I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's <i>on</i> the screen.<p>Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are <i>vastly</i> different than they were 20 years ago.<p>Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive.<p>But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine.<p>I was an avid "gamer" growing up. I wasn't always the most responsible with it. Probably overdid it a lot. But I can see with my own child, this is a different ball-game altogether.<p>Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
Calling it "screen time" is missing the elephant in the room. The largest part of the problem is that the software we're directly interacting with has been designed by companies with interests directly contrary to ours!<p>Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued.<p>Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi have not been <i>adversarily</i> tuned to fire off the reward centers of our brains just enough to keep us returning for more. Whereas on the same exact screen, firefox/chromium are gateways to madness.
The organization I work for, Common Sense Media, has done a good bit of research on screen time, addiction, and it's effect on families.<p>Here is the report on Technology Addiction: <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addiction-concern-controversy-and-finding-balance" rel="nofollow">https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addicti...</a><p>Here is our other research reports covering a wide range of media/technology topics effecting children, families and teachers: <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1</a>
This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable.<p>I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early.<p>Help them find good content. Have days where no tech is allowed on the weekends, but don't keep them away from it completely. Give them time to unwind with tech and choose stuff themselves, just as you probably do. Teach them about privacy and the problems that can come up with tech so they know how to deal with it themselves. Teach them that too much tech isn't good for you and you need to do other things too.<p>Monitor what they're watching and make sure you talk to them when things get out of hand. Expect to have some occasional issues, and treat them like you would an adult: are they sad? Is something going on at school? Is the tech affecting their ability to do other things at the time?<p>Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.<p>>"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand."<p>A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.<p>This larger issue of screen time and tech addiction will only continue to grow. At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. But because it's the brain and not the lungs it will play out differently.<p>People approach mental and physical health differently. Similarly dopamine addiction and chemical dependence are also treated differently in people's minds. One is often viewed as a moral failing the other as more "uncontrollable".<p>As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact. It's not "just a tool" and never will be.
I have a 2 and a half year old son now. My wife and I have found for us that the right answer is simply moderation, variety, and supervision.<p>1. We moderate how much time is spent on screens. Each day he probably spends a total of an hour or less in front of any screen (iPad/iPhone/Projector).<p>2. He does watch some (highly filtered) educational YouTube content, but we also make sure he's playing educational and interactive games, like building, drawing, and learning Chinese (we're a bilingual household). He also has lots of books and we read to him actively, he participates in sports, we take him outside to playgrounds and parks, do arts and crafts with him, and he helps us with chores around the house (in a fun way), etc.<p>3. When he is playing a game or watching a video, we're there participating. We're monitoring and filtering the content he's viewing, and we're actively adding to the educational experience by talking about the things he's seeing and doing with him.<p>Technology is a tool, and how it's used matters. Outright banning it means we're missing out on its potential benefits, and also we miss the opportunity to teach him from an early age how to use it properly. I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.<p>It was a little bit of a struggle at first, but now when we tell him it's time to turn off the iPad, he usually will do it himself without fuss, and he increasingly will turn it off without even prompting and move on to another activity like reading or drawing.
I wish the rhetoric around "screens" was less focused on the delivery mechanism and instead more focused on the problematic thing behind those screens.<p>The issues raised here seem to not be related to glowing LCDs, but rather particular apps and behaviors in those apps that lead to addictive and problematic behavior.<p>"Screens" is even broader than saying things like "the internet is bad". The latter statement already sounds unhelpful because everyone has a better understanding of just how diverse of a platform "the internet" is.
“’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.” –David Foster Wallace
I'd have to say whatever the waldorf schools are doing is working. My father-in-law's neighbor is an education PhD and her son has been in waldorf schools from the start. He is the most intelligent, wise, and confident kid I have possibly ever met, and he takes care of a wide range of animals at home (horses, chickens, alpaca, pig). He always seems fulfilled and is always excited to talk about what he is learning in school.<p>His mom who was previously writing and editing textbooks took a job at a public school in a lower income area of the county. She couldn't stay for even a year as she was so upset and dissapointed with the methodology they were using, heavily relying on screens and allowing kids to get away with everything.<p>I know that I will definitely do everything I can if I have children to get them into the same school.
There is always a tendency to blame the addiction on the substance, but it's usually symptomatic of something deeper.<p>In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.
> There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.<p>I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make games myself.
