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Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learn

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible. She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad. Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime. I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings. A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when new tech is the explanation for diminishing returns in our existing systems. Children are in aggressively structured, impoverished educational systems nationwide - bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets. Teachers & administrators have raised the warning that as many as 80% of children have not engaged at all with their schooling in the past two years. Maybe iPads aren’t the problem. Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse.

endisneigh 5y ago
> Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse. What's your household income?
- isoskeles 5y ago
  Enough to buy their kids tablets like it's nothing.
loceng 5y ago
The most notable difference between TV and computers of various sizes is it's interactive vs. passive, so the "reducing screen time" needs more nuance to the discussion - likewise Roblox etc together as a family sounds lovely vs. isolated dopamine hits from Instagram potentially allowing your peers/strangers dictate how you should feel about yourself (wrongly in either direction).
- Cerium 5y ago
  This reminds me of all the screen time I had as a kid with my parents, taking turns on single player games (a life or a race). A lot of time spent thinking about how the next turn would go, who would be better at this level (my mom was great at some Zelda temples and I was better at others). Way more thinking happened than any other TV activity.
  - danbolt 5y ago
    My father mentioned he noticed that when I played video games with my peers as a child, it was very much a social activity. I think it somewhat changed his paradigm on the medium after the 1990s having a bit of a moral panic on the topic.
baxtr 5y ago
I have a friend who was always the best in his class at Uni and has become a lead doctor in a major hospital. He once told me that he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day when he was a kid because his parents needed to work all the time. He turned out just fine. I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not just dull watching.
- fragmede 5y ago
  Please define what you mean by "just fine". "Just fine" is what parents who abused their kids say. Those kids later go to therapy to understand their treatment was abusive and to deal with it, and they don't turn out just fine, they turn out traumatized. I really have no idea what the situation is, but "they turned out just fine" is to abused kids the same as saying the phrase "calm down" in a heightened situation doesn't do shit to calm the situation down.
  - croes 5y ago
    Just fine this is the assessment of the previous poster, not that of his friend's parents. You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words. And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.
- WA 5y ago
  Or maybe you suffer from survivorship bias. I mean, anecdotes are nice and all, but totally useless in determining whether unlimited screen time has negative effects or not. And my educated guess is: it depends.
- pram 5y ago
  That’s how I was raised, and I turned out TV.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  He might be fine now, but he missed 2-3 hours of childhood per day. If I had to give up either my well paid job today, or my happy childhood playing outside, I would definitely be poor now.
Jarwain 5y ago
What kind of things does your daughter play? Personally I wonder whether there's a big difference between playing YouTube stimulation videos vs logic puzzle/math/mystery games vs the latest dopamine-addiction-of-day game
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  I think so. We don't have tablets, but we let our daughter play plenty of videogames. There is no hard limit, the limit is when we notice herself "coasting" instead of playing, but in those cases it means she's bored,so she happily explores alternatives. Playing an engaging videogame has the result of her deeply describing what she is doing (yes it's very annoying to the parent that has to acknowledge every detail, but it's a price I'm very happy to pay), as well as stimulating her duplo-building skills ("I've built a level for Yoshi!")
rock_hard 5y ago
We also have a unlimited screen time policy with our kids It’s been nothing but great! They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers. Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself. He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt park for example. It’s the result of watching the pro’s do it on YouTube and then practicing relentlessly! Society has this thing where everything new is stamped as bad…book, bad! Bicycles, bad! Radio, bad!, TV, bad! Computer games, bad! Drugs, bad! Sugar, bad! People are just a bunch of scaredy cats We ought to provide kids some more nuance about the things in the world Is there bad things to watch or do on your screens, like scary stuff or things that are incredibly dull…absolutely. But the only way to learn what that is, is to let them experience it and learn.
- WA 5y ago
  Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day? And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy? Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    > Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day? Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life. Thanks to the pandemic, my son has learned that screens can be boring, and it's not all that exciting anymore after too much time. He's learned to put it down and find something else to do. We don't have to enforce screen time anymore, he mostly does it himself.
    - throwoutway 5y ago
      > That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life. Not necessarily. Not when social media and gaming companies hire psychologist PhDs to explicitly entrap children through addictive traits
