Okay but WHY are parents doing that? You went only as far as "parents are doing this" and then never made the next conclusion.
Parents give their kids iPads and hand them over to TV as babysitters why? When did that start? When did kids start getting a lot of their socialization at school and much less of it in the general world?
My grandfather lived on a farm. He had twelve brothers and sisters who made it past birth. He was one of the babies, so he spent most of his time following his older brother Tad around. His father's sisters lived with the family, and there were people up the road that the young kids could go look in on. Cooking for neighbors and sending your kids back and forth or just handing one of the babies off to one of the aunties, as well as the fact that his mother was able to stay home, meant that childcare was split among family, friends and neighbors. (He was also expected to go work in the coal mines when he was old enough and one of his brothers died of pertussis, I'm not glorifying his childhood.)
My father grew up as the first generation after the great post-WWII sundering of the American family unit and the creation of the idea of the "nuclear family." My grandparents moved around a bit for the Navy. When he left the Navy, they were able financially to buy a nice 3BR house on his pension. Dad ranged all over his small town. His mom could still afford to stay home full time, but without the support of aunties, mothers and mothers-in-law, sometimes to get a breath, Grammy just said "oh you can go watch TV."
Both of my parents had to work in order for them to buy the house they wanted in the school district they wanted. I spent more time watching TV in the afternoons than they wanted me to, but when I was young, Dad was at the office and Mom was at class, and when I was older, Dad needed to get this article done and Mom was teaching class. Like many kids of the 80s, I was a "latchkey kid." I was still able to range over a wide area when I wanted to, though, so I didn't spend as much time watching TV or playing on the computer (our shitty Apple IIe knockoff, a Franklin Ace 2000) as kids who didn't live in the ass end of nowhere in a forest. Mom had the same supports as her mother did, which was "not many."
During my childhood and adolescence, the range of kids got smaller. Turning your kids out the door to just go run around (which is actually super important for brain development and health, having time alone with themselves and their peers, without adult supervision) became less and less acceptable. Kids started to go to the mall, which was viewed as better bc there were always adults not far away, and it was a contained environment.
Then I had my daughter in 2000. I'm going to be totally fucking blunt, here: we were poor as fuck bc we made the decision that I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars a month for someone to raise my kid in daycare, but we were lucky even at the time to make that happen. It's nearly impossible to have a parent able to stay at home now unless you're at minimum upper-middle-class. The economic pressures have changed: wages are flat, inflation is ridiculous, you can't do the things you used to do bc there's no money.
It was beautiful but also terrible. My mother was hours away, I had no one to lean on, and my partners worked and dumped the baby on me even when they were home because "childcare is your job". Even when I left them both and got a more supportive partner, we both had to work our asses off once she hit kindergarten. We lived in apartments with high turnover, bc nowadays poor people (generally speaking) move around a lot more than they used to. So we didn't know our neighbors when MK was little, and I had no one I could hand her off to so I could have a minute of peace, or cook dinner safely when i was too exhausted to cook AND entertain the child AND my partner was still working. Did I stick my kid in front of the TV? Yes. Did she get to play with my cellphone even though the only game on my Nokia 3300 was Snake? Yes. Did I have the support I needed from my community? Fuck no! When she was a baby I was so isolated and unsupported that I seriously considered suicide. And that's not unusual.
When she was 8, we were able to get a townhouse in a blue-collar neighborhood with a lot of kids. I was utterly determined to give MK stability: a childhood where we didn't move house a lot, one where she could walk places if she wanted to, and one where there were other kids in the neighborhood. In achieving this, we were extraordinarily lucky, and among our peers, out of the norm. I had a corporate job at the time which I stumbled into bc I'm white and well-spoken and good at sales and could make $60-70k a year without a degree. (Then I got sick and lost that type of job forever, but that's another story.)
My kid had a much smaller range of being able to go rove than I had, but because we were determined and very very lucky, she could still do that. However, the attitude around free-range kids of the variety that my grandfather, father and I had been? That changed, and the kids tended toward staying in one or the other's houses bc that would keep the nosy neighbors from calling the cops about "unsupervised children outdoors." (Yeah, this really happened, and a lot.) And what did they do inside?
