Raising your kid without ever showing it a cartoon and limiting the screen time to zero is for sure possible, but carries a risk of it being an outcast. If we like it or not, kids will talk about shows, characters and recent trends and I feel that to some extent it is important to expose your kids to that. At the same time I want to make sure my kid avoids the never-ending recommendation feed that will keep it hooked. To get that I reached back to somewhat forgotten tech that still works and can be given to kids without any risk. Low-tech can give kids agency, without all the overhead of psyop doomscroll brainrot algorithm manipulation overhead.

It probably won’t be anything new to state that smartphones are bad for small kids. Probably most parents are aware of this. Yet, when I went for a family camp for New Year’s celebration, every afternoon instead of seeing kids playing with each other, I saw groups of kids literally glued to iPads. I really do feel bad for them, but also I feel angry at their parents, because now my kid is the only one out of a dozen that is available to have some fun. I do my best to do some running around and playing, but I will not ever be a substitute for socializing with peers.

Naturally my kid knows what a smartphone is and on occasions it does watch Netflix and on even rarer occasions (God forbid) watches YouTube. But almost never on my phone. I only have FOSS apps and I rarely do any doom scrolling, so I guess it is not as tempting. We sometimes watch a popular science YT video, if interested. I always try to comment on what is on the screen. I see giving an unlocked smartphone to a small child as the same as handing a knife and letting it run around. Maybe it won’t be bad short term, but long term it will hurt them for sure.

The tech we have right now is amazing, it really is. Within minutes of sitting at your computer, you can create an infrastructure for a mid-sized company for whatever technology stack (Cloud), you can literally create your own things within hours (3D printing), you can create your own paintings or talk to a computer as if you were talking to a human (LLMs), you fit entire compacted human knowledge on a thumb drive (Qwen3-vl 235b + English Wiki is ~800 GB), you can set up so many different local offline services for your home.

Yet, for the most part, most people (citation needed) are hooked to the algorithm. What is the algorithm – it is of course the curated feed of whatever media that is tailor-made just for you. This very much touches the privacy topic I have been quite vocal about for many years now, but ultimately the biggest issue is that what is being shown on your smartphone is designed specifically for you. It is engineered to keep you watching, clicking, scrolling without an end. And it will for sure melt your brain and manipulate you. If an adult person cannot resist, what about kids’ brains?

This is why I put great effort into balancing between exposing my child to currently cool things that their peers enjoy (Paw Patrol, Bluey, Pokémon etc.) and making sure she is never alone with brain-rotting tech. Below is just a handful of things I do or implemented that in my opinion relieve the pressure for a child to reach for a smartphone or computer unnecessarily.

1. Landline phone – this is actually something that I am super happy about (inspired by Network Chuck), because ultimately it will be the human-AI interface for my smart home system. But this is just a usual phone that is connected to an Analog Telephone Adapter that is then hooked to VoIP service. Now with a speed dial, my kid can easily call people from my family to discuss whatever matters they want (sometimes at 6 AM). This gives them this freedom to decide on their own and requires no smartphone to call grandma.
2. CD player with microphone input – as a family we are rediscovering CDs and I personally think that there is just something super cool to physically interact with the technology even by placing the disk inside the player. Same as above, even a small kid can have a collection of nice colorful CD boxes that they can pick and listen to on their own. Depending on the radio, placing a CD inside can be a very easy task. And again, children can be left alone with the tech, pick whatever music they feel like and listen to it. No smartphone, touchscreen or whatever bullshit required. Also no 5 gazillion songs to pick. Just a handful from your collection.
3. Laminator – I did not think that this would ultimately be used as a toy factory, but here we are. My opinion is that my kid is spoiled. Did my best to prevent that, but I guess you cannot force relatives not to buy toys for their loved ones. But personally I try to limit number of toys that we buy, because they take space, cost money and are abandoned super quickly anyway. Which is why I discovered that when you draw something or even print it and color it and then laminate it, it instantly becomes a toy/character that you can play with. I still have to 3D print stands for this, but this 2D sturdy laminated piece of paper is good enough. We can then use it to tell stories, do some plays or even invite it to bath (not recommended).
4. LLMs for good ol’ tabletop RPG – I noticed that sometimes instead of watching yet another Paw Patrol episode you can simply create one with your kids. With LLMs that became even easier. Simply prompt it for a generic Paw Patrol episode and you are good to go. You can ask it for some guides on how to tell stories and believe me it will be very engaging for a small child. We sometimes create it together, when I say something like “And then the <insert generic character name> said…” and point to my kid. She will say something and we roll with this. Naturally we do not throw dice at this stage, but I do think that this is a great way to spend time. Especially if your kid is a big fan of whatever franchise. Let’s be honest, they are all quite generic and with printed and laminated characters you can have fun for the whole afternoon.
5. Use YouTube to learn how to draw – I never knew how to draw goofy faces or characters and it turns out that by learning a dozen patterns you can draw pretty much anything you want. It again is super engaging for a kid if you can draw something they want or change the character depending on the context. In here I specifically do NOT use image generation. Although for color it might be a good idea, I would want to avoid a scenario when we sit together and prompt, or the kid is just given an image.
6. Offline Media – I see that my kid when given Netflix would constantly pick a new kids show that is recommended. Sometimes we would “discover” 5 new series in a week. Something that very much leads to a melted brain. This is why when possible I download episodes for offline browsing on a PC or smartphone. This way there is no colorful UI that keeps you hooked. You can e.g. add only 3 episodes to a play queue and the risk of having it jump to a new episode or recommend something new is 0.
7. [Planned] Old games emulator – we have not yet reached a stage of playing games, but this will come inevitably. And instead of allowing to play pay2win, brainrot touch mobile games on iPad, I think we will go with some old school games that are available on so many emulators as physical devices. There is no store, no skins, no gamification, no DLC, just game, just good game.

Overall I think that right now we have so many different opportunities to spend time with kids in a meaningful way, then why limit yourself just to an app? I will continue to look for old tech that can be rediscovered to make technology more about fun and less about addiction. I feel that low-tech is not nostalgia. It is tech for a time when things were designed to serve humans and not to capture their attention.