9 ms·

The risk to children of tech over-use

63 points by cmsefton 9y ago

nikhizzle 9y ago
I would argue this title is a bit sensationalist. Limiting screen time (much like Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs) is a very common practice in our community. Our family follows the standard guidelines for doing so: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages/american-academy-of-pediatrics-announces-new-recommendations-for-childrens-media-use.aspx https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  My children are only allowed to use monochrome monitors and tactile keyboards.
  - polotics 9y ago
    Great! Can you tell us a bit more about this?
  - malkia 9y ago
    My second computer was 286 with Hercules monitor (~199x). Not being able to play many games, I took on the "herculian" effort to try to make it so. It kind of worked with the Trolls game (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls) where I found that they kept the video buffer in main memory, and then were copying it to 0xA0000. I did something simple - a TSR program that would copy (actually some made up bit transform) every once in a while (interrupt driven I think) the 320x200x256 colors screen buffer into the hercules by just taking some of the bits... ignoring the palette... Somehow it almost worked - like 5-10fps :) - but I was able to ... almost play the game... It was more fun coding it! I also found the message which is listed in the mobygames page :)
  - Gigablah 9y ago
    > tactile keyboards That’s arguably an upgrade.
  - junkscience2017 9y ago
    Haha. But for anyone seriously considering something like this, when your kids become teens in the US they either have smartphone access or they have no friends. Basically school hours are the only time they are reliably unplugged. This is the only way to do it: unplug everyone...now, no network effects.
- dang 9y ago
  More than a bit, I agree. We replaced the baity title with language from the article.
- hannob 9y ago
  I always found the idea of limiting "screen time" quite odd. Because this can mean so many different things, from playing games, writing messages to friends, using social media, reading books. Which can end up in some odd contradictions, because e.g. "reading books" is often considered as a positive thing while "screen time" is considered negative. So does "kindle / ereader time" count? Is cooking also considered screen time if you look up a recipe on the Internet with a phone or tablet? I think the idea of "screen time" limiting is rooted in an odd suspicion around technology and an unwillingness to consider the impact of the individual activities.
  - bittercynic 9y ago
    I agree that it is rooted in suspicion around technology, but I think the suspicion is well justified. Even those who are pretty sophisticated about maintaining control of our own technology can easily lose control of ourselves when using it.
  - baq 9y ago
    I bet that if the AAP could expect parents to follow an advice like 'never allow screen time in a stationary position', they would. Posture is a serious concern, kind of talking from own experience - no serious issues yet, but not quite ok either.
- mbesto 9y ago
  Honestly, I think it's disingenuous to think that your whole community consistently limits screen time based on those guidelines. Have you ever seen what parents do when their kid is throwing a tantrum? No matter how disciplined they think they are, shoving the tablet in their faces gives them an immediate solution.
tarr11 9y ago
There's a lot of social pressure for high tech parents to appear as if they limit their children's technology use. Parents are not particularly forthcoming about their children's technology use. I suspect that many parents don't actually know how many hours a day their children are interacting with technology. Perhaps this story about Bill Gates is being spun a bit to serve a particular goal? For example, here's a picture of Bill Gates' son with a mobile phone.[1] He says his child didn't "receive" a phone until he was 13. That doesn't mean he didn't "use" one. "Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'. He admitted that monitoring online activity is 'a very tricky issue for parents now.' Also, Can anyone link to the original study referenced here? I can't seem to find it. "Research has found that an eighth-grader's risk for depression jumps 27% when he or she frequently uses social media. " Googling leads me back to a bunch of other pages, with no references. Here is an alternative take on Jean Twenge's thesis with some criticism of her conclusions [2] [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2270869/Bill-Gates-Billionaire-opens-strict-parenting-rules.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2270869/Bill-Gates... [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/201708/no-smartphones-are-not-destroying-generation https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/20170...
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > "Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'. I mean, honestly, I am very much about giving children their privacy, but when I have children I don't know how I feel about letting them on the internet unsupervised until they're twelve or so. Not to snoop on what they are doing, but because I don't trust what the internet is trying to do to them. There is so much active exploitation and manipulation going on. Not just from malicious individuals trying to get your credit card data, I mean that the most popular platforms themselves are Skinner boxes algorithmically optimised to make you click and consume more. James Bridle had an excellent article about that a few weeks ago, in which he called this "infrastructural violence", and I don't think that is an exaggeration[0]. and children are still innocent in the sense that they are not aware or capable of understanding these tactics. I want to be able to intervene until they are independent enough to judge those things on their own. For off-line usage it's a very different story. [0] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
b0rsuk 9y ago
