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A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

• pier25 8y ago
  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. Social media, smartphones, and tablets, are the new smoking.
  • mikepurvis 8y ago
    I've been saying this for a while, particularly with respect to how our kids and grandkids will view these devices, systems, and patterns of behaviours— "Oh, there's grandpa, needing to leave the restaurant for a few minutes to get his social media fix because they've banned screens in here for privacy/ambiance/preference reasons."
    • sleepychu 8y ago
      Gosh I hope not, I can't imagine needing to do this!
      • mikepurvis 8y ago
        Really? I can totally picture it. There are already upscale cinemas that ban phones, for grownups who don't want to look at the movie over a sea of glowing screens, and are willing to pay a premium price and surrender the use of their own device for the privilege. Same goes with restaurants, especially fancy ones, where diners are sick of having everyone around them snapping pics of their food for instagram.
        • krrrh 8y ago
          Or standup comedians requiring people to lock their phones in neoprene bags before a show. I was at a Dave Chapelle show last year where he did this, and his surprise guest after the show was Kendrick Lamar. It was actually jarring to be at a concert for the first time in a decade where there were no phones up, and people just focused on the performance.
      • beat 8y ago
        On a recent tour, Jack White was banning cell phones at the concert - you had to check them at the door. Everyone I know who went to that show raved about the experience, to not feel the need to check in, to not see phones lifted above the audience film things, to just focus on the music.
    • yannis7 8y ago
      lol - though I completely disagree with the premise of social media is the new smoking. I would also assume by the time millenials are grampas nobody is gonna be looking at screens but through some AR glasses/lenses
  • billfruit 8y ago
    Wikipedia and YouTube can be huge timesinks as well, but hardly see much commentary as regards to FB and Instagram.
    • ntsplnkv2 8y ago
      Reddit and hackernews too. Frankly when I was a kid there were oldschool forums I'd frequent all the time. I think this isn't a "kid" problem. I see just as many adults glued to their screens.
      • cf141q5325 8y ago
        As adults however, we are old enough to decide for our self if we want to commit to bad habits. Kids are not attributed that judgment. There is a difference between restricting the diet of a child and restricting the diet of an adult.
    • dlisboa 8y ago
      Wikipedia is informative, at the very least. It's the same reason why you don't see an outcry about people spending time at the library. Youtube can be informative as well, although the majority of it is not. I consider YouTube to be as much of a problem as FB/Instagram, with the caveat that it can, by design, have useful content (which the other two cannot).
• trynumber9 8y ago
  > 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. 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.
  • chaoticmass 8y ago
    Age of Kings had a cool Condition/Trigger system for scripting campaigns. I thought the idea was so simple, yet powerful, it influenced me to write a scripting language based off the concept in Qbasic when I was 14. The scripting language idea consumed and while I dropped the Condition/Trigger system for something more sophisticated eventually, I worked on making my scripting language for years and learned a ton of skills.
  • moreira 8y ago
    Civilization in particular is phenomenal. The Civilopedia was a treasure trove of details about different real-life historical concepts. And the "Women's Suffrage" video in Civilization 2 made quite an impact on me as a kid. Having said that, I do think there's a big, big difference between playing games of that sort and... Candy Crush.
    • framebit 8y ago
      I actually came here to say the same thing: Civilization != Candy Crush.
  • benglish11 8y ago
    I've learned quite a bit about foreign cultures from Civilization which has prompted me to do my own reading/research to further my knowledge. There are also educational aspects to games like Factorio which can teach good logical problem solving and applied math skills.
    • 8y ago
• bjourne 8y ago
  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.
• wefarrell 8y ago
  There is always a tendency to blame the addiction on the substance, but it's usually symptomatic of something deeper. 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.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    You are partially right. But when I grew up there simply weren't that many things to tempt children as there are now. Even if I had wanted to have some there was no fast food around, there were no smart phones, no Facebook, no cable TV. We had to find ways to occupy ourselves be it reading or playing some games. It's hard for parents to fight off all these temptations.
