17 ms·

Screens Are Bad for Young Brains

156 points by laurex 7y ago

satya71 7y ago
"It's a small study" -- likely to be dominated by noise rather than effects.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  There is also a selection effect where small studies with boring results don't get articles written.
  - unishark 7y ago
    Absolutely it's called publication bias. Also studies who's results challenge the prevailing bias are much less likely to get published. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
bcrosby95 7y ago
I don't quite understand where people are finding the time to let their kids watch over 1 hour of TV (much less read to them) each day. My wife and I work a standard 8 hour day. Kids wake up at 700. We leave for daycare/work by 800. Arrive at work by 9. Work until 6pm. Pick up kids. Get home by 7pm. Prepare and eat dinner. Bedtime routine starts at 8pm. This leaves zero hours of dedicated kid time during the work week.
- logical_proof 7y ago
  There are quite a few stay at hone parents. Also what do you think is happening at most day cares? There is craft time for sure and recess but also at the understaffed places that are lower cost a lot of movie time.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    may I ask what do you mean with day care, and where do you live? In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      Our daycare (Montessori school for whatever that's worth) never showed videos, ever. Our very-good-for-our-city and excellent-for-our-state primary school, however, shows them quite a few movies (every indoor recess, for one thing, which... WTF), and puts the kids (yes, even kindergarteners) on the iPad a ton. Our first kid's reading ability actually dropped significantly for a while after the transition, and I largely blame all the "reading practice" in an iPad app that would read the book to the kids at the press of a button. Yeah, very, very few kindergarteners, even ones who are advanced readers, will choose to read over being read to, and being read books that are already under their current reading level (which is another topic) is doing approximately nothing to improve their reading ability. They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK. It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- polishdude20 7y ago
  I'm not the one to get between a man and his daily routine especially when it comes to family so please take this as a curious question. How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?
  - goodcanadian 7y ago
    Depends on the age of the kids, but I would go with pretty bad. Daycare was mentioned which suggests preschool. Kids of that age need 10-12 hours of sleep (it really depends on the child). Even starting the bedtime routine as late as 8pm sounds too late to me.
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    Sleep is incredibly important for kids and its also extremely hard to perturb - if we miss our kids bedtime by an hour he is a wreck.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    They’re supposed to sleep 12ish hours, give or take, until a later age than you’d think. Lots of people do put their kids down later and get them up just as early but it’s not clearly the better choice.
  - zrail 7y ago
    Depends on the kid but my sample size of two says very bad. If they don’t get at least 12 hours they’re a mess the next day and it starts a horrible cycle of not enough rest leading to it being hard to sleep.
  - syedkarim 7y ago
    My data should not be considered normal. I have a six year-old who goes to sleep at around 10pm and wakes up at 7:30am. Sometimes later than 10pm. She's been doing this for at least a year. When younger, she wasn't a napper. Extreme attitude if she goes to bed after 11pm, but bed time between 9pm-10pm yields a fairly consistent mood for the day. If left in a dark room by herself at 8pm, she'll be awake for at least an hour. Now we just let herself read herself to sleep. The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later. The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.
- adamredwoods 7y ago
  I don't understand this comment. Why do you expect us to have the same schedules and lifestyle?
  - tw1010 7y ago
    People generally seem to have difficulty thinking about the diversity of types of lives on a population-level scale.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lonelappde 7y ago
  There's the 2hr commute that some people avoid and can use for TV. There's all the weekend time. There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch. There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour. There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  Depending on where your daycare is, you could fit in half an hour of commute to and from, where the kid could watch something on the mobile phone... Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad. At least that's what happens with some kids I know.
- vnnkov 7y ago
  I do almost everything like you said. But my kid wakes up at 700, and we could play or read chapter from a book for 30 minutes when my wife working on breakfast. When i came back from work at 1900 i'll either play with wife/kid in the yard, or i could read books/draw/play with kid, while my wife working on dinner, or we switch here (i'm cooking, she playing). And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.
- lr4444lr 7y ago
  A 6 PM pickup is pretty late. Mine wake up between 5:30 - 6:00 typically, and the screen time eases the separation from parents when the babysitter arrives. (Yes, we tested to see if they were faking it to get screen time.) wife takes over again at around 4 PM, and bed time is at 7, which leaves about an hour for wife to get stuff done. She gets up at 5AM leaves the house by 6AM, so asking her to wait until 7:30 to start prepping for the next day would not only be impractical as relates to her having dinner and getting to bed, but would be too mentally exhausting to start doing evening work, leaving her no time at all to mentally unwind.
  - rebuilder 7y ago
