Computers and other devices with screens are massive double edged sword for kids growing up, it's a huge worry as a parent.
On the one hand, you can learn a huge amount of stuff just sitting there at home reading and following links. There are kids who've learned HFT level c++ sitting with a computer. (I worked with one). You can also learn a lot about just about anything else.
On the other hand, the same device can swallow your whole future via gamification. Social media and game designers have figured out how to make things so addictive kids get angry if you take it away from them. And you can't not have any online presence at all as a teenager, it's part of life now.
Hopefully I'll be able to navigate a happy medium.
The real issue behind this, like often, is that what is bad for the children is actually also very bad for the parents, but they think they can get away with their particular dose: cigarette, alcohol, sleep deprivation, bad eating habits, not enough exercice, toxic env, etc.
It's the same with screens: it takes a toll on everybody, no matter the age.
It's very easy to verify: go on a screen diet, but be very active during it. Don't sleep more, don't eat better, don't try to be less stressed. Just remove as much screen as you can. You may first notice a withdraw period, depending on your screen consumption. Passed that, your energy goes up, you eat better, your social life improves, your ability to focus as well, and you are actually more efficient for tasks that can't be shortcuted using screen-based tools.
Now as a computer scientist, I keep using screen hours and hours every day, knowing that. That's the whole problem: knowing the cause is not enough to solve an issue. It's even harder since screens are at the center of a lot of work and fun related activities of our modern lifes. I even had to buy a dumb watch to avoid looking at my phone to get the time.
Of course, if you don't solve the issue for you, kids will see that you give them advices you are not following yourself. And I distinctly remember as a child that as soon as I noticed this about an adult, I lost respect for what they tried to teach me at the moment. Being young != being stupid.
Where is your non-opinion-based, hard evidence that screen-time is "the same" as these bad things: cigarettes, alcohol, sleep deprivation, etc. Those things can be MASSIVELY bad for you, as we all know, however there is simply NOT the evidence base to support that claim for screen time.
I understand it's a newer phenomenon than those other negative influences, thus hard to know as of yet. Still, before you spout off very long pseudo-scientific opinions: provide data and evidence.
I can tell from experience that a kid or adult having too much "screen time" is annoying drag to people around right now.
It is not just about whether kid will be 0.5% more aggressive 10 years after. It is that he or she treats others (familly, siblings) badly now. It is also that such person is visibly loosing abilities like communication, patience, dealing with IRL setbacks, willingNess to do homework etc and parents have to intervene.
When these direct issues don't happen, parents care less. Waiting for study that confirms that some other kids are impatient jerks (or are not) after 3 hours of play is meaningless, because you a.) you are raising this one b.) they don't fund large scale studies over details like that.
> It is that he or she treats others (familly, siblings) badly now
Maybe his/her family treated him/her badly, and they don't even realize it. Maybe that kid will be happier without his/her family. Nothing wrong with that as far as I know. Maybe the kid doesn't want to do homework, because homework is an aberration of our modern society? Just my opinion.
I will put the abused kid aside and will assume non-abusive family. I will also put aside a kid that is about to go to foster care or something.
First, the kid is not and will not be without family. The kid is living inside a family. In the long term, the kid is supposed to be able to have family of their own. That requires both ability to communicate when they treat you bad without knowing it and ability to not treat other people badly. Long term functional relationships are not possible if you solve problems by hiding. That includes both spousal and work relationships.
I don't know why you went toward a kid that is without family. Because I was talking about kid that is impatient, reacts to IRL setbacks with temper tantrums or yelling or accusing people or picking on them or otherwise jerk behavior.
Your examples are like exactly attitudes that parent don't want the kids to get. Including the idea that historical kids rich enough to not have to work significant part of day would not be expected to learn a lot. There were periods like that, when middle class was strong and secure, but not calling it a norm where opposite is aberration is absurd.
> In the long term, the kid is supposed to be able to have family of their own
Or not. Who said everyone want to have a kid?
