IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.

My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.

> bad choices

As one of them, no, not really.

I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.

And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.

Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).

Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.

It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.

I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.

It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)

https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox

As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.

It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.

Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.

I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!