This whole article is a huge "appeal to authority" fallacy, and with a sample of 2. I'm not a fan of smartphones or FB myself, but this barely proves anything. Does America only have 2 tech gurus ? The argumentation borders on cult of personality.
- erasemus 9y ago
  A countervailing authority: Why keep kids away from tech they will create their lives with? Creative, not passive. It's like keeping our generation away from pencils. -- Garry Kasparov
mrits 9y ago
I'm not sure that being really bored all the time (whether it was a long car ride or watching bad TV) was much better. I also don't know if reading fantasy novels is really better than watching YouTube. My parents and teachers seemed to be thrilled with the idea of reading but I think you have some dimensioning returns on the actual value if the content is still junk.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  A few differences worth consideration are that books don't have popups distracting you while consuming the content, ads, or autoplay follow-on content. Also the writer and publisher don't make more money if you buy the book and spend 1 hour consuming it vs dozens. If anything, maybe we could argue they make less overall the longer you read it because spending your reading time on one book comes with the opportunity cost of not reading others.
- polskibus 9y ago
  It was better but not from the short term "I must kill the boredom now" point of view. Long version: read Deep Work by Cal Newport. Short version - by feeding our brain with information (doesn't have to be worthless but usually it's not relevant to our situation ) whenever we are bored, we're impairing our ability to focus and think deeply about problems, some researchers say irreversibly.
- watwut 9y ago
  It takes a lot of reading and years for a kid to be really proeficient with it. The excitement is about you becoming better and better at quickly recognizing words and needing less and less effort to read long text. That relates to ability remember more from text later on etc. It matters less that what you read was junk.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Simulacra 9y ago
I really want to limit screen time for my children. I grew up in an era where screen time only made up maybe 50% of my free time. I think that's a good balance.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I can remember when I self limited screen time to a couple of hours a day at most because the four tv channels only had stuff that was interesting to child me for that long, the rest was directed at older folks and kind of bored me to distraction.
mtkd 9y ago
I suspect this will right itself. The next generation are always hardwired to revolt against the previous ones - and they take all existing tech as the norm - so it's not massively interestingly/revolutionary. Millennials may well be peak social/online tech - as subsequent gens switch off and start to rediscover what it is like to feel/smell/buy clothes from a real shop and use a pencil/paper/desk light to design something. Why would they opt-in to being tracked/profiled/segmented/targeted while contributing free social content to megacorps 24/7?
- anotheryou 9y ago
  I don't think so. The revolt is not to use facebook, but snapchat instead; it's not using tin-can phones. Highly optimized to be addictive to the average consumer, you'd have to be well schooled or an oddball otherwise not to fall for it. I for example hate facebook and I'm far from addiction, but in my social sphere I need it for instant messaging and events. So not even someone who hates a service is safe from using it (or at least the costs of not using it are real enough that in many scenarios the hate against it is not enough).
  - baq 9y ago
    Exactly. Facebook should be an utility, not a media/advertising company they say they are.
ThomPete 9y ago
I have two boys 4 and 8. We both have limits and then things I don't want them to do. Whats' ok: Play games, watch a tv-series, movies, learn Whats not ok: Watch someone else playing, watch some family opening up a toybox, i.e. everything where someone else is doing the work for you. We are fairly liberal. They are allowed to binge watch once in a while, other times even though we have a whole weekend we don't allow them to use our ipads or phones. They both love being outside and play every day at the play-ground. My primary guideline is to look for whether they prefer computers to playing with others. For now it's not been a problem and I don't believe there is any right amount.
- gilbetron 9y ago
  What's the issue with "watch someone else"? I have an 8 year old, and I don't have issues with it - in moderation. Watching other people play games has taught him how games are played. As my mom taught me: you need to find balance. After an entire day at school with almost no screen time, and lots of social interaction and learning, I'm ok with him coming home and sitting in front of a screen. Assuming his homework and chores are done. He also has lots of after-school activities (martial arts, basketball, right now). Mostly I think he is growing up in a world deluged in screens and information and propaganda flowing at him, and he needs to learn how to swim in it.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    My opinion, and just from watching kids watch gameplay videos - it would seem to squash/not foster a grit/curiosity that one needs to figure stuff out/create solutions for problems. Instead one immediately because a Google programmer/user - "I'll just google it". I've gotten a lot of joy of playing computer games and figuring out the puzzles - it really seems like rote repetition to just watch someone else figure it out and mime them. Most puzzles/gameplay mechanisms in computer games are not meant to be that indecipherable/difficult unless that is the point of the game ala Dark Souls and one is mostly meant to get a sense of accomplishment by figuring stuff out, though I guess if one gets that by copying a gameplay video it works out in the end in a way.
  - 9y ago
andrepd 9y ago
