What to Know
As a parent and a person living in the world, I think the thing parents are most harshly judged for is screens and screen time. For generations, parents have used screens as a way to entertain, and more importantly distract their children. Now, the screens are smaller and more portable. I admit, when my son was younger, I would hand him my phone with educational videos so I could eat dinner in peace. People have a lot of strong opinions about the iPad kid, and what their usage says about the future.
A video has recently gone viral for this exact reason.
The younger generation is cooked with parenting like this pic.twitter.com/gLb3YF1lwS
— 🪶Native Patriot 🇺🇸 (@LaNativePatriot) May 10, 2026
It has been making the rounds on both X and Reddit, with the people sharing them claiming that the next generation is “cooked” or “doomed.” In the video, a preschooler is following her mom in what looks like a Costco. The mom has a tablet slung across her body on a strap, while the girl follows and eats a bag of chips.
“Whats the point of even bringing your child out if you’re just going to do this?” one person wrote on X.
“Letting a toddler devour a party size bag of chips while making them walk with you by using a strap on tablet movie has to be some form of neglect,” someone wrote on Reddit. “Shameful parenting.”
But really, should we be judging?
Many people are quick to judge both the parent and the child, but it feels unfair to make assumptions about a situation from a nine second video. I understand the concern about raising an iPad kid, but it feels a bit unfair. This is a literal blip of someone’s life, and here we are, assuming we know everything about what’s happening.
“Do you know the circumstances? Maybe it is a distraction so that Mum can shop? Stop judging people you know nothing about – life can be hard with kids – for all you know the little girl may have additional needs?” one person on X wrote.
Another commenter made an important point. “Meanwhile we’re all staring at our phones for half of the day…” they wrote.
Someone on Reddit wrote “This is a 6 second snippet into someone’s life. The child looks healthy enough and anyone who actually has a kid has had a tough day parenting and knows what it looks like. No need to doom an entire generation.”
Others pointed out how violating the video is.
this is depressing yes, but do not film random children and upload them to the internet, what's wrong with you https://t.co/7KaqIZ7PUa
— DIGI (@DiGi__Official) May 13, 2026
One person wrote “yeah horrible parenting but why the f–k have we normalized taking covert videos of other people’s children and posting them online for the entire internet to see without bothering to at least censor out their faces? that little girl is a human being just like the rest of us.”
“Please stop posting videos of young children that are not your own,” someone else wrote.
“Idk I don’t like people taking videos or pictures of someone else’s kids without the parents permission.”
Yet another person wrote, “this is depressing yes, but do not film random children and upload them to the internet, what’s wrong with you.”
However, not everyone was judgmental of the iPad kid.
“Sorry, but that borders on genius,” one person wrote. “Me, I don’t take my eyes off mine for half a second, so I end up forgetting half my groceries…”
“The younger generation is cooked with judgmental people posting things like this of children & parents,” someone else wrote.
“I see this as a nice way for a parent who might have difficulty multitasking to entertain the kid while focusing on what groceries to get, coming from someone with ADHD. (As long as the child is safe and she checks regularly I don’t see a problem here),” someone else wrote.
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