3 ms·

I'm not sure what you are advocating here. (Letting children fall asleep to Netflix???)

Waterluvian 7y ago
I'm advocating against these studies being turned into blanket statement advice that can do real harm. "IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm. If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."
- prox 7y ago
  Often it’s not the papers but the headline creators of these on-line magazines.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    You're right. That's important to keep in mind. But I don't think the medical and scientific communities are innocent to this either.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      Humans are guiltiest. The market for attention optimizes for clear messaging, not nuanced, because that's what humans react most easily to. If it wasn't researchers or their university putting out press releases with clickbait headlines for funding purposes, it would be the next step down along the chain, popular science publications trying to maximize their readership. It still seeps out into the press when the results are of broad interest. Regulation is necessary to avoid: self-regulation of publishers, self-regulation of readers, regulation of speed of transmission. But the more connected our society is, the more power a viral message has to blow up, so the most viral messages crowd out everything else, and before you know it it seems like the whole world mysteriously has the same headlines.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it" Except so many people are incompetent parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?), the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. Many kids will survive despite the awful way they were brought up, though often with psychological scars, and are likely to engage in the abuse they themselves were subject to, or turn to self-destructive behavior. Not that the parents of all psychologically scarred, abusive, or self-destructive people are 100% to blame, but they tend to play a significant role. So, yeah, I don't think the advice of "do whatever you think is best" to parents is necessarily the wisest approach, despite a lot of parents thinking they're smarter than the experts and that they don't need to listen to advice.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    > Except so many people are incompetent parents... >... who refuse to vaccinate their kids, >> The percentage of children who have received no vaccines has increased, reaching 1.3% for children born in 2015, compared with 0.3% among those 19–35 months when surveyed in 2001 (6). Some children might be unvaccinated because of choices made by parents, whereas for others, lack of access to health care or health insurance might be factors. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm6740a4_e https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm... > ... abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, >> 0.92 % >> The majority (77.5%) of perpetrators are a parent to their victim. Source: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2018.pdf https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2018.pdf > ...feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?) >> The prevalence of obesity [in children aged 2-19] was 18.5% and affected about 13.7 million children and adolescents. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html I'll leave this to you to parse out which parts of these are evidence of bad parenting; but it's pretty clear to me that the GP's statement is largely correct.
cle 7y ago
Imagine these statements in an engineering context: "Linked lists are bad." "Java is bad." "Databases are bad." As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great. The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me? And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.
- viklove 7y ago
  This is a classic strawman. Which researcher or medical professional is just saying "formula is bad"? It's obviously more nuanced than that, and letting your child go hungry because you can't breastfeed is obviously not the conclusion to draw. If you have the choice between the two, some researchers would encourage you to choose breast milk. They're not saying you're evil if you're unable to breastfeed. Will your child be worse off if they're fed with formula instead of breastmilk? There's some evidence showing that this is the case. If you're unable to breastfeed and feel guilt because you have this knowledge, that's not a valid reason to tell these researchers to silence themselves.
  - cle 7y ago
    The only strawman here is your claiming that I want to silence researchers. Research is one of the most important things we do as humans. I’m not claiming the research is invalid, I’m claiming that the broad overgeneralizations that some people draw from them is invalid, and creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety and encourages parents to focus on the wrong things. If you need an example of this, read the title of this post.

I'm advocating against these studies being turned into blanket statement advice that can do real harm. "IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm. If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."

prox 7y ago
Often it’s not the papers but the headline creators of these on-line magazines.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  You're right. That's important to keep in mind. But I don't think the medical and scientific communities are innocent to this either.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    Humans are guiltiest. The market for attention optimizes for clear messaging, not nuanced, because that's what humans react most easily to. If it wasn't researchers or their university putting out press releases with clickbait headlines for funding purposes, it would be the next step down along the chain, popular science publications trying to maximize their readership. It still seeps out into the press when the results are of broad interest. Regulation is necessary to avoid: self-regulation of publishers, self-regulation of readers, regulation of speed of transmission. But the more connected our society is, the more power a viral message has to blow up, so the most viral messages crowd out everything else, and before you know it it seems like the whole world mysteriously has the same headlines.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it" Except so many people are incompetent parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?), the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. Many kids will survive despite the awful way they were brought up, though often with psychological scars, and are likely to engage in the abuse they themselves were subject to, or turn to self-destructive behavior. Not that the parents of all psychologically scarred, abusive, or self-destructive people are 100% to blame, but they tend to play a significant role. So, yeah, I don't think the advice of "do whatever you think is best" to parents is necessarily the wisest approach, despite a lot of parents thinking they're smarter than the experts and that they don't need to listen to advice.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  > Except so many people are incompetent parents... >... who refuse to vaccinate their kids, >> The percentage of children who have received no vaccines has increased, reaching 1.3% for children born in 2015, compared with 0.3% among those 19–35 months when surveyed in 2001 (6). Some children might be unvaccinated because of choices made by parents, whereas for others, lack of access to health care or health insurance might be factors. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm6740a4_e https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm... > ... abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, >> 0.92 % >> The majority (77.5%) of perpetrators are a parent to their victim. Source: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2018.pdf https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2018.pdf > ...feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?) >> The prevalence of obesity [in children aged 2-19] was 18.5% and affected about 13.7 million children and adolescents. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html I'll leave this to you to parse out which parts of these are evidence of bad parenting; but it's pretty clear to me that the GP's statement is largely correct.

cle 7y ago

Imagine these statements in an engineering context: "Linked lists are bad." "Java is bad." "Databases are bad." As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great. The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me? And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.

viklove 7y ago
This is a classic strawman. Which researcher or medical professional is just saying "formula is bad"? It's obviously more nuanced than that, and letting your child go hungry because you can't breastfeed is obviously not the conclusion to draw. If you have the choice between the two, some researchers would encourage you to choose breast milk. They're not saying you're evil if you're unable to breastfeed. Will your child be worse off if they're fed with formula instead of breastmilk? There's some evidence showing that this is the case. If you're unable to breastfeed and feel guilt because you have this knowledge, that's not a valid reason to tell these researchers to silence themselves.
- cle 7y ago
  The only strawman here is your claiming that I want to silence researchers. Research is one of the most important things we do as humans. I’m not claiming the research is invalid, I’m claiming that the broad overgeneralizations that some people draw from them is invalid, and creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety and encourages parents to focus on the wrong things. If you need an example of this, read the title of this post.