I wouldn't say the problem is tech overuse; more specifically it is internet overuse. Offline is fine, in fact many probably many people have fond memories of tinkering with computers when they were younger, and many even became programmers or similar because of playing with computers when they were young. It is often a very stimulating activity. However the internet is a completely different beast. Some thought must be had about whether it is desirable for children to have unfettered access to a medium that puts them in touch with anyone in the world, and most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff. New technology isn't automatically good because it's new technology. We must have these debates.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  > most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff I think this is the bulk of the problem. There's nothing in the technology to say that that a website or game must bend over backwards with "engagement" bullshit and microtransaction teases instead of just being a good reading/playing experience. It's a socioeconomic and cultural problem, and blaming the technology isn't going to solve any of it.
  - jsonne 9y ago
    The problem is that internet advertising as a model for 99% of companies (Facebook, Google, and a handful of others making it work being the exceptions) is fundamentally broken. When you're a media company you fundamentally trade on people's attention and advertisers pay you to get a piece. You can do that with great content, or with dark patterns and manipulation. Usually its some combination of both. Regardless the vast majority of the web needs a new business model, but I'm not sure what the answer is.
  - andrepd 9y ago
andrewfromx 9y ago
i just bought a gun-safe with a complex passcode to physically lock up our ipad and android tablet. I removed the passwords from the devices (that was just annoying) and moved to actually put the thing in a locked box where kids cannot access it for hours.
sigsergv 9y ago
It seems to me that low-use of smartphones/facebooks in rich families are not because of restrictions but because of much more expensive and broad education, that includes schools and after-school activites that are not available to “regular people”. Rich kids just don't have enough time to spend in facebook.
gregpilling 9y ago
I have programmed the home router to turn on and off at various times of the day. Since we stream all video, and many games require an internet connection, this has the result of automatically controlling screen time. I tried it after this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395964 comment, and it has worked really really well. Children are 14,10,7 and 4 years old. I am waiting for the day the kids learn to hack the router, but so far they are too well behaved. So if you have kids, try it!
junkscience2017 9y ago
The big problem in my mind is cutting kids off from their peers. If I kick my son off his gaming laptop, he will be cut off from socializing with his friends. For better or worse, they all hang out and chat while gaming. Sure I would love it if they were all out riding bikes, but alas. Same with my daughter. If I take away her phone, she becomes isolated from her peers because sadly they mostly communicate through Snapchat. Even other things they might do like sports ends up creating electronic baggage. My daughter plays soccer, so she ends up talking about things said on the soccer team group chat. I have basically lost the fight and so have all the other parents of teens I know. I now dread weekends and holidays because I know my kids will be on screens continuously and the arguments to derail them are even more damaging to home life. There are a few local kids who are mostly gadget free due to parental control...and I predict they will fail out of college because once they are away from home, they will gorge on screens and ignore school. Every enlightened, educated parent I know who set about controlling tech has failed miserably.
- arkades 9y ago
  We approached this by punishing with Parental Controls rather than taking the phone away wholesale - at least for minor to middling transgressions.
- utefan001 9y ago
  I wrote my response previously. See link. https://twitter.com/DnsLearningOrg/status/919058340168306688 https://twitter.com/DnsLearningOrg/status/919058340168306688 Referenced time line.. https://dnslearning.org/img/myTimeline.html https://dnslearning.org/img/myTimeline.html
  - utefan001 9y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547
firefoxd 9y ago
Before the parent can be made to restrict internet use, they first have to understand their own susceptibility to internet over use. I used to try to restrict use of YouTube until i looked at my own history. It's like a drug user telling you to stop using drugs. So i tried to fix it for myself first. Now I'm the guy that will not watch the video you just sent, for the simple reason that it is designed to be addictive. The problem is not just children but also parents.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
Seems like it could be another case of 'correlation is not causation'. Are depressed kids more likely to have a greater use of technology to communicate? I would suggest there's a case to be made for that. However, there's no evidence shared in this article that suggests increased use of smartphones/laptops/tablets causes depression.
- baq 9y ago
  It's much easier to trigger depression in someone who's on the edge. A couple snarky anonymous comments and it's done. This simply didn't happen in the past when anonymity wasn't so easily attained.
foxyv 9y ago
In my area, the issue is that kids can't get around. The street has turned into a "Death Race" as population levels climb and the streets get wider/faster. Everything is designed to limit pedestrian traffic to major streets only and it takes 2 miles of walking to get 100 ft to another block because of fences. Every strip of land has been turned into a home and had a fence put around it. Parks are turning into a thing of the past and schools are off limits after hours and on weekends. Then we blame technology for kids being inside all day. What else are they going to do?