Now MK is 21 years old, and I look at the families starting in her generation, and the families I know. The ones who are doing well in this specific sense, with a minimum of screen time, either:
- Live near family
- Live in a polycule
- Have the money to hire someone full time
And if they don't have those things, then even before the pandemic, the answer is "give the baby a fucking iPad so you can fold laundry or take a shit in peace." And that's no different than when I put MK in front of a TV with Ice Age on for the 900th time so I could make lunch or brush my teeth without her literally hanging from me or go shut myself in a closet and breathe for a minute.
In the industrialized world, and especially in the United States, we expect parents to be able to both work FT jobs - and most parents are working 50-60 hours a week or have multiple jobs; keep houses clean enough to be shown on Zoom calls every fucking day; feed, bathe, and help their children with an absolutely monstrous and out-of-scope amount of homework; manage the activities and appointments necessary for a well-rounded child bc "structured activities" have replaced free-range kids, to the detriment of those children; and somehow in the middle of that, find enough time to take a goddamned shit in peace without handing the child some kind of technological distraction for 5 fucking minutes.
Add on top of this the fact that I really wanted MK, I love her to pieces, I think she's the best thing I've ever done with my life, I had 12 miscarriages trying to have another kid (or at least open to it) bc I wanted a big family when I was younger, and I still thought about ending it a couple times when things got really hard, bc I had no support. In a lot of places even when I had her, a lot of people had a lot less choice about that bc the right to family planning is in a very practical sense unattainable to a lot of my peers. Planned Parenthood may do sliding scale but you still have to take a bus into town to get there, which costs time and money you don't have. Abortions took hours of travel that required a car, cost money you didn't have, and local conservatives are still doing their best to make them actually inaccessible and skirt the edges of the law.
So even if we assume all of those children are 100% wanted, some of those children are being had in a situation where they're not economically viable. Quality child care costs thousands a month; an iPad costs like $50 a month on the family plan. Fucking bargain, honestly. Grammy isn't here for them to hand the kid to her for 5 minutes.
We have, as a society, blown apart the family as it used to exist as a support dynamic, done nothing to replace it, placed incredible pressures on parents which did not exist in prior generations and which increase generation upon generation, and then people like you tut tut how we have to blame the parents for this. And really what's usually meant there is "blame the mom," because that's what we always mean when we say "blame the parents, they're failing."
Blaming parents and saying "oh we have to put responsibility on them" is intellectually lazy and requires someone to willfully not look at how the experience of family and child-rearing has changed in the past century. The economic liberation of women didn't lead to true liberation for anyone, because capitalism looked at that and said NOW BOTH OF YOU CAN WORK. This is not an argument for going back to a "traditional" mom-stays-home nuclear family, bc that wasn't traditional and started this whole mess, and also yikes, gendered expectations. Not for nothing but there's a reason why the most stable child-raising situations I'm aware of exist in polycules where gender expectations are torn up and there are 3+ adults raising the kids, or in homes where multiple generations still live under one roof.
It takes more than two people to successfully raise a child, and the US has literally dismantled every support structure that parents had, both family and societal, and then people like you have the fucking gall to say mm well we do have to blame the parents actually like parents these days are somehow just all totally fucking lazy and don't really want to raise their children, they want someone or something else to do it for them, mmhmm, it's all on them, yup, that's the answer.
Like honestly, please do a moment of actual thoughtful inquiry into why your brain instantly went to "blame the mother parents" and get the fuck out of my notes with this sloppy, counterfactual, capitalist-media-driven narrative that absolves society as a whole and bullshit capitalist predation on individuals of the damage they have done and continue to do.
The reason a lot of us build found families is in part bc we are distancing ourselves from toxic family patterns, but also bc there is not an economic or practical way in the modern US as currently set up to have the kind of family support and structure that our grandparents and great-grandparents had. Zoning laws and landlords discriminate against multi-generational households -- bonus round, find a 4 bedroom apartment or house for rent near you. If you can find one at all, tell me how much it costs!
Like, fuck! I can't fully express how mentally lazy this point of view is. I usually agree with you but you really fucking missed the mark here.