    I remember when I first tried to schedule my days after we became a family of 3, thinking "A bit of organizing is going to sort this madness right out!". Cue my dismay when I realized that no, I'm simply 1.5 hours short each day of getting everything done and sleeping 8 hours. It did get better later on as the kid grew up.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      Can confirm, kid three is where it all goes to hell and there's not much you can do about it. I hear the difficulty levels off after that but damned if I plan to find out. No way.
    - lr4444lr 7y ago
      The hope that it improves is the only thing keeping me sane, hah!
birken 7y ago
The full text of the study is behind a paywall [1], but from the abstract we can see that: - It's 47 participants (out of 69 recruited) - The only other variables controlled for are household income and age The study's conclusion itself says: > The findings suggest further study is needed, particularly during the rapid early stages of brain development. So we should all be interested in the results of that future study, but at this point nobody can really make a strong claim one way or the other. 1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2754101 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
Misdicorl 7y ago
I continue to be surprised by the scope of these studies. Has nobody figured out that the screens are incidental and it is the content difference that matters? Listening to several hours of inane audio books every day is unlikely to be any better for a child's development. Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights
- riffraff 7y ago
  Pedagogy is hard, but I am inclined to agree. But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.
  - Misdicorl 7y ago
    Yes of course it's important to note that screens are huge enablers of passive consumption. But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert? Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)
    - satyrnein 7y ago
      I would have thought Facebook contained interaction, competition, and surprise, for better or worse.
      - Misdicorl 7y ago
        Only if you're publishing a lot. I think most users mostly just scroll through their feed. Nonetheless I see your point. Perhaps there is an interesting distinction! Maybe worth investigating, and not particularly suggested by a 'screens are bad' line of thinking
aeternum 7y ago
A more skeptical interpretation of the paper (worth a read): https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-on-screen-use-and-white-brain-matter-in-children/ https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...
- cwyers 7y ago
  > 5. The abstract reports the study found significant associations between language scores and the ScreenQ, giving the impression that these are robust, whereas the main text notes that these associations are no longer significant when household income was included as a covariate. Since many readers only read the abstract, this is misleading. I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.
o_p 7y ago
Yeah and TV will make you blind and videogames will give you epilepsy.. I heard so much nonsense when something new gets wide adoption, stop forcing the old world into your kids
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Not being outside enough at a young age probably does give you nearsightedness, so it's kind of related. The key seems to be exposure to bright sunlight including the UV part so you could watch TV outside and I guess that'd work (modern windows are often UV blocking so cheating and watching in front of a window might not do it) To be fair, reading or doing anything else indoors while not getting outside much is just as bad, though.
- Minor49er 7y ago
  Do you think that raising a child in front of a TV is a good idea?
  - criddell 7y ago
    If you are actually asking if television can be part of a healthy child's life, I would say absolutely. For example, I watched Sesame Street in the 1970's and my kids watched it in the 2000's and the quality was still great.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    Eh, in moderation it's fine. My kids get a couple hours of screen time a day, maybe even a little more sometimes. Both are at the top of their respective classes in school. But I've also been careful to keep them aware of the consequences of their various choices (screen time, junk food, etc) and they self-regulate pretty effectively. Although my daughter is currently addicted to fantasy novels and I may need to help her dial that back a little so she gets enough sleep at night :).
adamredwoods 7y ago
> The review of 33 studies concluded reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance as opposed to reading an actual book. Even stranger was that students had a more realistic assessment of their own skills when reading a paper document. This only held true for non-fiction reading material, leading the Hechinger Report to remark, “go ahead and read Jane Austen on a Kindle.” So non-fiction screen time is bad? It's studies like these that get parents like me to get all riled up but with no answers. I should start a research that tests if too much media consumption by parents leads to erratic child development.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  This smells of p-hacking. Split along enough dimensions and one of them will look barely significant under the wrong model.
teddyh 7y ago
— What other tools for creativity and learning do you arbitrarily limit? Do you have a hard rule on “paper time”?¹ 1. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification Related blog posts: http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Some of the kids experienced parents reading often to them, and little screen time. Other kids who’d had lots of screen time (more than one hour per day, the max recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the WHO) throughout early childhood. If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time. > If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental. So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.
- keytarsolo 7y ago
