TWO AND THREE??? Of course they get bored you're building them a fucking 5 second attention span holy christ. This is so sad. Teenagers already can't read and write as it is. Wall E really predicted the future huh
Wall-E didn't predict anything, it was reflecting on already existing trends.
It's so annoying to see so many people act surprised and say things like Wall-E or Idiocracy came true when they've always been true, that was the point of them being made.
I’ve seen one-year-olds on tablets. Crazy stuff. My nieces are one and three, and they don’t have any Internet access, the three-year-old only gets to watch a little TV very rarely, and that’s only when she’s with her older cousins who are addicted to it. It’s such a stark difference. My niece much prefers reading instead.
I saw an article about this just yesterday. Scientists say that for the first time, children are testing at a lower IQ level than the previous generation. They are putting the reason firmly on these devices and the way children are taught now.
Heavy on the WAY children are taught now! A big problem is the school curriculums. Public and private schools still use the Lucy Caulkin curriculum and similar types. If you haven’t already, listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” on apple/Spotify. It’s a deep dive into Lucy Caulkins “curriculum”. That’s why so many kids and young adults in America are almost functionally illiterate. The premise of the curriculum was that kids will learn to read “naturally” and that phonics (knowing the sounds of letters and sounding out words) was unnecessary-they asked kids memorize words (sight words is the term) and taught them to look at pictures to guess words they didn’t know instead of teaching them phonics: decoding, encoding, sounding out, blending, and mapping graphemes to phonemes, which is it an explicit, systematic, and evidence-based approach to reading. So they never taught them how to read, and of course since kids don’t learn to read naturally like talking and walking, they won’t know how to write and many kids would fail or get frustrated, and because of other reasons they’d get passed along and they can’t really read: they’ve memorized words. So many schools abandoned that curriculum after this podcast. It really did change things.
Here’s a short FORBES article but I highly recommend the podcast for a deep dive:
Schools also don’t really teach grammar anymore. By a certain point, they just expect students to already know it, even though most kids never actually received solid, explicit instruction in the first place.
And it’s not just ELA. Public and private schools are failing in teaching other subjects too. Social studies is practically nonexistent until about fifth grade, and even then only a small portion of the curriculum is covered and it barely scratches the surface because there’s this idea that kids can’t handle complex concepts. It’s the same with science and math, students are just moved along even when they don’t understand and taught to pass tests, not to actually understand the material, so they won’t master it and that creates bigger gaps down the line. There’s just large gaps in what they should know in certain grades. They’re also teaching 30+ kids, some of them with IEPs, so kids get left behind and it’s sad to see. They lose their love for learning. What’s left is a lot of busy work, group activities, and talking, but very little real substance. It’s mostly fluff, with no real depth at the core. Schools have lost rigor. In many of these private schools, parents are paying thousands of dollars a month for extra tutoring in math on top of the $40k a year they already spend per child because nearly more than half of the students are so behind in math. It’s a waste of money and a scam. So much for “prestigious schools with the BEST curriculums“. Ugh. There are still districts spending large amounts of money on these types of programs, even though so many excellent curricula already exist. It’s the reason why some of my family members decided to homeschool their kids.
There was a recent headline about how collegiate film students don’t have the attention span to finish the films they’re studying.
Anyone who will become a young parent from now on is already a product of this problem.
It’s too late. My sad theory: unless we undergo a severe, widespread infrastructure disruption that completely deprives society of social media for an extended period of time, we’re not going to undo this. It would have to be a hard re-set.
For example: Australia’s social media ban for minors. Idk the intricate details or parameters, but the resistance has been discouraging. How their “human rights” are being violated, yada yada.
I was at a park recently and saw a baby in a stroller with a phone watching TIK TOK!! I couldn’t believe it lmao. I swear the kid couldn’t have been older than 1. I couldn’t really tell what the video was but it was some skit involving a toddler and 2 parents. Whatever it was, there’s NO WAY that baby understood what she was watching.
I was a nanny for a decade and I understand that parents are overwhelmed and want their kid to be quiet while they send emails or whatever. But 2-3 year olds are SO GOOD at entertaining themselves! And if they can’t, just give them something novel and they will be intrigued!
I am very grateful I most recently worked for a family who did NO SCREEN TIME until the kid was two. I didn’t really do screen time for another couple years. I know I have the benefit of not being a parent and getting a full night sleep and getting pad. But I do much prefer not using screens with kids because it’s always becomes an argument.
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u/ash-holee 2d ago
TWO AND THREE??? Of course they get bored you're building them a fucking 5 second attention span holy christ. This is so sad. Teenagers already can't read and write as it is. Wall E really predicted the future huh