6 ms·

Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. 30 years before that, it was radio, TV, vinyl, and books. 30

Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. 30 years before that, it was radio, TV, vinyl, and books. 30 years before that: radio, vinyl, and books. Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things. Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance. It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.

germinalphrase 3y ago
It's only in recent decades that media has begun to adapt itself to increase captivity of individual consumers. That feels like a qualitative difference between your time horizons.
- wvenable 3y ago
  My two children 12 years apart in age and they have had a dramatically different childhoods. Unless you are a parent right now, you probably have no idea how quickly childhood has changed in the last decade.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    Or a teacher, or childcare worker, or pediatrician or nanny or school bus driver or any of the bazillion different ways that many adults actually get quite a clear idea of how childhood changes over time. Possibly more clear than parents, since they see kids going through the same stage over time.
    - wvenable 3y ago
      My close friend is a teacher and we have quite a few interesting conversations about kids and technology. I imagine there are lot of people on HN that aren't parents, teachers, or bus drivers.
psunavy03 3y ago
> Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  also 30 years ago, you did not have busybodies calling child services on anyone who left their kid alone.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    Health services and cops also gave less of a shit about things like that. This was great for the wider society but the small minority of kids that had it bad suffered. The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      There is not enough actual news happening in the world to justify 24-hour news coverage. So the media has to make stuff up until they fill the time. But then once they do this, they're also somehow incapable of telling the difference between what they've made up and actual news. And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.
dave78 3y ago
I was a kid 30 years ago. I may have wanted to watch TV all the time, but it was self-limiting back then. Much of the time the stuff on TV wasn't anything a kid would want to watch. There were only certain times of the day that you could find someone you wanted. Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  I feel like it's also hard money wise as a kid, I remember wanting a milling machine and tools/materials to build a boat that was just too absurdly expensive at the time. Also just being limited by cars and stuff, would've loved to be able to go surfing but it's a hard sell to convince your parents to drive 6+ hours round trip for something like that.
  - prawn 3y ago
    That's another challenge for parents. Books are expensive and take up space. Lego and various other toys are also expensive, take up space, and children constantly need reminders to pack it up. Arts and craft quickly dominate spaces and lead to disputes over which child made all the mess. Contrast with reading on an app like Libby (free, no bookshelves), playing Minecraft (cheap, no pack-up), or digital art/puzzles. Digital equivalents are pushed in every workspace. Scrawling unnecessarily on paper would be frowned on as wasteful in the average office. Sending a paper letter instead of an email is rare. I'm not arguing that there aren't advantages of physical books, board games, and literal painting, but doing things the "right way" is clearly more expensive, less space efficient, and uses up more time packing up. It all influences parenting decisions.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      Books aren’t expensive if you teach them about the library
jibbit 3y ago
how old are 'kids'? very few children under say 13 were obsessed with radio, records, books.. i see kids from age 3 who can't put down their tablets
lfowles 3y ago
I definitely remember seeing "turn off the TV" campaigns back then as a kid!
joenot443 3y ago
I think you’re lying to yourself if you really think vinyl and books are a fair equivalence to the TikToks and Snapchats of today.
huytersd 3y ago
It’s not the same. This line of whataboutism doesn’t work. None of those mediums were interactive or had their social networks on them. Almost everyone (kids) I knew watched a few hours of TV a day tops. There just wasn’t enough content with scheduled programming/without content on demand. Radio was even more limited. Honestly I really wish the government banned kids from using computers for more than a few hours a day (like some authoritarian country like China) and completely banned smart phones for everyone under 18.
dalbasal 3y ago
>>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with... It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success. This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture. Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex. Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs. They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > life's administrative tasks. Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions. I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    True. Arguably, work and social life have also gotten more difficult, at least for some. Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive. That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education. This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex. The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything. But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life. Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost. Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible. That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime. I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way. I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.
watwut 3y ago
I could not endlessly watch TV, because it was in the living room and I was not only one able to pick programs. Parents had a say and there was no privacy over what I was watching. Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.
euroderf 3y ago
As a teenager (70s) I was into, among other things, assembling balsa wood model airplanes. Does anyone even do that any more ? It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.
- oblio 3y ago
  Many of my real life building hobbies died when I realized I could build digital things.
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  My kid doesn’t have the dexterity (and thus the patience) for it but his best friend is constantly trying to get him to make castles. Because he’s not interested (and a little jealous I bet), he mentions they could 3d print castles easier (neither own one so I’m not sure it’s a valid argument).