  > It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time. I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs. My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
    I was born in 89. Until I turned 9 or 10, one of my parents would read to me every night, and I had over an hour of screen time just about every day too. That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one. Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix. The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children. Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.
freepor 7y ago
It’s been obvious for years that the kids who are sitting silently through 3 hour weddings glued to their iPads are not developing any of the skills like creating fun, making friends, or being disciplined on proper conduct. It’s great for the parents though, but if you give a kid an iPad you should be aware that you’re damaging their brain, the same way that ice cream damages their health (that doesn’t mean kids should never have iPads or ice cream).
- satyrnein 7y ago
  Letting your kid stare at an iPad for 3 hours at a wedding is damaging their brains? This is a bold claim and requires evidence. The article is talking about daily screen time, not the occasional one-off.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Some of those kids might be coming up fine but a bunch of them are growing up unable to behave without constantly being entertained by YouTube. It's why their parents give them the devices to begin with—it's work to train them initially, and there's some unpleasantness and inconvenience involved, and giving them your phone works immediately—and why they have to keep giving them to them even when they're older.
  - freepor 7y ago
    No, having a kid who you've never bothered to socialize because using the iPad is easier is damaging their brains. My kids are much more disruptive at adult social events than their iPad-addled peers, but 100x better-behaved than those kids would be if you took away their iPads. Sadly, the expected standard of behavior is tending towards the iPad zombies, it's mostly the older generation who sees my kids' petty transgressions as "kids being kids."
- sadness2 7y ago
  Failing to improve or temporarily affecting mood != damaging
wazoox 7y ago
There are many meta-studies demonstrating that repeatedly for the past 20 years. TV is bad for children. Video games are bad. Phones are bad, and tablets, and consoles, and computers. It's bad for their mood, their IQ, their sleep, it gives them obesity, ADHD, it's bad any way you look at it; it's even bad when the parents are watching the phone instead of interacting with their children... Here's one meta study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2751330 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst... "This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents." here's another one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use_and_ADHD-Related_Behaviors_in_Children_and_Adolescents_A_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use... "Our results indicated a small significant relationship between media use and ADHD-related behaviors."
- bpizzi 7y ago
  Honest question: why don't you include books as a media?
  - umvi 7y ago
    Same reason vegetables aren't grouped together with soda and candy and chips, despite all of them being "food"
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    From what I can tell, listening to books read aloud is by far the most effective and efficient way to promote child language development. Listening comprehension is a foundational prerequisite for most kinds of intellectual work. In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close. The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc. Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.
mcshicks 7y ago
I raised my kids without cable or broadcast tv, and they had limited access to computer games. However I did have a tv, later a digital projector and we would watch vhs tapes and dvds. They had a tandy 102 they could play with as much as they wanted. I think the problem is not so much screens, but a screen activity without a defined beginning and end, and in isolation. I had a lot of fun watching star trek, etc with my kids. Later as teenagers there was streaming etc, and at that point well they are just like me. The only kind of hard thing is when they felt kind of left out, like not knowing the shows other kids were talking about, or the games etc. I know it's not a easy choice for everyone to make, but at least for me I think it was a pretty good one. I more or less grew up watching tv every night, and what can I say, I know the lyrics to many tv sitcoms. It didn't wreck my life or anything, but it certainly didn't help it.
superkuh 7y ago
It's like once people have children something flips in their brains and they become unable to think rationally about perceived dangers. Screens are not bad. Screens display things. What is on the screen and how the child is interacting with that defines what is good or bad. Screens just are. And re: this study, when I was a kid in the 90s I used my screens to read books (and still do). It's not either or when it comes to books and screens.
- satyrnein 7y ago
  Do you think the AAP recommends a limit of one hour of screen time because parents are unable to think rationally? I personally am a little skeptical that these studies have no confounding factors, but I don't think it's fair to blame parents for what doctors, researchers, and clickbait authors are saying.
  - superkuh 7y ago
    There's few groups more in the thrall of the irrational desires of parents than the American Academy of Pediatrics.
    - satyrnein 7y ago
      I don't understand the incentives or mechanism here. Let's assume you are correct, and parents irrationally fear screens (and many other things). Then what, the AAP issues guidelines based on what parents already fear? Then they conduct studies and what? Fudge the results? I'm having trouble connecting the dots. If it's anything like this, it still seems like doctors are more guilty than parents. They're supposed to be the experts.