The moment that I truly got the idea of "you are the product" is when my 8-year-old complained to me, "I had to watch 10 ads in order to get a gold coin to feed my fish."<p>I felt literally repulsive when my sweet kid is part of an army to bump up someone's ad views. I also felt truly ashamed as a parent and as a tech worker.<p>Unfortunately, the most common rule in my kid's circle is that kid can download any app as long as it's free.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are super focused on adding new users and creating an addiction on a massive scale never seen before. Of course it's bad for kids.<p>Social media, smartphones, and tablets, are the new smoking.
The headline is chilling, but the actual content of the article boils down to "Many people in Silicon Valley feel that too much screen time is bad for kids".<p>That being said, I found this anecdote to be particularly... unsettling.<p>> “I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”<p>It's tough to explain away the emotional desire for something that was manufactured to be cool and addictive
I don’t understand why the extremes some families have had to implement to curb poor behavior is now some kind of “consensus”. The hell there is consensus.<p>The truth is, we are afraid of everything these days.<p>People don’t send our kids to play outside, someone might hurt or abduct them (or another parent might Parent Patty us)<p>People don’t spend time with their kids because they’re so busy at work (but they hire nanny’s with zero screen contracts to feel good about this)<p>To me, kids should learn to use screens early and often, and get good at understanding how they can exploit opportunity and personal advancement with them (and also how to manage time wasters).<p>Kids lacking social cues - is it really screens? Or are kids becoming nerdier and turning more to screens because of it?<p>We live in an era where comic book movies rule the box office and being a nerd is celebrated. It’s this strange double standard of how juvenile our adult pop culture has become, and yet we are flummoxed and finger pointing as to why our kids are regressing socially?<p>Active parenting is needed, and it’s tricky to outsource that or blame the glowing rectangle. This article is about a bunch of rich SV parents that outsource their parenting to nannies and have no good framework on how to teach moderation, so they're banning the devices outright. That seems like a niche situation.<p>Screens are wonderful, powerful tools - the bicycle for the mind, as Jobs would say. The world is also a bigger place than screens. Active parenting is needed to ensure moderation.<p>Extreme measures may need to be taken in some cases, but the fear is so overblown it reminds me of the things my parents took away from me for my own good: my Slayer and Judas Priest albums, my D&D sets, and also my computer and/or modem for months at a time. Sometimes for the sake of discipline these actions make sense, but more often they’re a reflection of popular fears.
This article doesn’t really explain what the dark consensus <i>is</i> beyond just “screens bad”. There are certainly some things on modern computers that are little more than Skinner boxes, but those things aren’t what the parents in the article are talking about. What makes Fortnite and Youtube videos worse than Nerf guns and library books?
Here's some low hanging fruit to get us started:<p>1. Ban gambling in games. That is, if real money is involved in the transaction, then there should be no element of chance involved. If not that, at least properly enforce gambling laws to games given that gambling is illegal for children anyways.<p>2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.<p>Problem is, policy makers are clueless when it comes to games. These policies have no chance of passing anytime soon.
Ok, come on. There is way too much "back in my day games weren't that bad" in this thread. Do you guys remember WoW? And Diablo?!?! Talk about a game designed to target addiction centers.<p>The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.
I as a parent am trying to do the best I can with what I can afford. This cost is both time and money (which honestly is vastly skewed). I learned watching my parents growing up and that's really what I have to go by.<p>I spent a lot of time growing up watching TV. It has helped me learn english (and the proper use of slangs) as well as teaching me some values and cultural references that I couldn't get from a book. If I was never allowed to watch TV, I don't know how I would have occupied my time. Libraries were a bus ride away, there was no local park for me to go to (even if I did, didn't have any friends to really do anything worthwhile)<p>So, is it my parent's fault? were they unfit as parents to let me watch whatever TV I could after doing my homework? would I have been a better person (whatever that means) if I would have had other after-school activities?<p>I'm writing this because I'm so sick and tired of people pointing fingers and speaking as though they have all the answers. If you identified the problem, you have to give me the solution as well. You can't just say "here's the problem, now go solve it yourself".<p>And for you non-parents, you have no idea the types of peer pressure these kids go through. Don't point fingers and label them as some kind of defects just because they've been exposed to the scary "screen time". Kids are just trying to survive, just like the rest of us.