  • skolos 8y ago
    In past generations parents spent much less time with kids than now. Kids were mostly roaming streets. Now society frowns upon letting kids be outside nonsupervised, hence the substitution - screens indoors. Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-now-spend-twice-as-much-time-with-their-children-as-50-years-ago https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
    • brightball 8y ago
      Part of that is that when roaming the streets, you knew the people on your street and usually had an idea that people were home to be able to call you to let you know there was a problem. Being at work is different than being "around and available" at home. Didn't have to be spending time with them directly to be available. When I was roaming at as kid it was to my other friends houses in my neighborhood and everywhere in between. I live in a fairly large neighborhood now and we only know one other boy in the neighborhood who is my son's age. It's unfortunate for him. At the same time, my daughter has several friends in the neighborhood her age and they play together all the time either at our house or the house of another parent who works from home. That said, when I was really little I watched a video of my 4 year old birthday party so many times I memorized it. My mom called it "the best babysitter." Even today I can play that video in my head.
• SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  This article doesn’t really explain what the dark consensus is 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?
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    That's what stood out for me while reading the article. Here are some people who say "screens are bad" and here are some other people who say "screens are not so bad". Then, a little bit about how screens are addictive and not good for kids. You could substitute "Dungeons and Dragons" for "screens" and we'd be reading an article straight out of the 80's.
    • malvosenior 8y ago
      It's funny because the subtitle is: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.” Over a huge ominous image. You are dead on about 80s D&D/satanism scare mongering.
  • shlant 8y ago
    > "What makes Fortnite and Youtube videos worse than Nerf guns and library books?" Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling. Youtube kids is also all kinds of messed up. Videos created using algorithms specifically to draw the attention of kids and sometimes contain very disturbing images and themes. This article is a good overview of how Youtube is not a good choice for kids: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig-youtube-weird-algorithms-automated-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig... Here is a video on Jake Paul (and many big youtubers) and how he markets HARD to kids while also having videos containing very inappropriate material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c On top of this, in terms of TV/Youtube vs books, there is a big difference in terms of it's effect on language, communication, and development. Also, TV/Youtube is a passive form of learning, reading books is active: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_10928340 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_1...
• sjg007 8y ago
  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”.
  • Dirlewanger 8y ago
    That's very true. One has to be weary of going too neo-Luddite, but at the same time, I don't think books and TV (on a mass scale anyway) caused kids to have less sex and skyrocket their depression and suicide rates.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      > I don't think books and TV (on a mass scale anyway) caused kids to have less sex and skyrocket their depression and suicide rates. Um, do we know that? Especially about TV?
• BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  >Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. >"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." A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this. 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. 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". 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.
  • ravenstine 8y ago
    I see two problems with how we view addiction: - Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits. - We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
    • djsumdog 8y ago
      My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood). The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book). There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away. But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions. It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium. But the medium can also be the message.
• shlant 8y ago
  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. Here is the report on Technology Addiction: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addiction-concern-controversy-and-finding-balance https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addicti... Here is our other research reports covering a wide range of media/technology topics effecting children, families and teachers: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1 https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1
  • lacker 8y ago
    Common Sense Media is great! I personally really appreciate the lists of educational apps, like https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/preschool-math-apps-games-and-websites https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/preschool-math-apps-g... . I strongly recommend that parents go through the educational apps on these lists and get ones that their kids find engaging.
  • topkai22 8y ago
    And here is a quote from one of those guides that pretty much sums it up: “Pay attention to how your kids act during and after watching TV, playing video games, or hanging out online. If they're using high-quality, age-appropriate media; their behavior is positive; and their screen-time activities are balanced with plenty of healthy screen-free ones, there's no need to worry.” Since I work from home on a computer all day, it seemed wrong to send mixed messages about screen usage. One trick we use is to set Alexa timers when starting screen time with our preschool and kindergarteners. You can argue with mom and dad, but Alexa is implacable. Also, the play room must be cleaned up and homework done, which seems to provide the “privilege, not a right” context we are looking for. It helps we have far better behaved kids in general that I have any right to expect. I blame my wife.
  • charliepark 8y ago
    Just want to say how fantastic Common Sense Media is, and what a great resource it provides for parents trying to be intentional about all of this. Thank you for what you and your team do! (And, to parents here who aren't familiar with their movie reviews and other resources, check them out: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ )
• Tehchops 8y ago
  I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's on the screen. Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago. Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive. 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. 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. Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
  • kartan 8y ago
    > They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine. I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines. Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use. The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of boring by design. Regulations force us to make them boring. (And that is a good thing, I will not work on this industry otherwise). The future of on-line games and mobile games is regulation. Micro-payments, push-notifications, etc. cannot be used without limits. People have right to their mental health more than companies have to higher profits.
