"Shut up and take your Youtube Kids" approach is very popular nowadays. BTW parents in all times did something stupid instead of considering their 0-3 y.o. baby as learn-able person who can do some successes in music, reading, arithmetic, physical culture and anything not stupid.

So, thinking that in previous times parenting was awesome and now it is lame is wrong.

While this is true on many levels, one might also forget why it does happen:

- parents living away from grandparents, so the family hasn't support (babysitting isn't affordable by everyone, plus everyone can't be trusted nowadays)

- absorbing jobs, no real work-life balance

- the need of parents to dedicate time to themselves and lack of it because of the preceding points

I get distracted by my phone because I get bored playing with my kids. It is fun to play with them, for a little while, but after that it is work. I put my phone physically far away to prevent getting distracted.

You missed the key part about women joining the workforce in the 70s.

Feminism as tool to enlarge the labor force and depress wages is the greatest propaganda victory in human history.

I’m not understanding this comment. Should women not have the ability to make their own income independently? Are you advocating that feminism purpose (not motivation) was not to ensure basic rights to half our species but to provide human labor to some capital machine ?

Yes.

Well in this economy, that's a huge win as well and I shouldn't be regarded as a negative aspect.

This says more about parents anxieties about the world than anything about raising babies. And what’s going to mess up kids more than any electronic gizmo? Parental anxiety.

No. It says that smartphones interfere with adult-child relationships.

Smartphones are great when used for direction finding or ordering food or something, totally negative when used to scroll endlessly through tik tok or instagram.

Many people are in total denial that social media have basically turned them into drug addict zombies.

On the upside, tik tok, like video games, is probably great at reducing street crime by keeping teens and young adults plugged into the matrix.

back in my day it was prevalence of TV. Before that it was cinema. Before that... and it goes all the way to Plato who lamented the tempores and mores.

yes i remember my parents bringing a TV with them to a restaurant and watching it instead of interacting with me, and bringing a cinema with them too