ads are essentially infohazards
By the 2000s, nearly every industrialized nation had developed a paid leave policy that allowed parents to stay home for months — up to a year in some places — with their infants, giving them more room to adjust to parenting, learn their children’s needs and troubleshoot the tough stuff. The United States is the only outlier. To this day, it remains the only industrialized nation to offer no such policy.
That means most U.S. mothers return to work within two months of giving birth. That’s no time at all in baby world. Two-month-olds are still waking multiple times a night, their parents are still in the throes of sleep deprivation. Moms are often still figuring out feeding, nap schedules, developmental milestones and just about everything else.
To achieve a life that doesn’t feel like a 24-hour circus, working parents lean on solutions they can access from their phones. The United States accounts for roughly 10 percent of all global baby product revenue, though it’s home to just 4 percent of the world population. Only China draws in a larger share of the global revenue (14 percent), but with a population four times the size of the United States. By 2033, the U.S. market is expected to grow another 40 percent, and the fastest growth will be in one sector: online purchases.
I took 3 months of paternity leave, which is on the better side here :(. I think I got 2 months with the rest being banked pto. With the first kid it was longer in a way, because she was born during Covid. It was a scary and stressful time, but I got pretty lucky with how it turned out, my work converted to remote, but the work also slowed down a lot do to the chaos and adjusting to the new reality. With the second kid though, I took 3 months again but 2 weeks were unpaid because I had to save some pto for inevitably when the kids got sick or had to stay home, and workflows had adjusted by then so work was not nearly as slow. Working remote was still great for it though
God. It’s so bad. My daughter just turned one and I barely got any baby ads because I’m a man and don’t use social media. But my wife got so many different targeted ads. It’s was so hard to find what you really need vs what you are told you need. We only had one big spend that we think was useless. It was a wood highchair that our daughter hates so we got a used cheaper one which is so much better.
She loved to be connected with other moms especially when she was on leave. But it feels so predatory in a way that exploits our need to be connected. It only works better against women since men are socialized to be lonely and like it. The community is real with advertisers coming in like parasites to suck money out of people.
We need to outlaw ads.
This is certainly part of why I run Jellyfin, keep my kids and myself away from ads, control the media I expose my kids to. Weirdly, YouTube only works on Grandmas tablet, not any of the other ones 😒. I’ve also got adguard home running on an openwrt router
Edit: When I do finally give them access to the Internet, I’ll set up the browser with ublock origin, privacy badger, ghostery, maybe even noscript but they might not like the amount of fiddling they’d need to do
Newpipe?
Intriguing, though that was supposed to be more of a scheming side eye. YouTube “doesn’t work” for some reason on our devices, mainly that I think we’d have to work harder to vet the content
Yeah it’s not just the surveillance marketing. No parent wants their kid addicted to brain rot content YT pushes on children.
