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Doctors Recommend Against TV For Kids Under 2
An anonymous reader writes "The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation to parents that kids under the age of two should be limited in their time watching television and using computers. They say there's 'no such thing' as educational programming for kids that young, and that they benefit much more from real human interaction (PDF). Psychologist Georgene Troseth said, 'We know that some learning can take place from media, but it's a lot lower, and it takes a lot longer.' The article continues: 'Unlike school-age children, infants and toddlers "just have no idea what's going on" no matter how well done a video is, Dr. Troseth said. The new report strongly warns parents against putting a TV in a very young child's room and advises them to be mindful of how much their own use of media is distracting from playtime. In some surveys between 40 and 60 percent of households report having a TV on for much of the day — which distracts both children and adults, research suggests.'"
I think most of TV is below the 2 year-old mentality.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk
Do you laugh or do you weep for the future.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Doctors also recommend against watching programs designed for kids under 2, unless psychotropic substances are involved.
Well, what that 1 year old is doing is not "watching," she is interacting, which is different.
Parents these days don't care, they just want their kids to rot in a couch while the TV babysits them.
The first years of life are critical, because that's when the child slowly learns about the world, how to socialize and the limits of their body.
My 2 year old daughter loves ( L - O - V - E - S - !) the Fiest 1,2,3,4 Sesame Street video and has watched it since she was a little younger than 1. She dances and sings and it has never gotten old. In the beginning she was so enamoured with it, it was like watching those old movies of Beatles fans grasping their heads and shrieking with delight. She'd wave at the characters and definitely was interpretting it right from the start. It had less than 7 million hits a year ago, and at 14 million and counting, I am sure she is not the only fan.
Introducing music to kids is great and I'd add that its fun for me to do too.. I'd have to say that this is different than plugging her into a TV set to watch the eye-candy slackjawed n drooling and I noted the ADHD link with fast edit kids media recently It is a much more interactive thing where she picks her favourite videos to watch as a treat. We talk about the characters and animals and sometimes do drawings after. Another favorite is a Woody Guthrie classic and we sing it together sometimes. She digs the iPad since she can click on suggested videos at the end of one... OF course it is a supervise activity.
I recommend against TV for children under 99.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Of course, he's a kitten, and he probably just sees the motions anyway, but did you really think I'd had a baby? Here, a slashdot poster?
Apparently not a very alert /.er. Only slow cats can see something resembling an image, the rest see a moving dot of light (for those with CRTs) or just a flickering stutter for slower LCDs.
There's other links out there for those that thought their "bright" animal watched TV. It certainly explained why the cat was never bothered by silent cats on TV, but had the shock of his life walking around the corner and seeing himself in the new full length mirror. Poof! Twice his normal size. :)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The AAP has always been extremely conservative when it comes to children and TV. No surprise about the new findings here. As always, you have to take these findings with a huge grain of salt. Apply common sense and your kids will be fine. I know that mine are even though they watched a boat-load of TV when they were still toddlers (what kid would not appreciate a bit of Sesame Street or The Wiggles?). Now they are in elementary school and way too busy to watch anything and they are a-okay with that.
Back in the day, parents would keep kids sequestered in playpens so that parents could get chores done easier. While TV is probably not the best answer, is there ever a good answer to distracting kids so you can do laundry, make food, take a shower or other necessary tasks?
I recommend against TV for children under 99.
You have the right idea but you're not thinking big enough.
... if you need somebody to explain this to you and impress you with how many Ph.Ds they have on their wall, you're a fucking idiot.
If you are a parent and you need a bunch of doctors to tell you that TV is not a good babysitter, that maybe "TV as babysitter" and designer diseases like "ADD" aren't really a coincidence, that if you weren't such a piss-poor parent you'd actually spend quality time with your young children and interact with them and stimulate their developing minds during their critical formative years
Such "parents" (not worthy of the name parent, should be called breeders sort of like cattle) should have their children taken away and should then be forcibly surgically sterilized. I'm tired of dealing with the now-adult offspring of negligent parents who saw their children as a line item on their daily schedules. They're idiots, they can't focus on anything, they can't even fucking look where they're walking, and they're so fucking helpless and lazy, constantly begging for some kind of handholding for things they should be more than capable of handling on their own. Don't even get me started on the trend of telling kids they're special and genius when they haven't actually achieved anything, and the loud-mouthed attention-starved narcissists they grow up to be.