      - robbrown451 7y ago
        Here's a theory. The parents don't irrationally fear screens on their own, but they are very susceptible to being told to fear them especially by a seemingly credible source. Now that they fear them, they are grateful to the organization that warned them. Grateful parents are key to funding. Organizations (and doctors, as you note) have a real incentive to conveying to parents things that parents subsequently find to be valuable, "action item" information. In other words, they are biased toward making themselves seem important. I don't think they necessarily "fudge" the results, but they can certainly avoid going out of their way to think of how such results might be biased toward "useful data".
Waterluvian 7y ago
The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts. I don't believe they have any idea what they're talking about and don't think they're capable of converting their research into practical advice that does good. I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice." Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works. It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest. I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet. So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.
- xorfish 7y ago
  last time I looked there wasn't much evidence for breastfeeding when you controlled for other factors. https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-finds-no-long-term-breastfeeding-benefits-for-kids https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-f...
robbrown451 7y ago
What if they are video chatting with a relative? Is that bad because it is a screen? If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time." Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.
dcolkitt 7y ago
Decades of twin studies, consistently replicated across dozens of large-scale studies, have found that family environment explains effectively 0% of the variance in adult IQ. In contrast, genetic heritability explains well over 50% of the cross-sectional population variance[1]. Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2]. Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children. When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608007000982 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160800... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human-height/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...
- rlonn 7y ago
  And as we all know, IQ is a perfect measure of mental capability and the only thing that really matters in the end. Self-confidence, ambition, passion, knowledge - that's just balderdash!
  - dcolkitt 7y ago
    Twin studies on personality factors[1] find that genetic heritability explains 40-50% of the cross-sectional variance in adults, while the impact of family environment is non-significant. All of those factors you listed show a nearly identical genetic pre-disposition as IQ itself. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1996.tb00522.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494....
sys_64738 7y ago
They've been saying this since the computer revolution started back in 1976.
mrfusion 7y ago
How do they account for the correlation that kids on screens are the ones that have less parental involvement?
sadness2 7y ago
Our kids would definitely be worse off without screens. We don't have time to give them their ideal levels and kinds stimulation, and screens are a tool which helps their parents' sanity. Us, as their parents being driven insane would adversely affect these children. One of them has special needs and the other 2 crave constant input. Overall screens are the lesser evil, and they're all doing just fine. It's all contextual and this article is nowhere near holistic enough.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Why can't the two provide input for each other? How did our grandparents with 8 kids do it?
  - sadness2 7y ago
    Context is everything
mensetmanusman 7y ago
5 kids here, ages 1-8, with the school aged ones at or near the top of their class reading-wise. Basic points on how we use technology: -totally disable the internet before the age of 6 -find all the interesting ABC / Songs / etc. that are interesting and download them locally (ssyoutube) -Always differentiate between the activities, i.e. are they consuming, creating, or playing with content? On the last point, it is interesting that the kids will sometimes not want to play the iPad if they aren’t allowed to watch ‘shows’ Once it becomes another toy, instead of an addictive consumer-driven device, it gets used just like the other things in the house. Can answer questions if there are any>
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  Why did you have so many kids and so close together in age? Or are they adopted? Are you able to work or are you a stay at home mom? If you work, does your company or government provide assistance/aid? I hear people with 1 or 2 kids struggling, I don't think I've met any with 5 kids so young.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    2 years between kids is quite common. Sometimes you get a multiple and sometimes "the last one" isn't a "one".
aaron695 7y ago
This article is absolutely incorrect. Go to the source journal article (Not CNN, it also is blatantly incorrect), it does not say what they claim. What this article claims is phenomenal. Why would you trust parentology.com with a discovery that would win a noble prize? To me, if you trust this article and use it to justify "Screens Are Bad for Young Brains" you clearly are not looking at the evidence. And that to me means you are not thinking at a low level what's best for a child. That's bad parenting.
jvanderbot 7y ago
Yeah, but they're bad for my brain as an adult. Video games and Netflix occupy 90% of my free time, which I would rather spend on hobbies, family, or exercise. But I am habituated.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Cancel Pause Netflix justbfor a month. It's super easy to go back if you don't like it. Or make a gym-only rule.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