donw 5y ago
Most parents treat tablets like fancy TV sets. The resulting harm can not be understated. Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age. TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume. The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on. Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds. My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools. I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15. At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on. That was true at one point, but it is worth noting that Cartoon Network is about 30 years old now. And even before cable became the dominant TV delivery mechanism, VHS enabled lots of binge watching (and rewatching).
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets. The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes. The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  > The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets. Educational spending covers a different set of domains in the US than it does in other countries. There's a lot of backfill in the social services area, for example.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    That doesn't mean schools are under-funded. If it's true it implies schools are over-funded and some of their budgets should be transferred to social services.
    - gopher_space 5y ago
      What it means is that you can't compare funding between the US and other countries.
      - 5y ago
pyuser583 5y ago
My daughter began an extremely unhealthy relationship with screens during COVID. She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic. She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history. She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends. Maybe iPads are the problems.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  It's almost as if the way you use the tools is what matters. I hope that works itself out for her.
- ben_w 5y ago
  That is fascinating and surprising; I previously considered a Darmok-like language to be implausible, but it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re experiencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok (Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).
  - Izkata 5y ago
    I'd argue we've had hints of it for centuries in the form of idioms, such as "kicked the bucket".
    - ben_w 5y ago
      The important part of the Darmok episode is that the language is just catchphrases from longer stories, not that it contains some examples of that.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    She’s 10, not a teenager. And I meant “cultural vocabulary.” It’s difficult for her to talk about anything but memes. And if you haven’t seen the same memes she has, she’ll try to tell you about the YouTube videos she’s watched. If you don’t find this interesting (nobody does), she’ll stop talking to you. Again, not a teenager. A little girl.
satysin 5y ago
Since going [near] unlimited screen time we have seen a huge change in how our son (8yo) engages with the iPad and computer which has resulted in a much happier and healthier use of technology. As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. He was much more open to using it for things other than games and funny videos. I felt a bit dumb when I realised it was me putting these limits on his use of the iPad and computer that amplified how much "power" they had over his desire to use them. Obviously there are still some limits but we follow them for ourselves as well (such as no screen time before bed, taking breaks every hour) so they haven't been an issue. I certainly don't think the devices are the problem but more how we give these devices so much power over kids by holding this magical machine in front of them that can do so damn much then restrict access to them so all they ever want to do is very basic things like game.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. Back in 9th grade when I was 14 or 15, we had a substitute teacher who was just out of college and our regular teacher hadn't prepared any sort of lesson plan for her, so instead of doing what we were supposed to we somehow got into a long conversation about adulthood. The part that's always stuck with me is when one of the other students asked something like, "now that it's legal you must get drunk all the time, right?", and she described the same thing you did here about screens: All the allure was from it being forbidden, and once she was legally allowed to drink she just didn't care anymore.
  - porknubbins 5y ago
    In a way it sounds like a naive question but some percent of people will get drunk all the time because it is available, or over use games/devices to the detriment of everything else in their lives. I think in the end all parents can really do is try model a more balanced, well rounded life and hope their kids want that for themselves.
tehjoker 5y ago
A relative of mine works in NYC schools and routinely notes that whenever he subs in a poorer district the teaching strategy basically revolves around making students sit and behave so they'll learn how to be obedient unskilled labor when they grow up. They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  > They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys. Oof. A teachable moment for the instructors hopefully becomes one for the student. Good teachers are amazing; bad ones are horrible at both teaching and learning from their students.
throwoutway 5y ago
That's one impressive extrapolation from an anecdote. I won't point at the significant amount of research that disagrees (since that would be ironic considering the parent of this thread) but instead I'll point to the anecdotes of children I know whose iPads and screen time are the source of significant problems. Sounds like your daughter is great and that you are an involved parent

endisneigh 5y ago

> Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse. What's your household income?

