Bondu is a stuffed dinosaur that speaks 27 languages. It—or, more precisely, the AI chatbot embedded inside it—can also play games, help with homework, and patiently answer a child’s questions, even the really inane ones. Its “bedtime mode” includes breathing exercises and stories. Bondu, which costs $300 and comes in four colors, is marketed as a playmate, a confidant, a teacher, a quasi-caregiver. The ads take pains to talk up its safety controls, including an app that allows parents to review the conversations that Bondu is having with their child, as well as its ability to adapt to a child’s mood, interests, and age. And they emphasize, repeatedly, that the product is “screen-free.”
This is an odd and technicality-laden argument to make about an object that contains the kind of computing power that would have basically been science fiction even a couple of decades ago—sort of like marketing a hand grenade as “bullet-free.” But Bondu knows its audience. What the toy is might be less important than what it isn’t. In one testimonial posted to Bondu’s website, a girl who looks to be about 4 years old chitchats about baby animals with her Bondu, whom she has named Rosie. The video cuts to a mom sitting cross-legged on the floor and smiling into a front-facing camera. “Camryn truly loves sharing about her day with her Bondu,” she says. “And I love that it’s something she can interact with that isn’t a screen.”
Screen time can be a problem—the American Academy of Pediatrics says so; many early-childhood educators say so; well-meaning in-laws do too. Unfortunately, screen time also rocks, in that it is about the only way to occupy a child while you wash the dishes or have a little lie-down or go to work or do any of the other necessary or pleasurable activities life demands and invites. The one thing that feels more urgently worse than plopping a kid in front of the TV is the desperation that forces it. And then, later, the guilt.
According to a survey conducted last year by Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, roughly half of the polled parents put screens in front of their kids daily, often because of issues securing or paying for child care. An even higher number—62 percent—felt guilty about their children’s screen time. In group chats and parent forums, parents admit to letting their kids watch Sesame Street in the kind of hushed tones that might lead you to imagine they’re giving their children black-tar heroin for breakfast. Some game out sophisticated avoidance strategies: skipping family gatherings with screen-addled grandparents; specifically choosing schools that ban devices. In the Facebook group “Screen Free Parenting Community,” which has more than a quarter of a million members, the mood is something between a radical activist organization and a support group. Last month, one of the moderators posted a freaky video of lobotomized-looking toddlers screaming after their tablets had been taken away. A few posts down, a mother who was a month out from delivering her third child in four years begged for help, or for forgiveness, for letting her toddler watch TV while she was taking care of the newborn. “I feel like an absolute failure,” she wrote. “I am scared about the repercussions this will have in the long term on my son. I pray that this isnt too late.”
[Read: The dumbest phone is parenting genius]
Commerce is to anxiety as mosquitos are to standing water. So here we have a new class of “anti-screen-time” electronic devices that purport to entertain your kid just as much as a screen, without rotting their brain. Bondu is joined by several other stuffies that have been outfitted with large language models, and seem designed to capture children’s attention and their attachment. Among them is a teddy bear that tells AI-generated bedtime stories; a saucer-eyed blue thing that employs “interactive AI features that make it feel more alive than a traditional stuffed animal”; an alien that can supposedly comfort a kid through a nightmare; and a plush rocket ship whose chatbot is voiced by the musician Grimes, a self-proclaimed busy mom.
Other products aim to satisfy the longing for screen-free parenting in less invasive and lower-tech ways, though they are still far from analog. The Yoto Player and Toniebox are rival audio devices that play music and short stories. The Tin Can is a Wi-Fi-enabled phone designed to look like a ’90s-style landline; since debuting last year, it has regularly had a monthslong waitlist. There is a light-up “screen-free tablet,” and a talking robot that will teach your child about STEAM, and an AI-powered “smart” sudoku board that promises “no apps, no tablets, no screen time battles.” Major toy manufacturers are now getting into the market, too, adding 21st-century bells and whistles to 20th-century products, presumably in a bid to not be left behind. OpenAI recently announced a “strategic collaboration” with Mattel, and earlier this year, Lego introduced a line of “smart” bricks equipped with speakers, microchips, and LED lights.
No matter the approach, the sales pitch is similar. These toys make a point of eliminating many of the most psychically and aesthetically offensive aspects of phone- and tablet-based entertainment designed for children—the singsongy audio, the bizarrely planed cartoon faces, the abstruse algorithm, the infinite scroll. They are generally priced to convey attainable quality, and they tend to be aggressively marketed on Instagram: As soon as I started researching this story, I was bombarded by advertisements for them, right between the ones I was already receiving for smartphone-addiction tools made for people my age. The ads are careful to stress how educational these toys are, how fun they are—but not so fun that they will distract your toddler from building a meaningful life. If Sesame Street is heroin, this is methadone.
A few weeks ago, I ordered a Yoto. People in the Facebook group love the Yoto, as do many of my friends, and thousands and thousands of other people. I was hoping my son would, too, because, really, what my son loves is the television.