156 points by laurex 7y ago

satya71 7y ago

"It's a small study" -- likely to be dominated by noise rather than effects.

BurningFrog 7y ago
There is also a selection effect where small studies with boring results don't get articles written.
- unishark 7y ago
  Absolutely it's called publication bias. Also studies who's results challenge the prevailing bias are much less likely to get published. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

bcrosby95 7y ago

I don't quite understand where people are finding the time to let their kids watch over 1 hour of TV (much less read to them) each day. My wife and I work a standard 8 hour day. Kids wake up at 700. We leave for daycare/work by 800. Arrive at work by 9. Work until 6pm. Pick up kids. Get home by 7pm. Prepare and eat dinner. Bedtime routine starts at 8pm. This leaves zero hours of dedicated kid time during the work week.

logical_proof 7y ago
There are quite a few stay at hone parents. Also what do you think is happening at most day cares? There is craft time for sure and recess but also at the understaffed places that are lower cost a lot of movie time.
- riffraff 7y ago
  may I ask what do you mean with day care, and where do you live? In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Our daycare (Montessori school for whatever that's worth) never showed videos, ever. Our very-good-for-our-city and excellent-for-our-state primary school, however, shows them quite a few movies (every indoor recess, for one thing, which... WTF), and puts the kids (yes, even kindergarteners) on the iPad a ton. Our first kid's reading ability actually dropped significantly for a while after the transition, and I largely blame all the "reading practice" in an iPad app that would read the book to the kids at the press of a button. Yeah, very, very few kindergarteners, even ones who are advanced readers, will choose to read over being read to, and being read books that are already under their current reading level (which is another topic) is doing approximately nothing to improve their reading ability. They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK. It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.
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polishdude20 7y ago
I'm not the one to get between a man and his daily routine especially when it comes to family so please take this as a curious question. How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  Depends on the age of the kids, but I would go with pretty bad. Daycare was mentioned which suggests preschool. Kids of that age need 10-12 hours of sleep (it really depends on the child). Even starting the bedtime routine as late as 8pm sounds too late to me.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Sleep is incredibly important for kids and its also extremely hard to perturb - if we miss our kids bedtime by an hour he is a wreck.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  They’re supposed to sleep 12ish hours, give or take, until a later age than you’d think. Lots of people do put their kids down later and get them up just as early but it’s not clearly the better choice.
- zrail 7y ago
  Depends on the kid but my sample size of two says very bad. If they don’t get at least 12 hours they’re a mess the next day and it starts a horrible cycle of not enough rest leading to it being hard to sleep.
- syedkarim 7y ago
  My data should not be considered normal. I have a six year-old who goes to sleep at around 10pm and wakes up at 7:30am. Sometimes later than 10pm. She's been doing this for at least a year. When younger, she wasn't a napper. Extreme attitude if she goes to bed after 11pm, but bed time between 9pm-10pm yields a fairly consistent mood for the day. If left in a dark room by herself at 8pm, she'll be awake for at least an hour. Now we just let herself read herself to sleep. The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later. The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.
adamredwoods 7y ago
I don't understand this comment. Why do you expect us to have the same schedules and lifestyle?
- tw1010 7y ago
  People generally seem to have difficulty thinking about the diversity of types of lives on a population-level scale.
- deleted 7y ago
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lonelappde 7y ago
There's the 2hr commute that some people avoid and can use for TV. There's all the weekend time. There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch. There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour. There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.
magicalhippo 7y ago
Depending on where your daycare is, you could fit in half an hour of commute to and from, where the kid could watch something on the mobile phone... Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad. At least that's what happens with some kids I know.
vnnkov 7y ago
I do almost everything like you said. But my kid wakes up at 700, and we could play or read chapter from a book for 30 minutes when my wife working on breakfast. When i came back from work at 1900 i'll either play with wife/kid in the yard, or i could read books/draw/play with kid, while my wife working on dinner, or we switch here (i'm cooking, she playing). And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.
lr4444lr 7y ago
A 6 PM pickup is pretty late. Mine wake up between 5:30 - 6:00 typically, and the screen time eases the separation from parents when the babysitter arrives. (Yes, we tested to see if they were faking it to get screen time.) wife takes over again at around 4 PM, and bed time is at 7, which leaves about an hour for wife to get stuff done. She gets up at 5AM leaves the house by 6AM, so asking her to wait until 7:30 to start prepping for the next day would not only be impractical as relates to her having dinner and getting to bed, but would be too mentally exhausting to start doing evening work, leaving her no time at all to mentally unwind.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I remember when I first tried to schedule my days after we became a family of 3, thinking "A bit of organizing is going to sort this madness right out!". Cue my dismay when I realized that no, I'm simply 1.5 hours short each day of getting everything done and sleeping 8 hours. It did get better later on as the kid grew up.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Can confirm, kid three is where it all goes to hell and there's not much you can do about it. I hear the difficulty levels off after that but damned if I plan to find out. No way.
  - lr4444lr 7y ago
    The hope that it improves is the only thing keeping me sane, hah!

