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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.
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.
Resistance was futile.
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!
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.
I would but my laptop does these just fine and takes up just about as little space while doing a lot more at the same time.
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.
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?
I actually got to go outside and play and use my imagination, and no one to track me or take incriminating evidence of me while I acted upon said imagination....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yeah we only have one TV because you don't really need more with tablets around, and they are far cheaper than the car entertainment systems. The parental controls on the Fire tablets are very granular for making sure they aren't just vegging out all day.
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.
Except that a tablet is not a sign of wealth. Entry level tablets are actually cheaper than many toys aimed at 8 yo kids. In fact, it is probably the cheapest way to keep them occupied.
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!
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.
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
Hard to lean back in a laze-boy chair and type fast on a tablet computer. Even my mom got rid of hers after a month and went back to a laptop. Also easier to read when taken into the kitchen.
No you didn't, you watched tv.
At the risk of stating the obvious, a generation or two back the typical lineup on broadcast TV wasn't nearly as conducive to 24x7 consumption by kids.
When compared to my full tower desktop with corner desk and triple monitors, my laptop is only a little larger than my tablet.
Yeah, I should have gone with a joke about the size of your penis.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Personal Computer Master Race Personal Computer. I'm assuming it means a PC with a discrete graphics processing unit.
"PCMR" refers to people who have chosen to become masters of their own computing and video gaming experience by acquiring a device where the person who owns it, not some app store monopolist, controls what computing is done. And if you want to (say) race, you're not limited to the steering wheel controllers approved by the peripheral monopolist.
So what does the child do once the homework is done but the meter is still refilling?
Well, since the only two meaningful things that children can possibly do outside of school hours are homework and staring at a phone or tablet, the only real choice they have is to sit facing the wall until they go to bed, still crying their eyes out from all the opportunities their parents robbed from them to grow up in a myopic virtual universe and ignore the real one around them.
TL;DR: I really hope you were joking.
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.
We've been the slowest part of computing for the last three decades.
Microsoft: "Hold my beer."
Aircraft for one. My laptop doesn't usually have room to open fully.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
An entry-level tablet is less than $50. If live in a western country and can't afford to pay $50 for your kid, be it for a tablet or something else non essential, it means you are either at the level where your health is compromised or you have trouble keeping a budget.
A tablet is the cheapest screen device you can get. Can't afford a TV, get a tablet. The hard part is the internet connection. If you can find a free WiFi, that's great, otherwise, maybe you can find a deal with your neighbors/roommates or something. Unlike with the tablet, internet is a monthly payment, and even with the cheapest plans, it adds up quickly.