Oh yeah, dumbass parents like this also wonder why their kids don't respect them. Hahaha. It will never occur to them to try actually being respectable. Nope, the problem must be the child, yeah, sure, naturally they had nothing to do with that...
infants and toddlers "just have no idea what's going on" no matter how well done a video is
This is just plain stupid. It isn't even a good lie. The "The American Academy of Pediatrics" us a self selecting group. It is one that has always seen TV as evil. My son was beating multiple levels of Pac-Man before he was 1 year old. Literally before he could walk. There is no way that this would have been possible if children couldn't understand what was happening on the screen before the age of 2.
Anyone that has bothered to talk to an 18 month old knows that they understand what is going on on the TV.
This is just nonsense.
My son wouldn't talk till he was over 2 years old. We were starting to worry. Then he discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly he wanted to say the names of the engines and he learnt his colours too. That led to shapes. At 3 he's now on to identifying numbers on the sides of the engines, he's got an incredible imagination. With no prompting he drew a passable clown face on his face when momentarily left alone with a texter (and showed how he'd close his eyes when he was warned that he could poke his eyes out). He's been to the circus exactly twice. I'll bet he got that from TV. He knows some letters because he's learnt H is for horn for example when we play Trainz with Thomas characters, or that you hit W to go forward. He has limited mouse and keyboard skills but his comprehension impresses me. He goes to preschool now so that's helping his social development. He is not allowed to sit there and do nothing but watch TV. My wife plays and draws and bakes cookies and everything else you would expect a young child do.
My daughter's developing speech sooner. She's not 18 months old yet but she's asking for certain objects with abbreviated words "bub" for bubble etc. She loves TV shows too. She usually prefers to watch with her brother and she's a very social little creature indeed.
Young children may not have the skills to understand at high level concepts, but they sure as hell can follow a kids TV show. And as long as it's not all they do, I think it's very important to their development.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
it trains your mind to be led by something other than your mind itself.
so even if television wasnt full of violence and myriad sexual innuendis (which it is), but instead filled only with decent people doing decent things, it would still exert a tremendous and unquantifiable amount of damage to the normal healthy mental fitness of any human cognitive enough to interpret any part of its message at any basic level.
i hate to say it but technology has dehumanized humanity. many have seen it pervading the social fabric already, decades ago. they were ridiculed and derided by people much like myself until a few years ago when the evidence became too overwhelming for me to continue living a lie.
our society is now filled with people that cannot concentrate on anything important for too long, seldom dwell on any actually important topic, and have very little desire to muse on anything. we all want fast paced, lots of colors, quick shallow messages that can be digested without any heavy mental thought given.
i am reading a book right now that echos my feelings on this far better than i can articulate. it is called 'high tech heretic' by clifford stoll (better known for his non fiction book 'the cuckoos egg' when he tracked down hackers that were working for the kgb and were breaking into the vms / bsd box's at his university decades ago)
Not sure I believe this, as I've seen several cats chase butterflies and other small, edible creatures on the screen.
Given she managed to open/turn pages in both magazines I think she understands them pretty well. The grabby hand movements don't seem strange, babies like feeling things. The only strange thing in the video is that the baby doesn't try to taste the magazine or the iPad.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You call apples lawyers and inform them those magazines are deceptively ripping off the ipad's design and they should have the court halt their shipments until things are sorted out.
Just wondering. TV isn't just bad for babies.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Everyone has been exposed to TV since Howdy Doody and Clarabel the Clown. What the study shows is that human contact and caring - WITH or WITHOUT television - is goodness. If you substitute TV for empty room, good. Substitute TV for siblings fighting in living room, ok. Substitute TV for caring interactive parents? Bad, Maybe?
Gently reply
Not sure I believe this, as the only show my cat likes is Fringe, which she watches religiously.
Who is John Cabal?
infants and toddlers "just have no idea what's going on" no matter how well done a video is
They can enjoy music, motion, colors, and even learn to understand what is going on. My first daughter watched https://www.babysigningtime.com/ from about 6 months (give or take a bit) and by 1 had a rather extensive signing vocabulary. At first she would watch 1 segment and gradually would watch one 30 minute episode (each episode had about 6 segments with a group of related signs in song format). The songs were catchy and the colors were flashy. Even if she was just sitting and playing and not paying full attention, I felt it was a fine musical background. Also, her watching was not always a solo activity. Many days, her and I would curl up together on the couch and watch the episode right before bed as a way to unwind. I was hoping http://www.yourbabycanread.com/ would catch her attention too, but when she wanted a show on it was almost always Signing Time.
