I need to start following this thread. Interesting stuff just the last couple pages, and learned a couple of things.
I've got a 2.5-year-old, and another coming at the end of February. Both girls. My wife and I are basically glued to our phones or the TV or the computer 24/7, which I think has made an impression on my toddler since she has essentially given very little interest to screen time. She's passively watched quite a few things but is constantly in her own head playing with things. She's watched Jurassic Park already. "I want to watch something scary." "I want to watch dinosaurs." "I want to watch Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman." She knows the entire Justice League already. But again, she doesn't really watch. The only thing she's ever actually sat down and watched with me were the two Home Alone movies. She actually managed to stare at the TV for the first hour of both of those before getting up to do something else.
I grew up with four younger sisters, so as soon as I got a Nintendo at like, 7 or 8 years old, I was glued to that thing. I was the oldest and only boy, so I got my own room. I had a small 10-11" black and white TV hooked up in my bedroom. My rich grandmother would buy me 2-3 games for my birthday and Christmas, with one sprinkled in if we found something at a pawn shop. Needless to say, my screentime was insane. And still is. I was the network admin in our house growing up. 10Base-T with 4+ PC's, using a software gateway to tunnel the internet through my computer on a fuckin' dial-up modem. To no surprise, I finally got into IT after 10 years of avoiding it and trying to make it work in Finance. I tried introducing an old iPhone 4 to the kid with some dated apps that would still run on it, but all she wanted to do was take selfies for about 3 minutes, pretend to talk for a couple of minutes, then set it down to go do something else.
I'm not really going to be too anal about screen time, though my wife wants to have some limits. I wanted to toss a TV in her room so she can have educational stuff playing in the background, but the wife vetoed that. We live in a technological age where everything we do these days is through a screen interface. Like my uncle did for me when I was young by introducing me to PC's and getting me to take PC training courses back when people didn't even know what a modem was, has made a huge difference in my life. Though I do have concerns about "watching 5 hours of Minecraft videos", we'll see what happens when she figures out the technology. The best she can do right now is turn on the TV for me.
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Anyone else's kid sort their toys, or position them in groups in different areas around the house? The other day she lined up all of her LEGO blocks by size and color. Of all of her cousins (ranging between 2 to 6), she's apparently been the most advanced when it comes to speech, and grasping advanced concepts fairly quickly.
Also, that whole toddler meltdown shit is real. Literally nothing you can do but just sit and wait it out. Their brains haven't developed the part that allows them to regulate fight/flight. Generally, it takes about 10 minutes for her to cool off, and it's like an endorphin injection because she's chipper as fuck immediately after. She swings when she's upset or tired. She threw a Barbie at my face and I took it away, she cried for 10 minutes, then asked for some milk and if she could "lay down in my bed and take a nap".