birken 7y ago

The full text of the study is behind a paywall [1], but from the abstract we can see that: - It's 47 participants (out of 69 recruited) - The only other variables controlled for are household income and age The study's conclusion itself says: > The findings suggest further study is needed, particularly during the rapid early stages of brain development. So we should all be interested in the results of that future study, but at this point nobody can really make a strong claim one way or the other. 1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2754101 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Misdicorl 7y ago

I continue to be surprised by the scope of these studies. Has nobody figured out that the screens are incidental and it is the content difference that matters? Listening to several hours of inane audio books every day is unlikely to be any better for a child's development. Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights

riffraff 7y ago
Pedagogy is hard, but I am inclined to agree. But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  Yes of course it's important to note that screens are huge enablers of passive consumption. But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert? Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)
  - satyrnein 7y ago
    I would have thought Facebook contained interaction, competition, and surprise, for better or worse.
    - Misdicorl 7y ago
      Only if you're publishing a lot. I think most users mostly just scroll through their feed. Nonetheless I see your point. Perhaps there is an interesting distinction! Maybe worth investigating, and not particularly suggested by a 'screens are bad' line of thinking

aeternum 7y ago

A more skeptical interpretation of the paper (worth a read): https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-on-screen-use-and-white-brain-matter-in-children/ https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...

cwyers 7y ago
> 5. The abstract reports the study found significant associations between language scores and the ScreenQ, giving the impression that these are robust, whereas the main text notes that these associations are no longer significant when household income was included as a covariate. Since many readers only read the abstract, this is misleading. I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.

o_p 7y ago

Yeah and TV will make you blind and videogames will give you epilepsy.. I heard so much nonsense when something new gets wide adoption, stop forcing the old world into your kids

karatestomp 7y ago
Not being outside enough at a young age probably does give you nearsightedness, so it's kind of related. The key seems to be exposure to bright sunlight including the UV part so you could watch TV outside and I guess that'd work (modern windows are often UV blocking so cheating and watching in front of a window might not do it) To be fair, reading or doing anything else indoors while not getting outside much is just as bad, though.
Minor49er 7y ago
Do you think that raising a child in front of a TV is a good idea?
- criddell 7y ago
  If you are actually asking if television can be part of a healthy child's life, I would say absolutely. For example, I watched Sesame Street in the 1970's and my kids watched it in the 2000's and the quality was still great.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Eh, in moderation it's fine. My kids get a couple hours of screen time a day, maybe even a little more sometimes. Both are at the top of their respective classes in school. But I've also been careful to keep them aware of the consequences of their various choices (screen time, junk food, etc) and they self-regulate pretty effectively. Although my daughter is currently addicted to fantasy novels and I may need to help her dial that back a little so she gets enough sleep at night :).

adamredwoods 7y ago

> The review of 33 studies concluded reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance as opposed to reading an actual book. Even stranger was that students had a more realistic assessment of their own skills when reading a paper document. This only held true for non-fiction reading material, leading the Hechinger Report to remark, “go ahead and read Jane Austen on a Kindle.” So non-fiction screen time is bad? It's studies like these that get parents like me to get all riled up but with no answers. I should start a research that tests if too much media consumption by parents leads to erratic child development.

lonelappde 7y ago
This smells of p-hacking. Split along enough dimensions and one of them will look barely significant under the wrong model.

teddyh 7y ago

— What other tools for creativity and learning do you arbitrarily limit? Do you have a hard rule on “paper time”?¹ 1. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification Related blog posts: http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Some of the kids experienced parents reading often to them, and little screen time. Other kids who’d had lots of screen time (more than one hour per day, the max recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the WHO) throughout early childhood. If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time. > If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental. So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.

