A mother has been labelled ‘lazy’ after revealing she allows her daughter to spend two hours each day on the iPad.
She took to the forum Mumsnet to suggest that her child's advanced learning is due to her playing educational activities on the Apple device every day.
“Our daughter is nearly 2.5 and watches A LOT of iPad every day. Hours of it. It’s the go-to for her otherwise very present and engaging and loving and affectionate father,” she wrote.
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The mother added that she believed her daughter was advanced in language and numeracy.
“She can name all but three or four letters of the alphabet (which we haven’t actively taught her),” she continued.
“She knows how to count actual objects, up to about five or six (we’ve taught her this mostly. But it’s been reinforced by YouTube videos).
"She knows how to say three colours in Spanish (we’ve not taught her this).
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“She can also now independently type in the first two or three letters of something specific she’s looking for, and choose the correct auto-suggested word from the search list.”
But despite spending so much time on the tablet, the mother maintained that her child also spends time with her parents and plays outside as well.
However, many on the forum criticised the mum’s approach to parenting.
One user wrote: “Sorry but my view is that this is lazy parenting and is probably affecting your child's development. I'm astounded by the amount of kids I see on their devices in all sorts of scenarios, not interacting or playing. Just sat staring at a screen.”
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Another said in part: “I don't know, I never let mine until they started Primary school, partly for lazy reasons, because they don't miss what they don't know, so we never had an argument about screen or tablet. They didn't seem behind anyone else.”
Meanwhile, another parent flagged that too much screen time may harm the children’s social and emotional development.
“I don’t know if it’s because of the constant fast-paced images going into their brain at a pace they can’t control, or if it’s merely because hours of screen time is hours of missed real world two-way social interaction, but either way; yes, it is damaging to give a lot of screentime to young children,” they begun.
“Sure your kid may learn the alphabet/numbers faster, but that isn’t important at this age, what you want is healthy brain growth and emotional development and hours of screentime is not going to give that.”
Charisa Bossinakis