> I was talking about kid that is impatient, reacts to IRL setbacks with temper tantrums or yelling or accusing people or picking on them or otherwise jerk behavior.
So? that's not an illegal behavior as far as I know.
Im more open minded than you about what should be a family, I don't see long-term relationships that much important, and I believe in a society where everyone can have the life they want. If they prefer short term relationships, I don't see this as a problem, but a personality trait.
Hi Whomping, even in the case of cigarettes, alcohol and sleep deprivation, it takes a long time before they manifest as cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and shortened life expectancy. I don't think we can afford to be careless around devices that suddenly have taken over a majority of our collective attention span.
There are anecdotal evidence that links intelligence to physical activity, and screen time becomes excessive when they result in not enough.
In addition, some dental schools are reporting loss of dexterity in students. These activities rely on fine motor movements that requires years to hone.
My strategy is to be a screen addicted zombie to the point that my children will hate phones so much they run away from them. Seems to be working so far.
Studies from 30 years ago screamed about health and TV, corelating bad eating and sleeping patterns with screen time. Suddenly one article says that it's not true for new techs.
I'm really not convinced. Just because you are less passive in front of a smartphone or a laptop doesn't negate the screen effect.
I'm increasingly convinced the worst health effects of tech are mostly about sleep, with any secondary effects being negligible by comparison.
I'd challenge anyone who thinks they "just can't" sleep on a normal schedule to drop all light-emitting devices and all artificial lighting aside from a couple candles, a bit after sunset in the Winter, or at sunset in the Summer. See if you still can't, or if you just don't want to. Not that I blame individuals for it, as it's really damn hard to stay away from all this hyper-engaging stuff at night. I haven't been able to. But trying that for a couple weeks gave me some serious insight into the why of my lifetime of screwed-up sleep. It's incredibly bright nighttime lighting (try the candle thing and see if you aren't surprised at how obnoxiously and unnecessarily bright even a single 60w bulb is after) and screen-based media (TV on up) to blame, entirely.
Turns out if you light your house up like it's daytime, then put 1,000,000x the top-quality entertainment an emperor of yesteryear could hope to command on a given night right at your fingertips, it's very hard to sleep. Go figure. But that's what's overwhelmingly the norm now for most people's evenings.
Honestly, I think I'd rather take <X> years off the end of my life than cut out my favorite activities from the only hours of the day that are really mine to allocate. It's time I'm losing either way, and sacrificing those hours on the altar of better sleep now, when I'm the youngest I'll ever be, doesn't appeal to me at all.
Basically, any suggestion to improve sleep by boring myself to death for 6 hours is a non-starter, and the holier-than-thou attitude of people on the internet who do so is starting to annoy me.
> Basically, any suggestion to improve sleep by boring myself to death for 6 hours is a non-starter, and the holier-than-thou attitude of people on the internet who do so is starting to annoy me.
Sure, but the flip side is you get a whole lot of "I just can't sleep a normal number of hours at a normal time, I guess I'm just built differently" and... well, no, probably not. I mean maybe. But probably not. You just like Netflix or late-night hacking or video games or whatever, too much to get a healthy amount of sleep. So does everyone else, to varying degrees.
And it's less a trade against end-of-life years as a trade against your ability to remember what you did or learned today tomorrow, and much shorter term mental and physical health issues (harder time with weight and blood pressure, generally lower energy and happiness, and so on). Though yeah, go for it. Most of the rest of us do, too, just not because sleep is some really hard thing that people are bad at and ordinary daytime schedules are unreasonable and demanding like many special Internet snowflakes claim (Nb not accusing you of making any such claim), but because our homes are, 24/7, more entertaining and brighter than a mid-tier amusement park.
I don't find it faulty, I'm saying that many studies said the contrary for TV for decades. I'm saying that many current time studies say that blue light and intense white ligh affect sleep. I'm saying that nowadays screens are debated as a huge problem for focus and attention.