keytarsolo 7y ago
> It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time. I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs. My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  I was born in 89. Until I turned 9 or 10, one of my parents would read to me every night, and I had over an hour of screen time just about every day too. That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one. Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix. The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children. Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.

freepor 7y ago

It’s been obvious for years that the kids who are sitting silently through 3 hour weddings glued to their iPads are not developing any of the skills like creating fun, making friends, or being disciplined on proper conduct. It’s great for the parents though, but if you give a kid an iPad you should be aware that you’re damaging their brain, the same way that ice cream damages their health (that doesn’t mean kids should never have iPads or ice cream).

satyrnein 7y ago
Letting your kid stare at an iPad for 3 hours at a wedding is damaging their brains? This is a bold claim and requires evidence. The article is talking about daily screen time, not the occasional one-off.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Some of those kids might be coming up fine but a bunch of them are growing up unable to behave without constantly being entertained by YouTube. It's why their parents give them the devices to begin with—it's work to train them initially, and there's some unpleasantness and inconvenience involved, and giving them your phone works immediately—and why they have to keep giving them to them even when they're older.
- freepor 7y ago
  No, having a kid who you've never bothered to socialize because using the iPad is easier is damaging their brains. My kids are much more disruptive at adult social events than their iPad-addled peers, but 100x better-behaved than those kids would be if you took away their iPads. Sadly, the expected standard of behavior is tending towards the iPad zombies, it's mostly the older generation who sees my kids' petty transgressions as "kids being kids."
sadness2 7y ago
Failing to improve or temporarily affecting mood != damaging

wazoox 7y ago

There are many meta-studies demonstrating that repeatedly for the past 20 years. TV is bad for children. Video games are bad. Phones are bad, and tablets, and consoles, and computers. It's bad for their mood, their IQ, their sleep, it gives them obesity, ADHD, it's bad any way you look at it; it's even bad when the parents are watching the phone instead of interacting with their children... Here's one meta study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2751330 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst... "This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents." here's another one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use_and_ADHD-Related_Behaviors_in_Children_and_Adolescents_A_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use... "Our results indicated a small significant relationship between media use and ADHD-related behaviors."

bpizzi 7y ago
Honest question: why don't you include books as a media?
- umvi 7y ago
  Same reason vegetables aren't grouped together with soda and candy and chips, despite all of them being "food"
- jacobolus 7y ago
  From what I can tell, listening to books read aloud is by far the most effective and efficient way to promote child language development. Listening comprehension is a foundational prerequisite for most kinds of intellectual work. In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close. The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc. Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.

mcshicks 7y ago

I raised my kids without cable or broadcast tv, and they had limited access to computer games. However I did have a tv, later a digital projector and we would watch vhs tapes and dvds. They had a tandy 102 they could play with as much as they wanted. I think the problem is not so much screens, but a screen activity without a defined beginning and end, and in isolation. I had a lot of fun watching star trek, etc with my kids. Later as teenagers there was streaming etc, and at that point well they are just like me. The only kind of hard thing is when they felt kind of left out, like not knowing the shows other kids were talking about, or the games etc. I know it's not a easy choice for everyone to make, but at least for me I think it was a pretty good one. I more or less grew up watching tv every night, and what can I say, I know the lyrics to many tv sitcoms. It didn't wreck my life or anything, but it certainly didn't help it.

superkuh 7y ago

It's like once people have children something flips in their brains and they become unable to think rationally about perceived dangers. Screens are not bad. Screens display things. What is on the screen and how the child is interacting with that defines what is good or bad. Screens just are. And re: this study, when I was a kid in the 90s I used my screens to read books (and still do). It's not either or when it comes to books and screens.

satyrnein 7y ago
Do you think the AAP recommends a limit of one hour of screen time because parents are unable to think rationally? I personally am a little skeptical that these studies have no confounding factors, but I don't think it's fair to blame parents for what doctors, researchers, and clickbait authors are saying.
- superkuh 7y ago
  There's few groups more in the thrall of the irrational desires of parents than the American Academy of Pediatrics.
  - satyrnein 7y ago
    I don't understand the incentives or mechanism here. Let's assume you are correct, and parents irrationally fear screens (and many other things). Then what, the AAP issues guidelines based on what parents already fear? Then they conduct studies and what? Fudge the results? I'm having trouble connecting the dots. If it's anything like this, it still seems like doctors are more guilty than parents. They're supposed to be the experts.
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      Here's a theory. The parents don't irrationally fear screens on their own, but they are very susceptible to being told to fear them especially by a seemingly credible source. Now that they fear them, they are grateful to the organization that warned them. Grateful parents are key to funding. Organizations (and doctors, as you note) have a real incentive to conveying to parents things that parents subsequently find to be valuable, "action item" information. In other words, they are biased toward making themselves seem important. I don't think they necessarily "fudge" the results, but they can certainly avoid going out of their way to think of how such results might be biased toward "useful data".