There is unfortunately a lot of anti-tech or anti-science bullshit sentiment behind the idea of restricting access to phones or screens. It reminds me a lot of how you would have people in the tech industry peddling fears about GMOs.<p>That said, they're not necessarily wrong. They're just missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn't social media or videos or even video games. It's advertising. The cold calculating hand of the free market will reach out to anyone and everyone for the sake of profit, which is why we see a ton of ads, shitty malware-ridden games and abuses of the system in order to gain a foothold into using children as weapons in the advertising war. Every click and every watch is more money, no matter who it is.<p>In a way it's similar to the way cigarettes were advertised as being for cool people, resulting in affecting children because it infects them with that message from an early age. Flintstones ads featuring Winstons Cigarettes being a great example.<p>So how do we stop it? You either prevent them from using it, full-stop or you actually create a walled garden designed to protect them from the exploitative behaviors of certain youtube content creators and lassiez-faire app stores.
I'm reminded of this book: "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" by Nir Eyal (BTW I'm not endorsing this book).<p>4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon after 1,100 reviews.<p>From the description:<p>"... by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging."<p>Link: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=18&tag=readah-20&pd_rd_r=7231f4ca-d944-11e8-bcf9-d56d64501878&pd_rd_w=gPCMl&pd_rd_wg=BZIES&pf_rd_i=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=&pf_rd_p=189&pf_rd_r=AEWX&pf_rd_s=desktop-dp" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/d...</a><p>We build 'addictive' products by design. Our children should be protected. I'm in the process of saying 'No' to my kids requests for phones and access to online services.
The screen itself is not the issue, it's toys and games that play with the child instead of the child playing with them. Imagination and learning to explore and reason comes from open-ended play ("play" is really just a word for learning).<p>People talk of a stick being a sword, a cane, a ruler, etc, but let's not forget that a stick can also be broken, bent, and manipulated in ways that one might not be able to with a toy or game that has programmed behavior. A lot of, perhaps most of, the useful learning come from crossing the "obvious" boundaries of some design.<p>This is one reason so many computer gamers from the 80s became interested in computing -- because it was easier to get "behind the scenes" and poke away at your machine. Everything's so professionalized and hermetic these days it's hard for a kid to explore.<p>Disclaimer: parent of a 20 year old who was not allowed electronics until he was 10. No calculators, no Star Wars. So I may be biased, but I lived my bias.
This is no different than when people were buying TVs for the first time in 1956. Those closest to the tech display the greatest fears.<p>In the 1980s there was hysteria that video games would turn kids into social pariahs due to the bad effects from violence and gore. But shooting a cluster of pixels in 1984 is trivial compared to running the bloods and guts of realism of a PS4. But not much is said anymore.<p>I think iPads are bad for kids as they become the subject matter, not that what they're trying to do. This is why iPads in education are bad IMO. Kids need to allow their brains to develop the appropriate cognitive functions but things like instance access to info reduce the ability to think, reduce the ability to memorize, and reduce the attention span of kids. In adults it's different as we're already as under/developed as we'll get.
I was obsessed with pinball (the predecessor to video games) for a while. It cost a dime for a game, a quarter for three. I had no money, so it was a big deal to get to play a game. The pinball machine is very set up to give "rewards" for points scored, such as giving out free games.<p>One time in the dorm, the coin op broke, and the machine allowed unlimited games for free. I played, and played, and played, and then something broke in me. I totally lost interest in pinball, it bored me silly, and in 40 years that interest never came back.<p>One of my first jobs was testing video games. That ground to dust any interest I had in that. It revived briefly when Doom came out, but that didn't last long.<p>I suppose I've dodged a bullet with that.
These stories come out all the time in history. First books, then radio, then tv, then video games, now screens. Surely there are some translational or longitudal analyses to see what effect these “distractions” have on “success”.
I think the key issue for these devices is that they can only give you a representation of the “real thing”. Kids don’t have much experience of reality to create natural intuitions about nature, social relationships, and society and foisting an internet full of other peoples’ opinions to children can easily distort their perception of what’s healthy and what’s not.<p>The solution is to limit kids from using internet devices and put them into environments where it is easy to have rich interactions with nature and with other people. Examples like Boy Scouts, school clubs, and road trips are good.
Yawn. When I was six people said video games would rot my brain too. Turns out I had more to worry from my parents generation wrecking the economy and destroying our shared institutions. Cue next moral panic.