And so I'll wait for 30 new studies saying screens are fine before starting to ignore them and my personnal experience.
If everytime you have a new study you trust it 100%, you will have to change diet every other week.
> Studies from 30 years ago screamed about health and TV, corelating bad eating and sleeping patterns with screen time.
Since you're a computer scientist I suppose I don't need to remind you that correlation != causation.
People who already have bad eating habits and sleeping patterns for other reasons, might also be the kind of people who enjoy spending more time in front of 80s/90s TV.
That would assume it's something about a specific screen technology that have this effect, while my understanding is that it's about the concept beaming virtual information to your brain that causes the issue.
I can't make heads or tails of your last statement. Is there some sort of magical connection to the rest of the world that we have that twisted by looking at these terrible liquid crystal displays? Sounds more sentimental than anything.
How can this be a “huge worry” when the fine article’s conclusion is as follows:
> The authors’ overall calculations did find a statistically significant negative association between technology use and well-being: more screen time is associated with lower well-being in the young people surveyed. But the effects are so small — explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being — as to be of little practical value.
Parents are wasting their time policing screen time. It’s a moral panic, not dissimilar to the moral panic when television came out and everyone thought it would make children stupid.
1. Well-being is not the only thing worth caring about.
2. The person you are addressing is talking about gaming, not screen time.
3. I don't see how you can deny that most games are made to be addictive, that innumerable people - especially teenagers - become addicted, and that this has a detrimental effect on their becoming full, rounded and developed persons.
Well being seems like a pretty comprehensive definition of what parents should be concerned about. And I can deny the detrimental effects of gaming because studies have repeatedly debunked that idea.
I don't see, however, how a study would 'debunk' the possibility of gaming having detrimental effects. It might that show that on average the detrimental effects are negligible. But that does not show, in the least, that parents have nothing to worry about: clearly there are a sizable number of people for whom it is detrimental. Even if that is offset by benefits spread across the statistical population, it's still a problem for those particular people. And to be honest, I'm skeptical to concede even this much.
I think you have to possess a highly etiolated idea of what the human 'good' is to believe that playing video games for dozens of hours a week - which millions of people do - is not to its detriment. It might be very fun. In a way, it can even be social. Both those things are important. But it's hardly the best and fullest exercise of human creativity and imagination, intelligence and enlightment, expansion and self-development, love and desire, etc.
>But it's hardly the best and fullest exercise of human creativity and imagination, intelligence and enlightment, expansion and self-development, love and desire, etc
No, but it's probably better than watching TV or using social media which are likely the most common substitutes for games.
In any case you'd need longitudinal studies to properly evaluate any detrimental effects, given they are likely to be developmental in nature.
> I think you have to possess a highly etiolated idea of what the human 'good' is ...
Quite. Well being is contested & value-laden terrain. One would really need to read a paper & the theoretical background it emerges from before affirming the concept of well being its measures purport to operationalise.
Having said that, contemporary wealthy societies specialise in etiolated concepts of the good life, so this would hardly be an exception. A consumer-subject plugged-in more or less permanently to corporate product is the dream.
Only if bewitched by the phrase. It's hard enough to agree philosophically on what constitutes well being for humans, so to accept psychological measures of it without very careful examination is a leap of faith I wouldn't take.
> And I can deny the detrimental effects of gaming because studies have repeatedly debunked that idea.
Again, you're taking a lot on faith there based on a relatively small amount of research done during only a few years. Exposing young people during significant portions of their waking hours to computers/screens is one of the widest-scale social experiments ever undertaken. It could take generations to fully understand its implications.
I don't have a horse in this particular race and agree that many comments on the topic smack of moral panic. The most rational thing to do at this stage is reserve judgement. We don't know everything, and it's very early days yet. Having said that, if I were a parent, given the gravity of the responsibility, I'd be cautious at least.
>if I were a parent, given the gravity of the responsibility, I'd be cautious at least.