isoskeles 5y ago
Enough to buy their kids tablets like it's nothing.

loceng 5y ago

The most notable difference between TV and computers of various sizes is it's interactive vs. passive, so the "reducing screen time" needs more nuance to the discussion - likewise Roblox etc together as a family sounds lovely vs. isolated dopamine hits from Instagram potentially allowing your peers/strangers dictate how you should feel about yourself (wrongly in either direction).

Cerium 5y ago
This reminds me of all the screen time I had as a kid with my parents, taking turns on single player games (a life or a race). A lot of time spent thinking about how the next turn would go, who would be better at this level (my mom was great at some Zelda temples and I was better at others). Way more thinking happened than any other TV activity.
- danbolt 5y ago
  My father mentioned he noticed that when I played video games with my peers as a child, it was very much a social activity. I think it somewhat changed his paradigm on the medium after the 1990s having a bit of a moral panic on the topic.

baxtr 5y ago

I have a friend who was always the best in his class at Uni and has become a lead doctor in a major hospital. He once told me that he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day when he was a kid because his parents needed to work all the time. He turned out just fine. I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not just dull watching.

fragmede 5y ago
Please define what you mean by "just fine". "Just fine" is what parents who abused their kids say. Those kids later go to therapy to understand their treatment was abusive and to deal with it, and they don't turn out just fine, they turn out traumatized. I really have no idea what the situation is, but "they turned out just fine" is to abused kids the same as saying the phrase "calm down" in a heightened situation doesn't do shit to calm the situation down.
- croes 5y ago
  Just fine this is the assessment of the previous poster, not that of his friend's parents. You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words. And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.
WA 5y ago
Or maybe you suffer from survivorship bias. I mean, anecdotes are nice and all, but totally useless in determining whether unlimited screen time has negative effects or not. And my educated guess is: it depends.
pram 5y ago
That’s how I was raised, and I turned out TV.
Grustaf 5y ago
He might be fine now, but he missed 2-3 hours of childhood per day. If I had to give up either my well paid job today, or my happy childhood playing outside, I would definitely be poor now.

Jarwain 5y ago

What kind of things does your daughter play? Personally I wonder whether there's a big difference between playing YouTube stimulation videos vs logic puzzle/math/mystery games vs the latest dopamine-addiction-of-day game

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
I think so. We don't have tablets, but we let our daughter play plenty of videogames. There is no hard limit, the limit is when we notice herself "coasting" instead of playing, but in those cases it means she's bored,so she happily explores alternatives. Playing an engaging videogame has the result of her deeply describing what she is doing (yes it's very annoying to the parent that has to acknowledge every detail, but it's a price I'm very happy to pay), as well as stimulating her duplo-building skills ("I've built a level for Yoshi!")

rock_hard 5y ago

We also have a unlimited screen time policy with our kids It’s been nothing but great! They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers. Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself. He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt park for example. It’s the result of watching the pro’s do it on YouTube and then practicing relentlessly! Society has this thing where everything new is stamped as bad…book, bad! Bicycles, bad! Radio, bad!, TV, bad! Computer games, bad! Drugs, bad! Sugar, bad! People are just a bunch of scaredy cats We ought to provide kids some more nuance about the things in the world Is there bad things to watch or do on your screens, like scary stuff or things that are incredibly dull…absolutely. But the only way to learn what that is, is to let them experience it and learn.