I'm concerned about my kids screen time, but I'm also concerned that there seems to be an "anti-screen-time" cult that is operating on virtually no evidence, yet insists that any form of time with "screens" is bad. Some of the computer games that my kids play are some of the most cognitively complex and creative things they do. For one example, Minecraft, has simply no equivalent "real world" activity that it can be compared to.<p>The problem with blindly saying all screen time is bad is that it actually prevents us talking about what is good and what is bad <i>about</i> it, and therefore actually impedes progress. As a result, we have almost no guidance to either parents or app developers about what constitutes "good" content, which actually results in more "bad" content and more kids being exposed to "bad" content because parents are just operating in a complete blind spot where they let their kids have small amounts of "screen time" during which they can do <i>anything</i>.<p>It's like saying "I limit my children's tobacco time to 1 hour per day" - which is ludicrous but that is exactly what being promoted currently as "good practise" for parents to follow.
Looking around nearly all adults are addicted - looking at phones whenever they can. The issue is should children wait before they get addicted or get hooked in early.
To me it seems the focus is wrong. Screens are not the problem. Most people having kids today grew up with screens. The problem is how the screens are used. Mobile devices and many apps have been developed to feed dopamine. This problem isn't isolated to children either.<p>You can disable or control this addiction pattern. Short, repeating patterns with rewards are how you feed addiction.<p>Turn off most or all push notifications. Don't mindlessly use devices in short, repetitive ways that reward your brain with dopamine (eg checking social media over and over for new posts). For things like social media, HN, and reddit have specific times of the day you use them and that's it.<p>Short cycle games like Fortnite feed this pattern too. Put time limits in place. This applies to adults too. It's really easy to play one more game.<p>> “Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’”<p>If this is you stop. Give your children freedom. You don't need to track them or know what they're doing 24/7. Being a helicopter parent will hurt them far more in the long run than giving them screen time.
I feel like a contrarian. After deleting twitter and facebook last week, I'm jumping off this smart phone train this week. A factory defect emerged in my smart phone, so I purchased a LTE flip phone. I decided I'm not going back to the smart phone. I know I'm not the average case, but I don't think quitting a smart phone has that much of an impact on the functional aspects of life.
> “Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”<p>I would say that it is better to go the hard route and helping my daughter to learn to live with screens and some semblance of self-control around them, rather than enforce complete prohibition.<p>But from reading the article, most of the "screen-time" seems to have been un-supervised? That is the thing we are probably trying to avoid the most, with my daughter we are most of the time in the room, and we did agree on a limit (most of the time, one sitting is 3 cartoons she chose beforehand).<p>But I do wonder what I will do, once she is in school, and there is a cool new game with microtransactions everybody is playing.<p>I kinda hope I will manage do be the weird dad that persuades her and her friends to organize a lan-party instead of throwing bucks at $COOL_SKIN in $POPULAR_GAME :-)
I hate the term "screen time". The screen isn't the important part. Yeah, if your kid is watching pointless videos, it's not good for them. But at the same time the educational tools available on iPads are <i>amazing</i> compared to what I had when I was a kid.<p>I have a 5-year-old who goes to kindergarten at a great school. But games like MathTango or Twelve A Dozen are capable of engaging him to a much greater degree than anything else I have found, and they get him engaged in more advanced mathematical concepts than either I or his teachers at school can do alone. When gamification convinces him to just spend a little bit longer solving a few more math problems to get to the next level, it's a good thing.<p>Stop thinking in terms of "screen time". It's not the screen that's hurting your brain, it's stupid apps that make you stupid. Just don't let your kids use apps that you don't think are good for them.
I don't have kids, but if I did, I'd probably let even a 6-year-old kid of mine have pretty much unlimited access to a Linux box connected to an ASCII terminal instead of a monitor if the box lacked access to the web and to file-sharing services.<p>(The purpose of not giving the kid a monitor would be to deny him access to Linux games with engaging user interfaces.)<p>My point is that the word "screens" is an imprecise description of the danger. The danger is restricted to certain platforms.<p>(Yeah, I realize that it is possible that the kid could get access to stuff I wouldn't want him to see via the ability to install from a large repository of Linux packages or via FTP, but as long as I'm occasionally inspecting his Linux installation, the expected benefits would outweigh the expected risks. For example, it is very unlikely that any Linux package or ftp repository has been optimized much for addictiveness.)