I'm curious as to what this entails, because
>Exposing young people during significant portions of their waking hours to computers/screens is one of the widest-scale social experiments ever undertaken.
This is false. A kid in the year 2000 has a radically different childhood from a kid in 1950 (who had the kind of childhood that people opposing screentime seem to want), who in turn has a radically different childhood from a kid in 1850 (who was probably working in a coal mine or sweeping chimneys or something).
There is no way to be cautiously conservative because there is no default to default to. In fact, I find it a remarkable coincidence that out of humanity's 100,000 year history, the perfect childhood just happens to be the one that today's old people had. Rest assured that in 1950, there were just as many old people bemoaning their youth that didn't know the value of hard work and spent all their time watching movies.
A good response & I'm definitely sympathetic to the notion that moral panics centre around departures from familiar (recent) norms.
I still hold to the claim that the screen use experiment is (1) particularly radical in that it involves substantially reducing children's exposure to the physical environment in which humans have evolved to develop (ie. that of human-scale 3D animate & inanimate things with which they physically interact). Note that 'radical' doesn't necessarily mean more harmful - just that it's hard to predict the developmental outcome as it's such a departure. And that it is (2) notably large scale due to the greater homogeneity of the change. A far larger proportion of kids are made subject to this particular experiment than in the past -- neither indigenous Australians not upper class English kids were chimney sweeps in the 19th C, but I'm sure both groups love their screens now.
Caution needn't mean adhering rigidly to an outdated template - that would be more like extreme conservatism or fundamentalism. It could just mean, er, caution! If I had kids, I'd consider how much screen time of different types they would be allowed, and how it might be balanced or blended with other activities. Like other parents, I would have no way of being certain about the answer most likely to lead to flourishing, I'd just have to make my best guess. I'm pretty sure for me that guess wouldn't be 'pass the child-training buck to Facebook & Google'. They take 'training' far too literally for comfort.
[Edit: My 'caution' would particularly extend to alarms &/or reassurances coming from studies such as this. For a number of reasons, it's a field I don't find very convincing ]
It is no harmful effect in families without problems. Meaning, parents in those studies observe kids and intervene when there is problem. Which makes kid ok, but also makes parent more resentful toward games and screen time.
If parent had to spend a lot of time arguing with kid and removing device etc after seeing kid behaving in worst ways, the parent will talk about bad effects of gaming without there being actual long term impact on kid. Because it took additional effort to counteract it.
Also, studies are about whether kids become more aggressive in long term. Parental annoyance of often about kids becoming harder to deal with, less capable to communicate or more jerk right now.
I don't think that's a great analogy. Today I think most parents worry about screen time quantity and not necessarily quality. Using a phone or tablet is often replacing other activities like sports, music, and just general physical play.
Also worth noting that they cited wearing glasses as a more significant factor. Worrying about screen time is less warranted than worrying about whether or not your kid wears glasses.
As a parent I want my daughter to have a wide variety of experiences. So if she spends all her time on any one activity I am going to encourage her to swap it around and do something else. If she spent all her time playing guitar I would probably take her guitar off her and tell her to read a book.. if she spent all her time reading a book I would take it off her and tell her to go outside.. If she was outside all the time I would tell her to come in and play a computer game..
It just so happens that what she wants to do all the time is play computer games, so that is the thing I have to keep steering her away from. I'm not convinced it is the screen itself that is harmful, but it is definitely the thing that stops her from wanting to do anything else.
From the tone of your comment it sounds like you think conflict is bad.
As a bit of a sidebar:
It's the parent's job to teach a child how to live a healthy lifestyle as an adult.
It's impossible to live a healthy lifestyle while doing only one activity, because there are many things that need doing around your house, or in your life, as an adult that most people won't have someone doing for them.
A parent's goals will conflict with a child's goals - the child lacks the wisdom the adult has gained over their lifetime, and as a result doesn't understand what they need to work on to become a functioning adult.