germinalphrase 3y ago

It's only in recent decades that media has begun to adapt itself to increase captivity of individual consumers. That feels like a qualitative difference between your time horizons.

wvenable 3y ago
My two children 12 years apart in age and they have had a dramatically different childhoods. Unless you are a parent right now, you probably have no idea how quickly childhood has changed in the last decade.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Or a teacher, or childcare worker, or pediatrician or nanny or school bus driver or any of the bazillion different ways that many adults actually get quite a clear idea of how childhood changes over time. Possibly more clear than parents, since they see kids going through the same stage over time.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    My close friend is a teacher and we have quite a few interesting conversations about kids and technology. I imagine there are lot of people on HN that aren't parents, teachers, or bus drivers.

psunavy03 3y ago

> Kids 30 years ago wanted to endlessly watch TV, play video games, listen to tapes, and read books. Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.

bobthepanda 3y ago
also 30 years ago, you did not have busybodies calling child services on anyone who left their kid alone.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Health services and cops also gave less of a shit about things like that. This was great for the wider society but the small minority of kids that had it bad suffered. The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    There is not enough actual news happening in the world to justify 24-hour news coverage. So the media has to make stuff up until they fill the time. But then once they do this, they're also somehow incapable of telling the difference between what they've made up and actual news. And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.

dave78 3y ago

I was a kid 30 years ago. I may have wanted to watch TV all the time, but it was self-limiting back then. Much of the time the stuff on TV wasn't anything a kid would want to watch. There were only certain times of the day that you could find someone you wanted. Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
I feel like it's also hard money wise as a kid, I remember wanting a milling machine and tools/materials to build a boat that was just too absurdly expensive at the time. Also just being limited by cars and stuff, would've loved to be able to go surfing but it's a hard sell to convince your parents to drive 6+ hours round trip for something like that.
- prawn 3y ago
  That's another challenge for parents. Books are expensive and take up space. Lego and various other toys are also expensive, take up space, and children constantly need reminders to pack it up. Arts and craft quickly dominate spaces and lead to disputes over which child made all the mess. Contrast with reading on an app like Libby (free, no bookshelves), playing Minecraft (cheap, no pack-up), or digital art/puzzles. Digital equivalents are pushed in every workspace. Scrawling unnecessarily on paper would be frowned on as wasteful in the average office. Sending a paper letter instead of an email is rare. I'm not arguing that there aren't advantages of physical books, board games, and literal painting, but doing things the "right way" is clearly more expensive, less space efficient, and uses up more time packing up. It all influences parenting decisions.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Books aren’t expensive if you teach them about the library

jibbit 3y ago

how old are 'kids'? very few children under say 13 were obsessed with radio, records, books.. i see kids from age 3 who can't put down their tablets

lfowles 3y ago

I definitely remember seeing "turn off the TV" campaigns back then as a kid!

joenot443 3y ago

I think you’re lying to yourself if you really think vinyl and books are a fair equivalence to the TikToks and Snapchats of today.

huytersd 3y ago

It’s not the same. This line of whataboutism doesn’t work. None of those mediums were interactive or had their social networks on them. Almost everyone (kids) I knew watched a few hours of TV a day tops. There just wasn’t enough content with scheduled programming/without content on demand. Radio was even more limited. Honestly I really wish the government banned kids from using computers for more than a few hours a day (like some authoritarian country like China) and completely banned smart phones for everyone under 18.

dalbasal 3y ago

>>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with... It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success. This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture. Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex. Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs. They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> life's administrative tasks. Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions. I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000
- dalbasal 3y ago
  True. Arguably, work and social life have also gotten more difficult, at least for some. Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive. That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education. This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex. The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything. But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life. Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost. Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible. That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime. I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way. I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.

watwut 3y ago

I could not endlessly watch TV, because it was in the living room and I was not only one able to pick programs. Parents had a say and there was no privacy over what I was watching. Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.

euroderf 3y ago

As a teenager (70s) I was into, among other things, assembling balsa wood model airplanes. Does anyone even do that any more ? It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.

oblio 3y ago
Many of my real life building hobbies died when I realized I could build digital things.
kasey_junk 3y ago
My kid doesn’t have the dexterity (and thus the patience) for it but his best friend is constantly trying to get him to make castles. Because he’s not interested (and a little jealous I bet), he mentions they could 3d print castles easier (neither own one so I’m not sure it’s a valid argument).