One thing to bring out the elephant in the room is what technology replaces. Technology is replacing human to human interaction. Instead of seeing your friends in real life we may watch their activities on social media. Instead of going with our friends watching videos together we are watching video on demand by ourselfes.<p>That and that online content is made by the producers to be addictive. There is a competition for consumer attention time. Attention time brings in advertising money. One should be aware that when the product are free, the information about us is being sold to advertisers.<p>Kids should play and learn not be targets for ad revenue by online content made like dopamine slot machine rewards.<p>I have an issue with video feeds going to the kids which has dark / violent content in them. Kids do not have proper developed reality and what is fiction filters. There is computer programs and there are TV programs.
I have been letting my kid use their ipad, iphone, and laptop since they were 2. 10 years later have not had any issues. I have no rules about when the kid can use their screens. Strong believer in the self-driven approach to parenting, see link below. When there are kids around, my kid puts the devices down and gets to playing with the other kids (that also have no rules around devices) and they all interact pretty normal. I also feel, that restricting the devices might actually lead to mental fixation on them and could back-fire.<p>Its pretty interesting because when my kid was young, my concern was not too much exposure but not enough.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0797ZV1RJ/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o04_aud_?ie=UTF8&psc=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0797ZV1RJ/ref=oh_aui_d_de...</a>
I've seen the effects of teenagers + phones in US high schools first hand. Simply put, kids are distracted and overstimulated. The always connected nature of the phone ensures that critical planning skills will never be learned. Never being bored (and the decimation of shop classes) has sapped the creative impulse from far too many of them.<p>Contrary to what may be popular belief, many administrations set no guidelines around phone use in classrooms, leaving it to teachers to fight the never-ending battle. The lecture becomes hard or boring, and out come the phones.<p>Getting a kid anything more than a feature phone is pretty much daring the poor thing to walk tightrope across a canyon without a safety net.<p>The parents quoted in the article talking about how preschool kids with phones are no big deal need to spend some time in a typical high school classroom.
I thought the potty with the ipad was a joke, but it is real <a href="https://www.amazon.com/CTA-Digital-iPotty-Activity-Seat/dp/B00B3G8UGQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/CTA-Digital-iPotty-Activity-Seat/dp/B...</a>
Not that long ago screen time meant a TV in the living room. Gaming meant a hardwired console on that same TV, or a computer in the computer room. When you weren't at home, there was not a screen. In today's World, the screen is in your pocket wherever you go. Children know this and the temptation is hard to resist when screen time is so accessible.<p>Children see a large majority of adults engaged with their screens and think, if they can do it, why can't I? Next time you're on the bus or subway look around and try to find the other person doing the same. Practically everyone is looking down unaware of their surroundings. It's the World we live in today and our children are following our lead. Parents need to do their best to set an example.
I’m curious how people invite other kids over for kid parties. That kid can’t drink soda, this one is forbidden screens, this one is no gluten, that one is no meat. When you have a baby, does the hospital give you a giant list of stuff you could forbid them to choose from?
We need to develop a reflexive (yes, unthinking) ethical response to digital technology, one that's built from common-sense analysis of the long-term side effects, and train it into our kids (and others we care about).<p>As an analogy, "don't eat that: it's dirty" is not a proposition that's meant to be analyzed on a case by case basis, it's meant to be applied automatically to the entire world excepting a few very clear circumstances. It's a good heuristic.<p>I don't know what the digital equivalents will be, but would love to hear suggestions.<p>"Don't follow the likes"<p>"You're the product"<p>"Don't post anything unless you want it in the NYT"<p>"Whose phone is that? (Google's)"<p>-- edit (spelling)
Grew up as a gamer and general lurker on the internet. Age of 24 and I've packed most of it in and focusing on the hobbies that I enjoyed that didn't involve a digital screen like reading and drawing, but still focusing on very few websites where I can stay up to date on the more educating and hobbiest content of the internet that's relevant to me and not go down a spiral of binging on instant gratification that I can't share or express in a meaningful way with other people I know IRL. Will probably still play games like I still listen to music and watch movies, but much more selective now than I used to be
Screen time...what about screen time creating music, art, programming, study, learning, and so on?<p>It's the "Ah, you know what I mean." saying.<p>No actually, we don't "know" what you mean, and that's the really question that needs answered in the public zeitgeist.<p>Most here "know" what it means. However, quantifying that into a simple statement or phrase like "screen time" is not so easy.<p>Are there any recommendations?<p>I think something along the lines of "screen farmed", seems to fit. A company using your time in their site/app to make money. So that company is "Screen Farming" you.<p>Thoughts?