Waterluvian 7y ago

The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts. I don't believe they have any idea what they're talking about and don't think they're capable of converting their research into practical advice that does good. I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice." Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works. It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest. I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet. So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.

xorfish 7y ago
last time I looked there wasn't much evidence for breastfeeding when you controlled for other factors. https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-finds-no-long-term-breastfeeding-benefits-for-kids https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-f...

robbrown451 7y ago

What if they are video chatting with a relative? Is that bad because it is a screen? If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time." Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.

dcolkitt 7y ago

Decades of twin studies, consistently replicated across dozens of large-scale studies, have found that family environment explains effectively 0% of the variance in adult IQ. In contrast, genetic heritability explains well over 50% of the cross-sectional population variance[1]. Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2]. Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children. When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608007000982 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160800... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human-height/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...

rlonn 7y ago
And as we all know, IQ is a perfect measure of mental capability and the only thing that really matters in the end. Self-confidence, ambition, passion, knowledge - that's just balderdash!
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Twin studies on personality factors[1] find that genetic heritability explains 40-50% of the cross-sectional variance in adults, while the impact of family environment is non-significant. All of those factors you listed show a nearly identical genetic pre-disposition as IQ itself. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1996.tb00522.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494....

sys_64738 7y ago

They've been saying this since the computer revolution started back in 1976.

mrfusion 7y ago

How do they account for the correlation that kids on screens are the ones that have less parental involvement?

sadness2 7y ago

Our kids would definitely be worse off without screens. We don't have time to give them their ideal levels and kinds stimulation, and screens are a tool which helps their parents' sanity. Us, as their parents being driven insane would adversely affect these children. One of them has special needs and the other 2 crave constant input. Overall screens are the lesser evil, and they're all doing just fine. It's all contextual and this article is nowhere near holistic enough.

lonelappde 7y ago
Why can't the two provide input for each other? How did our grandparents with 8 kids do it?
- sadness2 7y ago
  Context is everything

mensetmanusman 7y ago

5 kids here, ages 1-8, with the school aged ones at or near the top of their class reading-wise. Basic points on how we use technology: -totally disable the internet before the age of 6 -find all the interesting ABC / Songs / etc. that are interesting and download them locally (ssyoutube) -Always differentiate between the activities, i.e. are they consuming, creating, or playing with content? On the last point, it is interesting that the kids will sometimes not want to play the iPad if they aren’t allowed to watch ‘shows’ Once it becomes another toy, instead of an addictive consumer-driven device, it gets used just like the other things in the house. Can answer questions if there are any>

dntbnmpls 7y ago
Why did you have so many kids and so close together in age? Or are they adopted? Are you able to work or are you a stay at home mom? If you work, does your company or government provide assistance/aid? I hear people with 1 or 2 kids struggling, I don't think I've met any with 5 kids so young.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  2 years between kids is quite common. Sometimes you get a multiple and sometimes "the last one" isn't a "one".

aaron695 7y ago

This article is absolutely incorrect. Go to the source journal article (Not CNN, it also is blatantly incorrect), it does not say what they claim. What this article claims is phenomenal. Why would you trust parentology.com with a discovery that would win a noble prize? To me, if you trust this article and use it to justify "Screens Are Bad for Young Brains" you clearly are not looking at the evidence. And that to me means you are not thinking at a low level what's best for a child. That's bad parenting.

jvanderbot 7y ago

Yeah, but they're bad for my brain as an adult. Video games and Netflix occupy 90% of my free time, which I would rather spend on hobbies, family, or exercise. But I am habituated.

lonelappde 7y ago
Cancel Pause Netflix justbfor a month. It's super easy to go back if you don't like it. Or make a gym-only rule.

deleted 7y ago

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