At the same time, the child should challenge the adult's authority frequently - in order to discover the boundaries of their behavior. This has the additional benefit of giving the adult a lens through which to evaluate their own behavior.
I've learned more about myself and tempering my behavior from interacting with my daughter in the last 2 years than I had in the ten years before she was born.
I hope that as a result, I'm a better parent now than I would have been ten or even two years ago.
On topic:
I agree with the GP - too much of any one activity is no good. Everyone needs to learn that there's a time and a place for each activity, and that there are many things important to keep us happy and healthy.
A good portion of HN is people that got good at things before they were 15 and now lead comfortable lives thanks to that. Early specialization has its merits, unfortunately,
I think getting good at getting good at things is also good to do at that age. I'm in favour of encouraging kids to study broadly, but I've also ready very compelling accounts of where encouraging a kid's narrow interests got the child to learn ancillary things much more quickly (though TBF, that child was deeply on the spectrum and perhaps not a typical example)
Holy shit. I was literally just having a conversation with my spouse yesterday about why so many children wear glasses. I was convinced it was a 'back in my day' syndrome popping up again.
Do you have any citations? Because it genuinely seems like more kids wear glasses than they used to.
> And you can't not have any online presence at all as a teenager, it's part of life now.
Not all teenagers feel like this. My fourteen-year-old's "online presence" mostly consists of using google docs to write stories with her friends. I know, it's anecdotal at best, but at least in my house the kids don't feel a need to be on social media.
I think this depends greatly on the social group your teenager is in. A bunch of girls that write fanfics together are going to have very different social dynamics than a bunch of boys talking about 9gag (or whatever meme site 14 year-old boys like these days. Might just be Youtube actually).
If a kid is deeply engaged with an activity, suddenly terminating it for arbitrary reason is a huge sign of disrespect from parents. Kids get as angry about this as adults, it's just that adults are trained to repress the anger. Consider: if you, as an adult, were immersed in a book or in a team sport, and I came up and ordered you to stop what you're doing right now and go do something else - wouldn't you feel at least a bit angry?
Yep. We have started having our toddler press the start button on a timer when we need to transition to something else, primarily bed time routine. She presses the start button, goes back to playing, and then when the timer goes off she presses the stop button and is much more inclined to get through the transition without protesting.
Really I think a lot of the “my kid got mad because X” comes down to setting proper expectations. Whenever we set expectations with her, and especially when she gets to participate in the setting, things go so much more smoothly. Not to say we’re perfect, far from it, but the contrast is striking.
Works without a timer too: "Bed after you did X for three more times" or "read 5 more pages". Just prepare them mentally that something is going to happen soon.
I stole it from someone else :) they actually use Alexa and have the kid say “Alexa set a timer for 5 minutes”. Works for a five year old, not so much for a two year old.
My wife and I don't allow much screen time, but for our toddler, with a lot of things...
My wife is inclined to give "bonus minutes". I'm inclined to give warnings, as I've found the effect the same. My wife will come out and say "It's been ten minutes, we're moving on to X" and toddler will struggle so she'll say "two bonus minutes". I'll remind him after eight minutes that "he's got two minutes left". He'll ask for bonus minutes, but when I say no there isn't much of a struggle.
The nice thing about a timer is that it moves control away from you, even though you ultimately decide when to start the timer and how long it lasts. Seems like they’re less likely to argue with something that they initiated.
Do you have kids? My toddler has all kinds of toys that he loves. A short time ago I thought I would try handing him an age appropriate, non-adware, educational iPhone game. The intensity of craving for “just one more minute” was unlike anything I have seen before or since. It’s on a whole different level.
Although I know I’m going to need to teach him how to live in our screen-filled world, I’m not sure when I’m going to feel like he’s mature enough to face the intensely addictive properties of the thing. Frankly, my personal experience is that I’m not ready to appropriately handle their addictive properties for myself even now, so...