    • danesparza 8y ago
      You've gotten me wondering: Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines? Is that a state-by-state regulation? A federal regulation? And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines? Thanks in advance for satisfying my curiosity.
      • gbear605 8y ago
        I’m not entirely up to date, but my impression was that as long as the rewards are not redeemable for cash, it’s fine.
• asnowman 8y ago
  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.
• keeptrying 8y ago
  Anyone care to share their Screen Time stats from IOS12?
  • miker64 8y ago
    Last 7 days: Instagram 5h 32m (insta has a 2 hour custom limit set) twofold 2h 55m (tetris-ish puzzle game) unread 2h 38m (feed reader) maps 1h 59m twitter 1h 15m Safari 1h 13m Spotify 1h 5m and then it drops off into under 10 minutes on various reference apps.
    • miker64 8y ago
      24 pickups per day.
  • leonroy 8y ago
    2 hours per day and 66 pickups. I feel I've been curbing my usage a lot since Screen Time got added to the iPad/iPhone. Mainly Slack, Messages, Feedly and Safari.
  • ben_w 8y ago
    3h56m per day / 27:34 total Reading: 13:19 Social: 10:27 Education: 2:02 This is despite trying to cut down my use.
• e0m 8y ago
  I wish the rhetoric around "screens" was less focused on the delivery mechanism and instead more focused on the problematic thing behind those screens. 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. "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.
  • Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    The problem, of course, is that it's really difficult for a parent to differentiate between the various types of things kids can do on their screens, especially for someone who is less tech savvy in general. This isn't to say that it shouldn't be done, just that it's hard. Personally, if I had to select one "easy avenue" to ban or restrict, it would be not screens but internet access. This has the side effect of putting the parent in charge of acquiring new content.
• dak1 8y ago
  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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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.
  • manux 8y ago
    > 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. This is also one of my bigger fears. There is a strange mix of people in my generation (born 1990's), who are non-techies, and are either responsible with their internet use or display worrying signs of unhealthy internet presence. Even though tech has been around for some time now. Some, I realised, were introduced to technology rather late. A fun example is how some people would be offended if I were to call them "gamers". They don't own PC games, don't own a console, but they spend their entire commutes and more playing mobile games.
  • John_KZ 8y ago
    That's a great point. But it takes a lot of time and effort to filter the content your child consumes. That's because the system is designed so the end user has almost no control over the information flow. So this will affect the poor disproportionately (once again). If you don't have time to discover child-friendly, educational content, no money to buy ad-free movies and games from trusted companies, you'll just give your child a tablet with a tab open showing an educational video. What your child will be watching 10 minutes later is up the the mercy of Google. Whatever it's going to be, I bet it won't be in the best interests of your child.
• nraynaud 8y ago
  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?
• mangoman 8y ago
  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". That being said, I found this anecdote to be particularly... unsettling. > “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.’” It's tough to explain away the emotional desire for something that was manufactured to be cool and addictive
  • humanrebar 8y ago
    Watch the Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine clip.
• jimejim 8y ago
  This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable. 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. 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. 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? Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
  • jvvw 8y ago
    We try and do all this - the hard thing I find is what limits to put in place and how when they do find stuff that feels less worthwhile or on the addictive side, which they obviously do. It's actually harder than it sounds I have found to set time limits - particularly with siblings as they play together, look over eachother's shoulders etc. and if your daily schedule isn't completely regular due to other activities. We've gone for making one day at the weekend screen-free but it often feels like that isn't enough.
    • jimejim 8y ago
      I use a food analogy when talking about tech consumption with my kids, so I'm fine with occasional junk food so long as they're keeping a well rounded diet and getting exercise. It takes some work to get there, but so far, so good. We have a pretty standard schedule: - Tech off at 6pm every night and during dinners - After school till 6 is basically free for all time if they don't have other obligations, which I count as decompression from the day. They hang out with neighbors too. - Weekends we allow tech, but only if it's educational programming or they're creating something (arts, crafts, stop motion, game programming), so it's a bit more strict. YMMV, of course.