To make matters worse, schools are rushing to adopt Chromebooks for every class. One laptop per child.<p>Now parents can’t be sure if the kids are working on homework or playing. Or multitasking.<p>Instead of teachers grading written homework, kids visit clunky websites created by textbook manufacturers, and do their homework online. Takes longer, and can be frustrating, but easier for the teachers. Pearson example: <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt842499.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt842499.aspx</a>
I still want to build a MOOP - Massive Open Online Psychology. So much of our lives <i>can</i> be monitored that frankly I think they will be - so we may as well turn that to a positive.<p>84% of parents with well-behaved children went for a walk instead of allowing a second hour of games. Why don't you press this button, it will give a one minute countdown to all devices in your house.<p>Your coats are in the hall, apart from Jennifer's who dropped hers in her room.<p>63% of parent whose children dropped clothes on their bedroom floor have successfully used the phrase "Please hang your clothes up dear, the coat fairy does not visit till next month"
How is this effectively different from the cable TV, nintendo, home PCs and gameboy era of 20 years ago for kids?<p>Microtransactions? I don't think the existence of microtransactions is what makes it obviously worse. You could waste your entire childhood in front of screens back then too, and society quickly came to learn you should reduce screen time, despite the temptation of the TV babysitter. Those same lessons apply to the smartphone era of today.<p>F2P games, like the almost 10 year old farmvillie? That is a bit newer, and I do agree that has a problem. I don't think that is new although.
There is an interesting tinge to this attack on screens, different seemingly than attacks on TV in the past, which is eliciting opinions from random people with 6 and 7 figure salaries about how to raise children.<p>Let's be real: writing a backend data pipeline doesn't teach you anything about how to raise a child. We all laugh when they talk about kale, or activating their almonds, but we're supposed to think random CEOs, VPs, and engineers became experts in developmental psychology simply by being in proximity to silicon valley.
I think the point of life is to love each other, and that means interacting with each other. And the best way to do that is face to face. When screens get in the way of this, that's when they go bad.<p>I remember back in high school when I wanted to play Diablo 2 LoD more than anything else. I had a great time, and don't actually regret it, but I think if I had not been able to break free of that at the proper time, it could have had bad consequences on my life. "All things in moderation" as they say.
A sidebar on this is why parents put their kids in front of a screen in the first place. Depending on your child and your childcare arrangements, sometimes the easiest and cheapest way to get your kids to stop bugging you is to plop them in front of a screen.<p>Is your kid whining st a restaurant? Or bugging you while you need to make an important phone call. It’s easy to calm them down if you hand them an iPhone with candy crush.<p>I think many parents are uncomfortable with this use of phones, but reality forces you to use it.
I have a 3 month old. The way the television across the room melts her mind is something to behold. We try to avoid that from happening as much as we can.<p>I have no delusions about it being easy, but we're going to try very, very hard to bar interactive screens as long as we can, and keep them to a bare minimum when we can no longer bar them.<p>As I've mentioned in other threads, watching people watch their phones on public transport, like rats in a dopamine experiment, troubles me, a lot.
I'm worried by how the big market of mobile games with very little discernible intellectual content are influencing kids. Games are inherently forced to have some kind of intellectual engagement (though I think we've explored the edge with cookie clicker) so I'm not that alarmed just yet. But from what I've seen most of these games don't seem to engage the user in a way that encourages them to challenge themselves.
To all the people who don't see the problem, try and stay off the internet for 48 hours. No phone, no email-checking, no HN, no whatever. Try it. I dare you.
I wouldn't say begins, Silicon Valley execs have been sending their kids to tech-free schools for years, as the NYTimes reported back in 2011: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-sch...</a>
This brings up a weird tendency of parents to feel obligated to turn into their antithesis without any shred of self awareness. Elvis was wholesome despite his hip thrusting and a song about MSM in jail (Jailhouse Rock) although to be fair the censorship regime was basically enforced naivety while metal in the same genre is evil incarnate.<p>All with the usual special pleading about how things were different then.
