Text 10A2-II

It was the middle of the afternoon, and my son, as he often does, wanted to watch Paw Patrol. “Pups Save a Humsquatch"?” he pleaded, rattling off episode titles. “No, „Pups Save the Bears." No, „Pups and the Stinky Bubble Trouble"!” I hesitated, the first sign of defeat. We"d settled into a virtuous no-TV-on-schoolnights routine, but it wasn"t a school night, and my husband and I had already done everything there was to do with a 6-year-old on a below-freezing Chicago Saturday — made pancakes, drawn pictures, counted and written numbers up to 100, read stories, played hide-and-seek (which became tickle-and-run), practiced piano, gone to Sky Zone, eaten chicken and rice, played computer games at the library, transformed an errant cardboard box into a tube for our dog, pulled out his new kids" cookbook and cooked up chocolate pudding on the stove. What more was there? TV. There was TV! Deep down, parents know that plopping your young child in front of the TV feels bad. Of course, there are even more malevolent screens lurking. In an age of YouTube Kids and artificial intelligence chatbots and when a 2025 Pew survey showed that among parents of children 12 and under, more than half reported daily YouTube consumption, worrying about the cartoons my kindergartner streams may sound quaint. But my son is, for now, too young for the perils of the Internet and adequately distracted by streaming shows, which doesn"t make me feel any better about leaning on them to keep him occupied.

Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/(adapted).