year-old daughter played her first real video game this month. Their only exposure to computers at school is to support classical learning (Accelerated Reader tests, etc) - not for the sake of inserting technology unnecessarily. My life experience tells me that being immersed in technology from a young age is less important for success in a technical field - what's more important is a really good education (reading/writing/math/science/logic/history/ethics/etc). Person with that foundation will be able to graft on technology (or whatever else they want) relatively quickly and successfully.
In the last six years, a lot of parents have upgraded their tablets. My sister in law is one of them. She "gave" her old tablet to her son, he's only allowed to use it a few hours a week but for the purpose of this he'd be considered to have his own tablet. So this survey doesn't actually mean a lot.
That said, letting electronics raise your child is a common practice and not a good thing. It's not new, the tablets are new but personally I grew up watching excessive television and that's really no better. It may even be worse as there's no real interaction with the television. The point is, this survey makes it sound like tablets are causing some new wave of neglectful parenting, but that's not the case at all they're just the new go-to distraction taking the place of the last one. I'm sure before television, there were other things parents would let children do that weren't good for them but got them out of the parents' hair. My thinking is, exposure to any of these things (tablets included) isn't inherently bad, and kids having their own isn't even bad, but anything in the absence of good parenting becomes a bad thing.
this exemplifies everything that is wrong with merkin society.
Our 10-year-old daughter played her first real video game this month. Their only exposure to computers at school is to support classical learning (Accelerated Reader tests, etc) - not for the sake of inserting technology unnecessarily. My life experience tells me that being immersed in technology from a young age is less important for success in a technical field - what's more important is a really good education (reading/writing/math/science/logic/history/ethics/etc). Person with that foundation will be able to graft on technology (or whatever else they want) relatively quickly and successfully.
Then your 10 year old daughter will be behind the curve. My daughter is doing both and tests way above the national average in all disciplines including accelerated readers. I lost count of how many books she's finished. You're an idiot to presume that you can't do it all. That's just an excuse to be mediocre and not get in the game. To each their own. If you want to be a luddite go right ahead. The rest of us will out-compete you for resources.
We'll make great pets
"No," shout the Vogons, "Resistance is USELESS!"
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Families with young children are now more likely to have a subscription video service such as Netflix or Hulu (72%) than they are to have cable TV (65%).
That's because cable TV is shit value for the money. It's (generally) tied to a physical location, requires special hardware to record and view at a time convenient to you (which they charge extra for), has a huge amount of really crappy programming, they refuse to make ala-carte channel selection an option, their streaming options (generally) suck, and it's very expensive. $40/month gets you a very basic selection of channels with not a lot of interesting programming and no archive of content to watch.
In short:
Hard to time shift
Hard to location shift
Expensive
Crappy assortment of programming
Wall to wall advertisements
No archive of content to watch
Is it really any wonder people are dropping cable?
Most of the big cable companies have phone apps now. Xfinity has been pushing advertisements for this on me for a while. They also seem to be working on the time shifting.
That said, most cable channels are terrible value for money.
I've had Comcast, AT&T and Dish and their apps all suck. It's almost like they're laughing at me for trying to use their stuff. They either under provision or have buggy interfaces to weird data issues like a single dropped packet causing the video to stutter or abort.
Netflix handles all of this fine. Bandwidth drop-off? it just gets a bit more pixelated, on the fly. Your home internet down? Just tether it to your phone (I have near-unlimited data) My kids don't watch a lot of TV but when they do it's most likely Netflix (added bonus: many Netflix-originals have audio and subtitles in many languages - this is a boon as my kids get to practice their 2nd language).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Oh please. Your daughter will be out sucking cock like a Dyson just like all her friends. You forgot high school, old man.
A whopping 42% of children ages 0-8 have their own tablet device
WHAT? They do?????
MOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!
We need to talk NOW!
(And stop shutting that basement door, dang it!)
How expensive are these? If not in an upscale neighborhood I would expect a significant outcry if the public elementary schools demanded that significant extra expense.
How expensive are these? If not in an upscale neighborhood I would expect a significant outcry if the public elementary schools demanded that significant extra expense.
They have a rental program and they make arrangements for folks that are lower income like school lunch programs. It's hardly an upscale neighborhood. I would call it a middle class neighborhood. That's the problem with the educational system. It's only as good as the tax dollars can pay for. Therefore, if you live in a rural area or inner city, you're screwed. I came from a lower class, rural family and I had to work my way out of it. It wasn't easy but I did it.
We'll make great pets
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Err....go outside and play with their friends?
That's dangerous...
for the parents. Local law enforcement in many places seems to consider playing outside to imply parental neglect. See, for example, "Children spend less time outside than prison inmates", "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS", "#1. Mom Arrested for Letting Children Play Outside", and "#5. Letting Kids Walk Places Alone".
Still, what between sunset and bedtime?
You can draw, write, animate, and even start fires with it. No, it's not a Note 7. It's kind of limited on memory, but if the average sheet of paper holds 3500 zeros, at 100 sheets, that's 42.7246 KB of storage. Good thing too, because the RAM sucks...*looks in the mirror. Pen marks on the arm as "Swap" space.*
"42% of Americans Under 8 Have Their Own Tablet"
The title should have been:
42% of American Parents are Morons.
Just another day in Paradise