63 points by cmsefton 9y ago

I would argue this title is a bit sensationalist. Limiting screen time (much like Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs) is a very common practice in our community. Our family follows the standard guidelines for doing so: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages/american-academy-of-pediatrics-announces-new-recommendations-for-childrens-media-use.aspx https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...

amigoingtodie 9y ago
My children are only allowed to use monochrome monitors and tactile keyboards.
- polotics 9y ago
  Great! Can you tell us a bit more about this?
- malkia 9y ago
  My second computer was 286 with Hercules monitor (~199x). Not being able to play many games, I took on the "herculian" effort to try to make it so. It kind of worked with the Trolls game (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls) where I found that they kept the video buffer in main memory, and then were copying it to 0xA0000. I did something simple - a TSR program that would copy (actually some made up bit transform) every once in a while (interrupt driven I think) the 320x200x256 colors screen buffer into the hercules by just taking some of the bits... ignoring the palette... Somehow it almost worked - like 5-10fps :) - but I was able to ... almost play the game... It was more fun coding it! I also found the message which is listed in the mobygames page :)
- Gigablah 9y ago
  > tactile keyboards That’s arguably an upgrade.
- junkscience2017 9y ago
  Haha. But for anyone seriously considering something like this, when your kids become teens in the US they either have smartphone access or they have no friends. Basically school hours are the only time they are reliably unplugged. This is the only way to do it: unplug everyone...now, no network effects.
dang 9y ago
More than a bit, I agree. We replaced the baity title with language from the article.
hannob 9y ago
I always found the idea of limiting "screen time" quite odd. Because this can mean so many different things, from playing games, writing messages to friends, using social media, reading books. Which can end up in some odd contradictions, because e.g. "reading books" is often considered as a positive thing while "screen time" is considered negative. So does "kindle / ereader time" count? Is cooking also considered screen time if you look up a recipe on the Internet with a phone or tablet? I think the idea of "screen time" limiting is rooted in an odd suspicion around technology and an unwillingness to consider the impact of the individual activities.
- bittercynic 9y ago
  I agree that it is rooted in suspicion around technology, but I think the suspicion is well justified. Even those who are pretty sophisticated about maintaining control of our own technology can easily lose control of ourselves when using it.
- baq 9y ago
  I bet that if the AAP could expect parents to follow an advice like 'never allow screen time in a stationary position', they would. Posture is a serious concern, kind of talking from own experience - no serious issues yet, but not quite ok either.
mbesto 9y ago
Honestly, I think it's disingenuous to think that your whole community consistently limits screen time based on those guidelines. Have you ever seen what parents do when their kid is throwing a tantrum? No matter how disciplined they think they are, shoving the tablet in their faces gives them an immediate solution.

