My nieces and nephew had iPads at 4

My nephew plays COD. He is 8. He sleeps with his iPad.

The nieces are are 6 and 11. They are obsessed with tiktok.

My son is 7 and goes to school with kids that have iPhones.

And my son only watches screens when we are supervising. He watches a lot of TV and plays Switch games though. Never phones and we don’t have a tablet or any of the streaming stuff.

It is very hard not to give in.

You probably read the Robot and Monk novellas too?

I was a bad reader this year… But some quick sci-fi reads are the Murderbot books (Martha Wells) and the Forward Collection (7 books by 7 authors). An older one is True Names by Vernor Vinge.

Probably in the works, but there are some adaptable options here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_honorifics

Like Excellency or Honourable… But as a professor I receive so many emails starting with odd honorifics (e.g. Dear Sire, My Sire, Sir bbbhltz, My Lord, etc.) due to translation software errors that I can’t be bothered to even care about it anymore haha

I am not the brightest bulb, so I do feel bad about saying this does come down to the intersection of intelligence and common sense. Back in my day it was vitamins for kids. My mother had us taking 6 or 7 a day because that fucking doctor on Oprah said vitamins and supplements were good. There was no thought process. She just went to the store the next day and loaded up on dozens of bottles of stuff.

I would wager that in the case of this infant, a similar situation occurred. The parent outsourced their thought processing to the groupthink of a Facebook mom-group and never gave it a second thought.

Similarly, when I was young, doctors and pharmacists/chemists would tell you to never give Aspirin to babies and very young children. Did the mothers listen? They did not. Later when I worked in a pharmacy we kept all Aspirin behind the counter and specifically told them in blunt language about the risks of giving this to babies.

Anyway, this is a horrible story. Right up there with parents giving their babies almond milk and seemingly competent adults drinking colloidal silver.

Have you seen what people are doing in Belgium for for similar reasons?

These people are sheep. What f-cking Facebook group is spewing garbage that they have decided to make part of their identity?

Sex-ed helps teen make better decisions. Back when I was in school we did the classic stuff: anatomy, reproduction, nasty photos of diseases, putting condoms on wooden dingdongs.

Some parents opposed. Their kids didn’t come to school those days. It was a bad idea for them. Can you guess which young ladies were getting pregnant at 14 and 15? How just 4 or 5 people in my year were able to make so may bad decisions is beyond me.

And teaching about gender identity stuff will not make a teen gay or bi or trans. Ask these people basic math questions, I bet they can’t answer. But, they took math at school and it didn’t make them math geniuses. I am a dude that learned how tampons and other period products worked and the only conclusion we came to at age 13 was that they should be free or cheap as can be.

Let the teachers teach, and make the parents take the class too.