• nyghtly 8y ago
  Here's some low hanging fruit to get us started: 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. 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. Problem is, policy makers are clueless when it comes to games. These policies have no chance of passing anytime soon.
  • medobs41 8y ago
    It’s not just cluelessness that is the problem, it is the motivation, ideology (and influence by funders) of the policy makers. (Speaking here only about US regulation.) More details in my comment above including a link.
  • naravara 8y ago
    >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. So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating. Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft. The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.
• borkt 8y ago
  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. 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. I know that I will definitely do everything I can if I have children to get them into the same school.
  • lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Have you considered that the kind of parents that raise such children re the kind of kids to put them into waldorf schools, not that waldorf schools do something special.
    • samatman 8y ago
      (waldorf kid here) while that is an obvious confound, the waldorf pedagogy strong encourages children not be exposed to any screen time at all. It goes further: even at the kindergarten level, all toys and costumes are natural materials, you won't find a single piece of plastic among items intended for a child's use. Even the crayons are made of beeswax.
      • selimthegrim 8y ago
        Are they still making you memorize colors for days of the week? My ex gf tried to go out of a Waldorf program into engineering at CU Boulder and had no clue how to use a computer.
        • samatman 8y ago
          No doubt, it's absolutely soaked in weird Christian Theosophy. More likely to pick Montessori for my own youngins, wanted to provide some accurate info.
• shanemlk 8y ago
  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.
• rb808 8y ago
  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.
• lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  I still want to build a MOOP - Massive Open Online Psychology. So much of our lives can be monitored that frankly I think they will be - so we may as well turn that to a positive. 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. Your coats are in the hall, apart from Jennifer's who dropped hers in her room. 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"
• fhood 8y ago
  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. The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.
  • manfredo 8y ago
    WoW was less of an explicit slot machine than a lot of mobile games. While things like item drops had a random element, it wasn't a "pay once per chance" sort of deal like loot boxes. You just kept killing mobs, and when you got a drop it was great. The impact wasn't all that good anyway, since even the best item would be obsolete in 4-5 levels.
    • sesqu 8y ago
      WoW had an absurdly high recurring fee that it tried to make you renew again and again and again. Because there was no micropayment infrastructure, it didn't use "pay to throw dice", it used "pay to retain your investment". By contrast, many of the modern games don't do that and are perfectly happy with their high turnover rates.
      • manfredo 8y ago
        The point is, though, it costs the same amount of money if you take one chance at winning or a hundred. A monthly recurring fee makes the devs optimize for lasting engagement, not impulsive choices. Sure, lasting engagement may be created by having mechanics that make the player feel guilty about not playing regularly but it's not the same sort of incentive as a slot machine.
        • sesqu 8y ago
          It was definitely less abusive, but I think it was more malevolent - like payday loans instead of horse racing. Both prey on the destitute, but one builds itself into your life (like a need), the other is merely novelty (like opportunity).
• rayiner 8y ago
  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.
• deleted 8y ago
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• driverdan 8y ago
  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. You can disable or control this addiction pattern. Short, repeating patterns with rewards are how you feed addiction. 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. 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. > “Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’” 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.
• sys_64738 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
  • humanrebar 8y ago
    Keep going back. Novels used to be unhealthy: https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/ https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer... More recently, parents used to complain about teenage girls locking themselves in their rooms to talk on the phone with their friends.
    • Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      The fact that parents have had somewhat silly concerns about past technologies does not discount current concerns. I truly believe that the new crop of "psychologically optimized" mobile games and apps have crossed a line in this regard. Books, movies, comics etc were of course designed to be appealing and enjoyable, but were not specifically designed to consume as much of your time as they possibly could.
• antpls 8y ago
  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. 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? 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. 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.
• imranq 8y ago
  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. 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.
• arthurcolle 8y ago
  at some point people need to take responsibility for what they spend their time on
• lacker 8y ago
  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 amazing compared to what I had when I was a kid. 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. 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.
• kachurovskiy 8y ago
  Got an 8 year old daughter. After trying all those things, here's where we settled: - 2h Netflix time per week - Offline phone with audiobooks - Offline PS3 with SingStar - Occasional music video on parent's smartphone No free TV usage, no YouTube and no Internet-connected devices. Seems to work well for now!
