Audio players allow kids to choose what music or podcasts they want to listen to from a selection curated by parents.

When I was 3 years old, like many children of the ’80s, I was gifted a Fisher Price tape recorder. It had four buttons: play, forward, rewind and record. Its aesthetic would be at home in today’s popular parenting palate of sad beige, because its colours are brown and brown.

I had a few Raffi tapes that I listened to on repeat during long car rides, and I also spent plenty of time recording my own nonsense songs and making grown-ups listen to them.

It was the kind of imagination and creativity-rich play that parents are so anxious to get their children more of these days, as we desperately scramble for anything that doesn’t involve a screen to distract our kids, who — like us — are happy to zone out on an endless scroll whenever they have the opportunity.

New technologies between my Raffi tapes and now have fundamentally transformed the way we consume music and all other audiovisual content. With a few taps on my phone, I can find a recording of almost any song I’ve ever heard — usually for free. But this unfettered access comes at a cost. The apps we use to access entertainment of all kinds are designed to keep us coming back for more, creating a loyal audience for advertisers.

When my son was 3, it didn’t take long for one search of “Thomas the Tank Engine” on YouTube to send us down a never-ending rabbit hole of train videos, most of which, taken on their own, were cute and harmless. What was clearly not harmless, however, was the way the laptop or iPad or iPhone screen hijacked my child’s attention, turning him into a little content zombie who asked for “one more” every time we threatened to power down.

Parents are in a bind. They don’t want to deny their kids access to all the music and podcasts and other content that are available digitally. Neither do they want their children’s consciousness consumed by the algorithm. There is a growing mountain of evidence connecting screen time to developmental issues like speech delays, and mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders.

Smelling an eager market, businesses have seized on this parental anxiety and developed a product they’ve dubbed an “audio player” that is, essentially, a 21st century version of my Fisher Price tape recorder. After a parent shells out $70-100 for the device, they can purchase content, which comes on a “card” (if you buy a Yoto) or a “figure” indistinguishable from a toy (if you buy a Toniebox). Other brands use........

© HuffPost