WA 5y ago
Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day? And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy? Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  > Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day? Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life. Thanks to the pandemic, my son has learned that screens can be boring, and it's not all that exciting anymore after too much time. He's learned to put it down and find something else to do. We don't have to enforce screen time anymore, he mostly does it himself.
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    > That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life. Not necessarily. Not when social media and gaming companies hire psychologist PhDs to explicitly entrap children through addictive traits

donw 5y ago

Most parents treat tablets like fancy TV sets. The resulting harm can not be understated. Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age. TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume. The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on. Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds. My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools. I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15. At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.

webmaven 5y ago
> You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on. That was true at one point, but it is worth noting that Cartoon Network is about 30 years old now. And even before cable became the dominant TV delivery mechanism, VHS enabled lots of binge watching (and rewatching).

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets. The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes. The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.

gopher_space 5y ago
> The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets. Educational spending covers a different set of domains in the US than it does in other countries. There's a lot of backfill in the social services area, for example.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  That doesn't mean schools are under-funded. If it's true it implies schools are over-funded and some of their budgets should be transferred to social services.
  - gopher_space 5y ago
    What it means is that you can't compare funding between the US and other countries.
    - 5y ago

pyuser583 5y ago

My daughter began an extremely unhealthy relationship with screens during COVID. She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic. She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history. She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends. Maybe iPads are the problems.

erikerikson 5y ago
It's almost as if the way you use the tools is what matters. I hope that works itself out for her.
ben_w 5y ago
That is fascinating and surprising; I previously considered a Darmok-like language to be implausible, but it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re experiencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok (Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).
- Izkata 5y ago
  I'd argue we've had hints of it for centuries in the form of idioms, such as "kicked the bucket".
  - ben_w 5y ago
    The important part of the Darmok episode is that the language is just catchphrases from longer stories, not that it contains some examples of that.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  She’s 10, not a teenager. And I meant “cultural vocabulary.” It’s difficult for her to talk about anything but memes. And if you haven’t seen the same memes she has, she’ll try to tell you about the YouTube videos she’s watched. If you don’t find this interesting (nobody does), she’ll stop talking to you. Again, not a teenager. A little girl.

satysin 5y ago

Since going [near] unlimited screen time we have seen a huge change in how our son (8yo) engages with the iPad and computer which has resulted in a much happier and healthier use of technology. As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. He was much more open to using it for things other than games and funny videos. I felt a bit dumb when I realised it was me putting these limits on his use of the iPad and computer that amplified how much "power" they had over his desire to use them. Obviously there are still some limits but we follow them for ourselves as well (such as no screen time before bed, taking breaks every hour) so they haven't been an issue. I certainly don't think the devices are the problem but more how we give these devices so much power over kids by holding this magical machine in front of them that can do so damn much then restrict access to them so all they ever want to do is very basic things like game.

Izkata 5y ago
> As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. Back in 9th grade when I was 14 or 15, we had a substitute teacher who was just out of college and our regular teacher hadn't prepared any sort of lesson plan for her, so instead of doing what we were supposed to we somehow got into a long conversation about adulthood. The part that's always stuck with me is when one of the other students asked something like, "now that it's legal you must get drunk all the time, right?", and she described the same thing you did here about screens: All the allure was from it being forbidden, and once she was legally allowed to drink she just didn't care anymore.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  In a way it sounds like a naive question but some percent of people will get drunk all the time because it is available, or over use games/devices to the detriment of everything else in their lives. I think in the end all parents can really do is try model a more balanced, well rounded life and hope their kids want that for themselves.

tehjoker 5y ago

A relative of mine works in NYC schools and routinely notes that whenever he subs in a poorer district the teaching strategy basically revolves around making students sit and behave so they'll learn how to be obedient unskilled labor when they grow up. They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.

aspenmayer 5y ago
> They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys. Oof. A teachable moment for the instructors hopefully becomes one for the student. Good teachers are amazing; bad ones are horrible at both teaching and learning from their students.

throwoutway 5y ago

That's one impressive extrapolation from an anecdote. I won't point at the significant amount of research that disagrees (since that would be ironic considering the parent of this thread) but instead I'll point to the anecdotes of children I know whose iPads and screen time are the source of significant problems. Sounds like your daughter is great and that you are an involved parent