I hate parents like these. The parents are showing the kids that the kids can do whatever they want and get their way. No wonder more and more kids are getting spoilt these days. Kids nowadays growing up without discipline and wondering why they don't get their way in the real world.

Unless there is sign of physical or emotional abuse, I don't have opinion on what other parents let or don't let their children do.

However I certainly don't let my daughter spend hours in front of any screen, be it a phone, computer or a tv.

I believe it will boost her creative and logical skills to find other ways to be entertained. Thankfully I have a neighbor whose son was born the same year as mine, and she doesn't let him spend time with the phone either, so our children are besties and they have so much more fun together.

I think it will always depend on circumstance. My daughter is autistic, things like going to the doctor for a normal kid may be a bit of a fight, for us it's an all out war. Any changes to her usual day or activities, especially when she's sick, is met with a lot of kicking and screaming and although we try to keep her as calm as possible, in strange areas she can't quite control herself all the time. The best way we can keep her occupied and happy as well as agreeable is when we have a little balloon app or the alphabet app on the phone and she can use it as a distraction. And it's amazing how many judgmental looks we get because of it. So, being that I have experience with it, I try not to judge other parents. If they do it just so that they don't to deal with their child? ehhhh not a fan but it's sometimes hard to tell which child is "normal" vs. which one isn't.

I'll grant that most of the time it's the wrong way to parent. But there are far more variables involved than just you do it or you don't. (How many kids, at what ages, is the parent all alone, how crucial is the quieter time bought by using the phone, etc.) For example, my wife and I have two infants two years apart. If we're both at home with them there is no reason to ever use tech to silence them. But if one of us is all alone and the littlest is melting down hungry and the older is being a maniac you can't take your eyes off of then it's perfectly reasonable to distract the maniac so you can get 5 minutes to make the food to feed the other. Or another scenario is the younger needs to sleep and the older is being way too loud and perhaps getting tech out makes the older stay quiet so sleep can continue. Or another was when we went to buy our car it took a while doing the paperwork and the kid couldn't handle the wait and busting out the cell phone got us through to the end of the process.

But all of these are special exceptions. Generally parents should limit if not completely eliminate screen time for infants.

Sounds to me like you're rewarding them for misbehaving.

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Parents who do this are just prolonging the unavoidable confronts with their kids