Slashdot Mirror
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.
Only because you have no imagination. I'm still using mine as a light browser, email client, videophone, occasional gaming time waster, VNC client, as well as acting as the remote for my soundbar, TV and Plex server.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
Tablets are useful, don't be a dolt. They are not desktop replacements. They are not laptop replacements. They are not essential-must have items.
For kids they're great pacifiers. But my son, who is 9, is at the point where he wants a PCMR PC, and tablets are becoming more of a utility rather than the center of his world.
The problem is that some marketing dolt somewhere kept trying to push the idea that tablets were going to replace computers. It didn't happen, it's not going to happen.
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?
My kids have an unfiltered but monitored Internet Connection. They also have a separate account than mine, on the PC (Windows) and laptop (Windows). They have no tablet or smart phone yet.
I have analyzed the data gathered from their gaming and website accessing for the last 6 months and found one occurrence of questionable data, which was an ad to a zombie game. In fact, it was an image containing "other games from us", split in 4, and one of the quarters had an image of a cartoon character shooting a cartoon zombie. The most likely reason for the "cleanliness" of their data is the fact that major data providers (Microsoft, Google) have become so good at establishing and reinforcing the information bubble that it effectively protects them from accessing questionable sources, namely they don't see them in "recommended" data (be it other games, Youtube videos, etc).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yep. Our 5 year old has my old tablet. But that doesn't mean he is glued to it 12 hours a day. He probably uses it about 1-2 hours a week such as on Saturday mornings when we just are not read to get up when he is. It is also very nice to load it with a few favorite movies for car trips. Even then he only watches maybe an hour or two's worth of movies/shows over 8 hours of driving.
Like many things, there can be responsible use or irresponsible misuse. I see nothing wrong with modest amounts of TV watching, but I am also not about to use it as a baby sitter.
my ten year old older kid is always on youtube, but he can describe exactly how a car's powertrain works from the stuff he watches. Not like when i vegged out to stupid westerns in the 80's
As opposed to Great Briton, France, The United States, Soviet Union, China...
Eugenics was a popular idea globally at the time. In the United States, children of poor people or criminals were sterilized at birth. We are still inflected with nationalism, where by virtue of or Race, culture, religion, or where we were born, we somehow are better then someone else.
Sadly enough the side that won WWII were guilty with their own crimes against humanity, as trying to exterminate inferiors was a popular notion of the time. It is just that one side won, and was able to cast judgement on the side that had loss. At least on the bright side, after casting judgement there was some insight to adjust their own moral code to prevent from being too hypocritical.
Now Germany seem to do things worse then the Allies did. However the Allies were not that far from it, just some small changes could had pushed us over the edge.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.