And the tablet. And playing stupid games on my phone while we wait for the subway. Once he stood so close to the TV for so long while I was doing work that I texted an ophthalmologist friend out of fear that he had permanently deep-fried his retinas under my supervision. Another time, he had to be dragged away screaming from a video display at a museum; only afterward did I notice that the exhibit was broken—he was staring slack-jawed at a screensaver. The tablet is the source of his greatest joy (when it is out) and his greatest heartbreak (when we take it away). The video with the screaming tablet kids could have been filmed in my house.
I do not know exactly how to feel about this. Like many of my peers, I grew up transfixed by screens too—but they were small, stuck to a wall or mounted on a desk, and designed to be gathered around as a family. The interaction was passive: no swiping, no skipping, no on-demand viewing, no advanced systems built by rooms full of well-paid people all working diligently to deepen rabbit holes and maximize time spent watching ads. YouTube arrived in 2005, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. In the decade-plus since, entertainment—for both kids and adults—has become much more algorithmic and much more absorbing. People are being directed by the technology, and not the other way around. The devices themselves have become better, more portable, and also completely essential to societal participation.
[Read: The attention-span panic]
And many of the adults who survived this transformation have begun to wonder what it did to them. They worry that they’re no longer able to think independently, live authentically. They fret about their lost ability to spend time productively and uninterruptedly—to read a novel, appreciate a sunset, blast through a spreadsheet at work. In recent years, some adults have started to engage in ostentatious acts of self-restraint to reclaim their attention spans and mental real estate, some by buying dumbed-down products designed to import the functionality but not the itchy pull of a screen.
The people who personally experienced the smartphone revolution are precisely those who now have young kids. They are passing down the anxieties of their generation, like every generation does. The parents with Bricks are buying their kids Tin Cans. They (we) are old enough to remember a different world, and to worry about what kind their children are growing up in. I spend an average of five hours and 22 minutes a day staring into my phone. I love my son’s mind more than anything on Earth—the last thing I want is for it to turn out like mine.
The Yoto works a bit like a first-generation iPod and looks a bit like an old-fashioned TV set, the cuboid kind that lived in the family room of my childhood home. (Like many screen-free products, it actually has a screen, just a janky one.) Much of its available narrative content—accessed by inserting playable cards into the device—also reminded me of the TV I grew up with: Although the hundreds of cards available for purchase in Yoto’s online store include music, original stories, and adapted children’s books, some of the most popular ones evoke IP that a child would know only from screenland—Mickey Mouse, Thomas & Friends, The Wizard of Oz.
That many of these products adopt nostalgic signifiers and model themselves off decades-old tech is intentional, I think, or at least a secret to their success. Of course we want the objects sucking up our kids’ attention to at least kind of feel like the ones that used to suck up ours, even if they are equipped with computing power never before possible. Of course we want to be reminded of the good old days, the days before children or adults had to think about screen time.
Those days were defined by a fair bit of benign neglect, and also by the freedom engendered by a life less documented. On average, contemporary parents work much more and parent much more than previous cohorts. Child-rearing has become more intensive, more public, and more competitive. For a certain set of parents, smartphones and the internet ushered in an era not only of always-on work, but also of endless opportunities to compare themselves to others. (The screen-free parents group, after all, is a space made possible by screens.)
Bondu, according to the ads, is useful as a playmate—but it will also get your child to practice piano. Tin Can advertises “no distractions,” which sounds appealing except that it’s not entirely clear what, exactly, a child needs to worry about being distracted from is unclear. Ingesting this sales pitch, I was reminded of the way grown-ups talk about their screen anxiety. The discussion seems to be predicated on two baseline assumptions: that there is a right and wrong way to spend one’s time, even when it’s for leisure, and that screen-free activities are inherently more noble.
[Read: Why are there so many ‘alternative devices’ all of a sudden?]
Gazing at a sunset is good; taking a picture of it for Instagram is bad. Reading a novel on your Kindle is okay; reading it in paperback is better; scrolling BookTok is worse. Katie Davis, who co-directs the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Youth, has noticed that many parents who feel guilt about letting their kids engage with screens tend to justify it by emphasizing the screen’s educational value. They say things such as, “Oh, but you know, my kid was building worlds in Minecraft and learning to code,” she told me, “because that type of thing is supposed to be okay.” Many of the people concerned about their screen-wrecked brain’s ability to focus at work are putting their kids in front of not-screen screens so that they, the parents, can do more work, probably on a screen. And all the while, they are worrying about their child’s future ability to be successful at work, probably also on a screen, probably because of something they read on a screen.
Personally, I don’t worry very much about what other parents are doing, nor about my son’s competitiveness in the labor market (he’s 3). But as I unboxed the Yoto in front of him, chirpily insisting that it was so cool, I did begin to wonder whom I was trying to convince, and of what. He listened to Peter Rabbit—which I first encountered as a picture book, so very long ago—and I thought about inheritance, and about what I was giving to him, and if I’d rather he grew up in thrall to screens or in thrall to screens and also beset by guilt. Then I got distracted by something on my phone and moved on.
The post The Allure of the Anti-Screen-Time Toy appeared first on The Atlantic.
