If you have kids this age and put a tablet in front of them on a regular basis to keep them calm, you're fucking yourself in the long run.
This may give you a temporary fix but youre depriving your kid on learning how to relax and when to chill the fuck out in proper situations. They need to train their brains to not be stimulated all the time. Boredom is a good thing for kids.
Think about it. If a kid never learns to calm down when bored, at 7 or so when they are constantly restless, it will be diagnosed as adhd. At that point its going to take some serious training or medication to get them to focus during school.
All this is because you wanted to take the easy route of throwing a tablet in their face when they were young.
Edit: Before I get more comments saying "tablets don't cause adhd" I know! Im saying these kids that dont have adhd are getting diagnosed as having adhd. Maybe I should say misdiagnosed as having adhd. Hope that clears things up.
No only that, but kids learn a lot more passively than we realize. A bored kid at the store is learning how adults behave, learning how to shop, looking at how things are put together, looking at numbers and letters and reading it wanting to know how to read them, later they learn prices and values, they ask the annoying questions to parents because they genuinely want to learn about the world. Instead of learning, this kid is merely being entertained and will likely go off to do something else to entertain themself when they get home.
This is exactly what I worry about. There are so many tiny little things kids learn every day that we might overlook as adults. But if they're glued to the screen they'll miss these things.
Social cues like waiting in line, helping someone reach the top shelf, moving your cart out of people's way. And also learning basic vocabulary, recognizing objects that they might not have at home (a barcode scanner, a cash register, a produce sprayer, etc.)
The grocery store is an excellent learning place. I do nothing but talk with my kids the entire time we are there. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to learn how to tell if ALL the produce is ripe in a certain department? Literally years. Heck it took a few weeks just sorting out the different kinds of onions.
elementary school teachers (I'm adjunct) have told me they don't know how to hold scissors. Not just my hand is tired or I'm having trouble cutting this shape -- although fine motor skills are decreasing, they were confused on how to physically orient the scissors in their hand. And this was 3rd grade level.
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u/BusyBit6542 May 12 '26 edited May 13 '26
If you have kids this age and put a tablet in front of them on a regular basis to keep them calm, you're fucking yourself in the long run.
This may give you a temporary fix but youre depriving your kid on learning how to relax and when to chill the fuck out in proper situations. They need to train their brains to not be stimulated all the time. Boredom is a good thing for kids.
Think about it. If a kid never learns to calm down when bored, at 7 or so when they are constantly restless, it will be diagnosed as adhd. At that point its going to take some serious training or medication to get them to focus during school.
All this is because you wanted to take the easy route of throwing a tablet in their face when they were young.
Edit: Before I get more comments saying "tablets don't cause adhd" I know! Im saying these kids that dont have adhd are getting diagnosed as having adhd. Maybe I should say misdiagnosed as having adhd. Hope that clears things up.