tarr11 9y ago

There's a lot of social pressure for high tech parents to appear as if they limit their children's technology use. Parents are not particularly forthcoming about their children's technology use. I suspect that many parents don't actually know how many hours a day their children are interacting with technology. Perhaps this story about Bill Gates is being spun a bit to serve a particular goal? For example, here's a picture of Bill Gates' son with a mobile phone.[1] He says his child didn't "receive" a phone until he was 13. That doesn't mean he didn't "use" one. "Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'. He admitted that monitoring online activity is 'a very tricky issue for parents now.' Also, Can anyone link to the original study referenced here? I can't seem to find it. "Research has found that an eighth-grader's risk for depression jumps 27% when he or she frequently uses social media. " Googling leads me back to a bunch of other pages, with no references. Here is an alternative take on Jean Twenge's thesis with some criticism of her conclusions [2] [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2270869/Bill-Gates-Billionaire-opens-strict-parenting-rules.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2270869/Bill-Gates... [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/201708/no-smartphones-are-not-destroying-generation https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/20170...

vanderZwan 9y ago
> "Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'. I mean, honestly, I am very much about giving children their privacy, but when I have children I don't know how I feel about letting them on the internet unsupervised until they're twelve or so. Not to snoop on what they are doing, but because I don't trust what the internet is trying to do to them. There is so much active exploitation and manipulation going on. Not just from malicious individuals trying to get your credit card data, I mean that the most popular platforms themselves are Skinner boxes algorithmically optimised to make you click and consume more. James Bridle had an excellent article about that a few weeks ago, in which he called this "infrastructural violence", and I don't think that is an exaggeration[0]. and children are still innocent in the sense that they are not aware or capable of understanding these tactics. I want to be able to intervene until they are independent enough to judge those things on their own. For off-line usage it's a very different story. [0] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

b0rsuk 9y ago

This whole article is a huge "appeal to authority" fallacy, and with a sample of 2. I'm not a fan of smartphones or FB myself, but this barely proves anything. Does America only have 2 tech gurus ? The argumentation borders on cult of personality.

erasemus 9y ago
A countervailing authority: Why keep kids away from tech they will create their lives with? Creative, not passive. It's like keeping our generation away from pencils. -- Garry Kasparov

mrits 9y ago

I'm not sure that being really bored all the time (whether it was a long car ride or watching bad TV) was much better. I also don't know if reading fantasy novels is really better than watching YouTube. My parents and teachers seemed to be thrilled with the idea of reading but I think you have some dimensioning returns on the actual value if the content is still junk.

tedmiston 9y ago
A few differences worth consideration are that books don't have popups distracting you while consuming the content, ads, or autoplay follow-on content. Also the writer and publisher don't make more money if you buy the book and spend 1 hour consuming it vs dozens. If anything, maybe we could argue they make less overall the longer you read it because spending your reading time on one book comes with the opportunity cost of not reading others.
polskibus 9y ago
It was better but not from the short term "I must kill the boredom now" point of view. Long version: read Deep Work by Cal Newport. Short version - by feeding our brain with information (doesn't have to be worthless but usually it's not relevant to our situation ) whenever we are bored, we're impairing our ability to focus and think deeply about problems, some researchers say irreversibly.
watwut 9y ago
It takes a lot of reading and years for a kid to be really proeficient with it. The excitement is about you becoming better and better at quickly recognizing words and needing less and less effort to read long text. That relates to ability remember more from text later on etc. It matters less that what you read was junk.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Simulacra 9y ago