When I was young, it was the TV. My TV watching was severely limited until I left home, and while at the time I thought it was an atrocity committed against me, I'm glad of it now. It's too easy to lose a whole day to TV.<p>As a result I spent time outside, hanging with friends, reading, and building things.
<i>Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house.</i><p>When you don't want the product anywhere near you but you still want to get paid for manufacturing the product, you might have an unresolved ethical dilemma in your life.
I have a 6-year-old and worry about this myself. But I'll be honest, I grew up in front of an NES, TV, cartoons, Sega Genesis, nearly every waking hour. I'm not a perfect man, but I am a productive member of society. So in my mind, this is a little overblown.
I lived without a TV for 10 years.<p>But, when I got married, I could not convince my spouse that a screen free environment would be beneficial for our kids.<p>I also sometimes think I should get rid of my smart phone.<p>Do I really need it?<p>But given that I haven't, it is really hard to do one thing and ask my kids to do another.
I would say, if kids are attracted to screen, there must be a biological reason to it. It's not like an intake of chemicals like alcohol : the device and interactions with it actually stimulates their brains. It should be studied and used in a good way rather than plain banned.<p>It seems the parents are disallowing devices for other reasons than just "it's bad". They are privileged people, are they afraid of being spied by the devices of their kids? Are they afraid that the existence of their privileges are leaked to a greater population?<p>Tomorrow's society will be connected, and so will be politic, information, and learning. But no parent wants to risk it with their own kids, because of fear of the unknown, or because they don't accept that they will lose control over their kids sooner than ever.<p>It's their choices to rise their kids as they want, but they are probably from the top richest 1% anyway, their kids future is already privileged and boosted, phone or no phone.
Got an 8 year old daughter. After trying all those things, here's where we settled:<p>- 2h Netflix time per week<p>- Offline phone with audiobooks<p>- Offline PS3 with SingStar<p>- Occasional music video on parent's smartphone<p>No free TV usage, no YouTube and no Internet-connected devices. Seems to work well for now!
Dark consensus? More like a handful of amplified voices. I have kids, they're on screens lots, and somehow manage to do well in school and have rich IRL friendships. This is just the latest moral panic.
lol kids today should have such an advantage with early exposure to tech but over-protective parents will fuck up that early advantage for their kids thinking they know better. Instead of no screens, teach your kids smart browsing skills like always ad-block, identify sponsored content as the garbage it is, and see micro-transaction mobile games as the low-quality content they are. No screen policies leave your kids naive and easily manipulated once they do get screen time and they will __need__ screen time and to be savvy with it.
I’m far removed from childcare but the number of parents I see raising their kids with iPads is worrying. Is this the new 21st century version of junk food that will be affecting poor families more?
I watch don't watch television so much, because I prefer to read a book, write a book, work on computer, think about mathematics, etc. Sometimes is OK watching television sometimes though.
The singularity is not some supercomputer - it's the consciousness that emerges when we are all tethered at the level of the neuron to each other. There's no hiding then ...
I have heard no screens until age three.<p>Are there phones that allow a parent to remotely shut off WiFi and cellular? Because if there aren't there should be.
There is a reason why Steve Jobs banned iPads for his children.<p>"They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
This is in part why I plan to raise my kids on open source, ethical software. I'm not going to force them, but libre software will be the normal in my house. These black box proprietary systems are predatory and hamper creativity.
The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising.<p>The article doesn't say there has been any peer-reviewed research to show a little screen time is harmful. It just says, oh, check it out, here is a grab bag of assholes, we picked out of a population of like 1 Million engineers, and THEY DONT LET THEIR KIDS USE SCREENS.<p>Well guess what. I was a video game engineer for 10 years. Now I work in a different area of tech. My wife works for a giant tech company too. We let our 2 year old watch cartoons on Netflix on Sunday mornings. She loves it. We think its cute, because we used to watch Sunday morning cartoons as kids ourselves. She's one of the most advanced kids in her daycare. She can recite the alphabet, count to ten, and speaks full sentences, and tells stories in class. The teachers say she is doing really well.<p>Whoopity doooo. So what if she knows how to use an iPad.<p>Please. Stop treating Facebook engineers like they are special snowflakes that know about everything because they wrote some javascript and html that runs a social networking website.