An anecdote from the flip side, our three kids have had very extensive access to screens since they’ve been able to use them, none of them have bad screen habits. They all happily put them down to play with anything else that seems interesting.
Our working theory is that by not making screen time precious, we’ve made screens just another toy/tool/way to accomplish something, rather than something to be sought out for their own sake.
I have two kids, a toddler and a newborn. The toddler gets mad when we take her away from anything she’s doing, for whatever reason. We haven’t really given her interactive iPad games yet because the one time we tried she was completely uninterested.
I have no experience with this, but there are apps you can get which turn the screen from full colour to greytone. apparently it really cuts out the addictive quality for a lot of people.
The article says that after data mining a large dataset for correlations, the authors could only explain 0.4% of the variation in well-being by screen time. Is there really that much to worry about?
Yes, well-being is only measured in the short term. How many people do you know who will readily admit they spent too much time looking at a screen when younger?
Well, I owe my entire career (as I imagine most people here do) to spending obsessive amounts of time on computers in my teens. So while it was "a lot", I have a hard time taking seriously any claim that it was "too much".
Well... yeah? If I'd spent my teens obsessively reading romance novels instead of learning how to build software, then I would consider that 'too much' time because the end result is useless (excepting the very few people who become rich by writing bodice-rippers).
I doubt only because of that. It’s quite easy to end up in an alternate reality where you get $30k/year for doing boring manual work, or indeed anyway sitting behind a screen all day.
Yep, and that's why my kids will get unlimited access to computers for anything creative or productive, somewhat limited access to games, and strictly limited access to video streaming and social media.
I've got four kids and don't mind them enjoying their ipads, but it does worry me a little that the ipad is always the number one for them. Playing outside, creating things, sports, other kids are all nice, but if they can choose, they will choose the ipad.
I have a more specific concern which is really just "the iPad" and related appliance-type devices.
My plan for my kids when they're old enough is they'll get Linux laptops to play with, and the option to use Windows if they can figure out how to install it for games.
Because what I want to encourage is understanding how the machine works, that it is a machine and that it can be manipulated, since my most important formative memories when I was young was that my dad was writing his own software to run his business and that core message was something me and my brothers spent a lot of time emulating as play.
The thing I don't like about modern screens is that you won't get a chance to spend hours futzing around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to get your system just right, or play with IRQ jumpers and settings. I'm actively looking for plan Bs in the form of Raspberry Pis or similar kinds of gear.
oh man, all the hours I spent futzing with xorg.conf as a kid. or trying to get wifi on my laptop working using ndiswrapper. kids these days will never know the pain (or eventual satisfaction)
I don't think you need to worry too much.
As has been said in this thread, electronic devices and the software running on them are designed to be addictive. Young children lack the self-control to limit or stay away from things they're addicted to.
You'll be doing just fine if you lay down some boundaries for them limiting the time they spend on any one activity. Bonus points if you take part in those activities with them. :)
Maybe another kid will sit down and learn to fluently speak Latin, but how will it help him/her to live in the modern world where Latin isn't used anymore?
Edit : as I see a downvote, I may further explain what I meant. We should not stop kids to learn what they want, but we should make sure that we don't endanger their futures by letting them learn only what they want. Learning "HFT level c++" is maybe interesting, but it would be a crime to let a kid only learn that for 10 years, and then let him/her figure out that their will be no job for him/her because ML and AI replaced all old programming models, when it is too late and he/she needs an income to actually survive (I'm assuming here people will still have to work to survive in the future)
On the one hand, you can learn a huge amount of stuff just sitting there at home reading and following links. There are kids who've learned HFT level c++ sitting with a computer. (I worked with one). You can also learn a lot about just about anything else.
On the other hand, the same device can swallow your whole future via gamification. Social media and game designers have figured out how to make things so addictive kids get angry if you take it away from them. And you can't not have any online presence at all as a teenager, it's part of life now.
Hopefully I'll be able to navigate a happy medium.