I really want to limit screen time for my children. I grew up in an era where screen time only made up maybe 50% of my free time. I think that's a good balance.

stevenwoo 9y ago
I can remember when I self limited screen time to a couple of hours a day at most because the four tv channels only had stuff that was interesting to child me for that long, the rest was directed at older folks and kind of bored me to distraction.

mtkd 9y ago

I suspect this will right itself. The next generation are always hardwired to revolt against the previous ones - and they take all existing tech as the norm - so it's not massively interestingly/revolutionary. Millennials may well be peak social/online tech - as subsequent gens switch off and start to rediscover what it is like to feel/smell/buy clothes from a real shop and use a pencil/paper/desk light to design something. Why would they opt-in to being tracked/profiled/segmented/targeted while contributing free social content to megacorps 24/7?

anotheryou 9y ago
I don't think so. The revolt is not to use facebook, but snapchat instead; it's not using tin-can phones. Highly optimized to be addictive to the average consumer, you'd have to be well schooled or an oddball otherwise not to fall for it. I for example hate facebook and I'm far from addiction, but in my social sphere I need it for instant messaging and events. So not even someone who hates a service is safe from using it (or at least the costs of not using it are real enough that in many scenarios the hate against it is not enough).
- baq 9y ago
  Exactly. Facebook should be an utility, not a media/advertising company they say they are.

ThomPete 9y ago

I have two boys 4 and 8. We both have limits and then things I don't want them to do. Whats' ok: Play games, watch a tv-series, movies, learn Whats not ok: Watch someone else playing, watch some family opening up a toybox, i.e. everything where someone else is doing the work for you. We are fairly liberal. They are allowed to binge watch once in a while, other times even though we have a whole weekend we don't allow them to use our ipads or phones. They both love being outside and play every day at the play-ground. My primary guideline is to look for whether they prefer computers to playing with others. For now it's not been a problem and I don't believe there is any right amount.

gilbetron 9y ago
What's the issue with "watch someone else"? I have an 8 year old, and I don't have issues with it - in moderation. Watching other people play games has taught him how games are played. As my mom taught me: you need to find balance. After an entire day at school with almost no screen time, and lots of social interaction and learning, I'm ok with him coming home and sitting in front of a screen. Assuming his homework and chores are done. He also has lots of after-school activities (martial arts, basketball, right now). Mostly I think he is growing up in a world deluged in screens and information and propaganda flowing at him, and he needs to learn how to swim in it.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  My opinion, and just from watching kids watch gameplay videos - it would seem to squash/not foster a grit/curiosity that one needs to figure stuff out/create solutions for problems. Instead one immediately because a Google programmer/user - "I'll just google it". I've gotten a lot of joy of playing computer games and figuring out the puzzles - it really seems like rote repetition to just watch someone else figure it out and mime them. Most puzzles/gameplay mechanisms in computer games are not meant to be that indecipherable/difficult unless that is the point of the game ala Dark Souls and one is mostly meant to get a sense of accomplishment by figuring stuff out, though I guess if one gets that by copying a gameplay video it works out in the end in a way.
- 9y ago

andrepd 9y ago

I wouldn't say the problem is tech overuse; more specifically it is internet overuse. Offline is fine, in fact many probably many people have fond memories of tinkering with computers when they were younger, and many even became programmers or similar because of playing with computers when they were young. It is often a very stimulating activity. However the internet is a completely different beast. Some thought must be had about whether it is desirable for children to have unfettered access to a medium that puts them in touch with anyone in the world, and most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff. New technology isn't automatically good because it's new technology. We must have these debates.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
> most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff I think this is the bulk of the problem. There's nothing in the technology to say that that a website or game must bend over backwards with "engagement" bullshit and microtransaction teases instead of just being a good reading/playing experience. It's a socioeconomic and cultural problem, and blaming the technology isn't going to solve any of it.
- jsonne 9y ago
  The problem is that internet advertising as a model for 99% of companies (Facebook, Google, and a handful of others making it work being the exceptions) is fundamentally broken. When you're a media company you fundamentally trade on people's attention and advertisers pay you to get a piece. You can do that with great content, or with dark patterns and manipulation. Usually its some combination of both. Regardless the vast majority of the web needs a new business model, but I'm not sure what the answer is.
- andrepd 9y ago