• Mankrik 8y ago
  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
• rdlecler1 8y ago
  The web link isn’t providing a non-paywall alternative?
• faissaloo 8y ago
  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.
  • deleted 8y ago
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• calebm 8y ago
  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. 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.
• C1sc0cat 8y ago
  I bet 40, 50 years ago you could see the same sort of article about Television
• mindslight 8y ago
  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! 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. Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi have not been adversarily 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.
  • 51lver 8y ago
    Maybe someday FOSS "veganism" will catch on.
    • mindslight 8y ago
      With that analogy, I guess web browsers are cheese. I don't think FOSS is even necessary for what I'm talking about (although it seems to be sufficient). Non-networked binary distribution of yore was also (mostly) aligned with the interests of its users.
      • marcosdumay 8y ago
        > Non-networked binary distribution of yore was also (mostly) aligned with the interests of its users. It's much more related to who is paying the bills. Technical concerns do make some difference, but are eclipsed by the money question. Our current problem is that people mostly don't pay for software anymore. So we are left with FOSS and anti-user software.
        • mindslight 8y ago
          Though it's harder to be lucratively anti-user without a channel for telemetry and control. I've long pondered if an economy around Free software could be better implemented. We take it as a forgone conclusion that wide source code availability precludes charging per-instance, but really that's just an assumption. Of course the idea is likely moot in the light of network effects, which seem to be a major underlying factor of the current harsh dichotomy.
• TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
  The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising. 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. 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. Whoopity doooo. So what if she knows how to use an iPad. 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.
  • thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    Your methodological criticisms are spot-on. > The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising. A lot of parents lack sophistication when it comes to "screen time". I have multiple in-laws who seem to not understand that it's what is on the screen that matters. As you predicted, those same people are also prone to magical thinking about other things: vaccination, fluoride, radio waves, GMOs, etc. This has multiple effects. First, they tend to over-limit access to useful aspects of computers. Second, they tend to allow toxic uses of the screen-time (allowing an hour of pocket slot machine time each day, which is IMO super excessive). A stretched analogy: it's similar to a parent who doesn't understand the difference between alcohol and water, and therefore limits their children's access to liquid to a few times a day. However, during those few hours, the kids get to drink whatever they want out of the liquor cabinet. Obviously, the cabinet should be off-limits 24/7 but the water faucet should be freely available. Similarly, kids should not be allowed to play pocket slot machines or watch youtube with zero restriction/oversight. But there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time for other uses, because it's not the screen itself that's the problem. Concretely, my kids will have unrestricted access to an Apple ][ with an Apple BASIC interpreter and manual. I doubt that will cause any problems that aren't also caused by unlimited access to microscopes or pH strips. Of course, their access to iPad games and Netflix will be moderated in the same way their access to TV will be moderated. But a lot of parents -- especially non-tech-literate parents -- lump it all in as "screentime", which causes them to both under-moderate what's going on when the screen is on and over-moderate access to the screen for healthy uses.
• crwalker 8y ago
  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). 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. I don't know what the digital equivalents will be, but would love to hear suggestions. "Don't follow the likes" "You're the product" "Don't post anything unless you want it in the NYT" "Whose phone is that? (Google's)" -- edit (spelling)
• subpixel 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• ggggtez 8y ago
  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. 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.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  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 ...
• donohoe 8y ago
  I'm reminded of this book: "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" by Nir Eyal (BTW I'm not endorsing this book). 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon after 1,100 reviews. From the description: "... 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." Link: 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 https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/d... 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.
• jmartrican 8y ago
  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. Its pretty interesting because when my kid was young, my concern was not too much exposure but not enough. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0797ZV1RJ/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o04_aud_?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0797ZV1RJ/ref=oh_aui_d_de...
• quabity 8y ago
  “’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
  • marmaduke 8y ago
    Spot on. Where is that from?
    • frereubu 8y ago
      The film "The End Of The Tour" - there's a transcript with that quote here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/end-tour-david-foster-wallace https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/end-tour-david-foster-wall...
• gumby 8y ago
  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). 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. 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. 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.
• cabaalis 8y ago
  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.
• carlospwk 8y ago
  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?
• moneil971 8y ago
  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: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-sch...
• anigbrowl 8y ago
  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. 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.
• climber604 8y ago
  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. 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.
  • SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    From what I understand, people read yellow journalism and newspapers before phones on public transport. (Also, books were considered similar to phones for children nowadays.) Phones are definitely a whole new problem, but I don't think it's correct to describe it as fundamentally different behavior than the past in any way wrt adult asociality.
• woolvalley 8y ago
  How is this effectively different from the cable TV, nintendo, home PCs and gameboy era of 20 years ago for kids? 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. 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.
• eddieplan9 8y ago
  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." 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. Unfortunately, the most common rule in my kid's circle is that kid can download any app as long as it's free.
• apo 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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.
• tomjen3 8y ago
  I don't think the issue is screens. I think the issue is internet connectivity, more specifically always on internet connectivity.
• acd 8y ago
  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. 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. Kids should play and learn not be targets for ad revenue by online content made like dopamine slot machine rewards. 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.
• intrasight 8y ago
  Please mommy, don't take away my Hacker News!
• thowthisaway 8y ago
  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. 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) 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? 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". 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.
• Nasrudith 8y ago
  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. All with the usual special pleading about how things were different then.
• marcell 8y ago
  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. 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. I think many parents are uncomfortable with this use of phones, but reality forces you to use it.
• lunulata 8y ago
  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.
• fromMars 8y ago
  I lived without a TV for 10 years. But, when I got married, I could not convince my spouse that a screen free environment would be beneficial for our kids. I also sometimes think I should get rid of my smart phone. Do I really need it? But given that I haven't, it is really hard to do one thing and ask my kids to do another.
• zzo38computer 8y ago
  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.
• ancorevard 8y ago
  There is a reason why Steve Jobs banned iPads for his children. "They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
• sunstone 8y ago
  I wonder how today's screens compare with the effects of TV on kids growing up before the internet?
• jackcosgrove 8y ago
  I have heard no screens until age three. Are there phones that allow a parent to remotely shut off WiFi and cellular? Because if there aren't there should be.
• zmmmmm 8y ago
  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. 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 about 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 anything. 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.
• fzeroracer 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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.
• WalterBright 8y ago
  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. As a result I spent time outside, hanging with friends, reading, and building things.
  • WalterBright 8y ago
    These days, I sometimes catch myself worrying about fake "karma" points on HackerNews or Reddit, and then laugh and forget about it.
• WalterBright 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. I suppose I've dodged a bullet with that.
• ineedasername 8y ago
  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.
• guelo 8y ago
  I thought the potty with the ipad was a joke, but it is real https://www.amazon.com/CTA-Digital-iPotty-Activity-Seat/dp/B00B3G8UGQ https://www.amazon.com/CTA-Digital-iPotty-Activity-Seat/dp/B...
• illiac_1962 8y ago
  Quit posting pay wall shit
• hollerith 8y ago
  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. (The purpose of not giving the kid a monitor would be to deny him access to Linux games with engaging user interfaces.) My point is that the word "screens" is an imprecise description of the danger. The danger is restricted to certain platforms. (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.)
• a-saleh 8y ago
  > “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.” 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. 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). 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. 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 :-)
• Tempest1981 8y ago
  To make matters worse, schools are rushing to adopt Chromebooks for every class. One laptop per child. Now parents can’t be sure if the kids are working on homework or playing. Or multitasking. 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: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt842499.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt842499.aspx
• DaveSapien 8y ago
  Screen time...what about screen time creating music, art, programming, study, learning, and so on? It's the "Ah, you know what I mean." saying. No actually, we don't "know" what you mean, and that's the really question that needs answered in the public zeitgeist. Most here "know" what it means. However, quantifying that into a simple statement or phrase like "screen time" is not so easy. Are there any recommendations? 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. Thoughts?
• parasubvert 8y ago
  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. The truth is, we are afraid of everything these days. People don’t send our kids to play outside, someone might hurt or abduct them (or another parent might Parent Patty us) 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) 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). Kids lacking social cues - is it really screens? Or are kids becoming nerdier and turning more to screens because of it? 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? 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. 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. 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.
  • pappaSsmurf 8y ago
    serious question: do you have kids?
    • parasubvert 8y ago
      Yes, two.
  • jessriedel 8y ago
    > 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. It's clickbait. The author wants to jam some facts into a narrative. Consensuses are always "growing". Evidence is always "mounting".