andrewfromx 9y ago

i just bought a gun-safe with a complex passcode to physically lock up our ipad and android tablet. I removed the passwords from the devices (that was just annoying) and moved to actually put the thing in a locked box where kids cannot access it for hours.

sigsergv 9y ago

It seems to me that low-use of smartphones/facebooks in rich families are not because of restrictions but because of much more expensive and broad education, that includes schools and after-school activites that are not available to “regular people”. Rich kids just don't have enough time to spend in facebook.

gregpilling 9y ago

I have programmed the home router to turn on and off at various times of the day. Since we stream all video, and many games require an internet connection, this has the result of automatically controlling screen time. I tried it after this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395964 comment, and it has worked really really well. Children are 14,10,7 and 4 years old. I am waiting for the day the kids learn to hack the router, but so far they are too well behaved. So if you have kids, try it!

junkscience2017 9y ago

The big problem in my mind is cutting kids off from their peers. If I kick my son off his gaming laptop, he will be cut off from socializing with his friends. For better or worse, they all hang out and chat while gaming. Sure I would love it if they were all out riding bikes, but alas. Same with my daughter. If I take away her phone, she becomes isolated from her peers because sadly they mostly communicate through Snapchat. Even other things they might do like sports ends up creating electronic baggage. My daughter plays soccer, so she ends up talking about things said on the soccer team group chat. I have basically lost the fight and so have all the other parents of teens I know. I now dread weekends and holidays because I know my kids will be on screens continuously and the arguments to derail them are even more damaging to home life. There are a few local kids who are mostly gadget free due to parental control...and I predict they will fail out of college because once they are away from home, they will gorge on screens and ignore school. Every enlightened, educated parent I know who set about controlling tech has failed miserably.

arkades 9y ago
We approached this by punishing with Parental Controls rather than taking the phone away wholesale - at least for minor to middling transgressions.
utefan001 9y ago
I wrote my response previously. See link. https://twitter.com/DnsLearningOrg/status/919058340168306688 https://twitter.com/DnsLearningOrg/status/919058340168306688 Referenced time line.. https://dnslearning.org/img/myTimeline.html https://dnslearning.org/img/myTimeline.html
- utefan001 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547

firefoxd 9y ago

Before the parent can be made to restrict internet use, they first have to understand their own susceptibility to internet over use. I used to try to restrict use of YouTube until i looked at my own history. It's like a drug user telling you to stop using drugs. So i tried to fix it for myself first. Now I'm the guy that will not watch the video you just sent, for the simple reason that it is designed to be addictive. The problem is not just children but also parents.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

Seems like it could be another case of 'correlation is not causation'. Are depressed kids more likely to have a greater use of technology to communicate? I would suggest there's a case to be made for that. However, there's no evidence shared in this article that suggests increased use of smartphones/laptops/tablets causes depression.

baq 9y ago
It's much easier to trigger depression in someone who's on the edge. A couple snarky anonymous comments and it's done. This simply didn't happen in the past when anonymity wasn't so easily attained.

foxyv 9y ago

In my area, the issue is that kids can't get around. The street has turned into a "Death Race" as population levels climb and the streets get wider/faster. Everything is designed to limit pedestrian traffic to major streets only and it takes 2 miles of walking to get 100 ft to another block because of fences. Every strip of land has been turned into a home and had a fence put around it. Parks are turning into a thing of the past and schools are off limits after hours and on weekends. Then we blame technology for kids being inside all day. What else are they going to do?