Most people will immediately take the knee-jerk reaction and think they can't let a child watch anything. Sure, if you let the television babysit your child for hours you will have issues. Like everything else in this world, there is a need for moderation and parental involvement. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with letting a child watch things like the previously mentioned shows, Sesame Street, Super Why, or Sid the Science Kid, so long as it is not being used as a substitute for parenting.
(I do not work for nor have any association with any of the aforementioned programming)
(Post based on empirical evidence, not a scientific study. Your mileage may vary. Perhaps my child turned out great DESPITE my efforts.)
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least.
Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years.
Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon.
We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year.
Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least. Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years. Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon. We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year. Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
I have an entirely different theory. It's not a matter of something new that has recently appeared. It's a matter of something old that is no longer valued as it once was. The heightened pace of modern life merely increases the contrast, makes the nature of the problem more evident and observable. Without that, you'd have to look for it much harder before you would see it.
It's simply a matter of discipline mixed with expectation and most people grossly sell themselves short on both counts. The lack of depth is absolutely caused by the decline of personal introspection and self-evaluation, things which naturally lead to an internal embracing of the good and rewarding kind of discipline. This isn't the kind of discipline externally imposed by some authority. It is a desire to appreciate and to invest in things that are valuable and significant.
If you buy a car, you take good care of it and learn a little bit about how it works so you know how to do that. If you buy a computer, you pay attention to experienced users, you learn from your mistakes, and you do a little reading here and there so you can get the most out of it. All of that has now been shoved into the exclusive domain of experts. All of that is "too hard", which is code for "requires a small investment of effort that repeatedly pays off forever afterwards".
All of that is not passive enough, not comfortable enough for those who want to be served more than they want to help themselves. That kind of creative, relaxing "me time" would also mean you don't judge your social standing by how hectic and burn-out your schedule is, you make time for things you value more than you say "I just don't have the time". In short, that would make you a nobody, because if you were really somebody, you'd be drowning in appointments instead of bothering with things like working on your character and learning new things.
The only real change has been to what you might call a value system. The pace at which a given value system is applied is completely irrelevant.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
How does the fact that projects that used to take years now take months account for people who cannot keep their attention on anything for more than a few minutes at a time?
Is there any evidence for this or are you just hypothesizing? Sure sounds like you are pretty certain of it.
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense that people can't keep their attention for more than a few minutes because they watch shitloads of TV from the day that they are born where there is a commercial break every few minutes?
It's not so much a symptom of things that go faster as it is loonies deluding themselves that they can actually multi-task and expecting others to do it as well.
They end up ADD because they never learn what focus actually feels like. They're as likely to accomplish any sort of focus as a couch potato is to break a record in the long jump and for similar reasons.
Nonsense.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.
Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.
Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
Nonsense. There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive. Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers. Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
Here's the nonsense part. It's one thing to not be "primarily" an audio-visual learner. It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
It's also another thing to say, "hmm, I have a definite weakness in this area and my very best possible move is to never, ever work on this weakness until, with time and patience, I become at least proficient at it even if I never become the best at it. Damn, that's far too dynamic and active and I really want my mind to be rigid and passive. No, now that I'm aware of this weakness, I'll just avoid it entirely and call it my disability. Then everyone can accommodate me or they're insensitive."
That so few have the guts, the sense, and the personal responsibility to understand this is precisely why we're gradually embracing fascism. Think about it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Sufficient genetic deviation in the population should allow such people to exist. If these people are successful breeders relative to the ADD folks, then, Darwins law of evolution shall explain the rest for you.
Darwinism doesn't apply when the penalty for stupidity (i.e. lack of fitness) is less than death or at least, sterilization.
Darwinism in that classic sense hasn't applied to human beings for a very long time because of technologically improved production capabilities, social safety nets, and modern medicine. Please don't offer explanations based on things you clearly don't understand.
It's particularly shallow to offer a genetic explanation in a one-size-fits-all manner in response to my post about nurture and voluntary decision-making.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
. . . another year to use the computer, you are out of your fucking mind!
The corners aren't rounded, I think the magazines might have a slim chance.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
When a couple only produce one child and this child only has one child in coupling with another only child, the relative amount of their DNA in the gene pool diminishes. Compared this to their neighbour, who produces three offspring every generation. It's simple enough to create a proof by induction that you have either not understood what I wrote, or, that you have no idea what you are talking about... please refrain from posting rubbish.
Does it go on forever?
an anonymous coward preaching down to individuals not worthy of a name?
slashdot = stagnated
you = nigger
Natural selection applies in any instance where the probability of reproduction is affected. It's got jack all to do with death or sterilization except insofar as those things affect probability of reproduction. If you have a gigantic nose and that makes it less likely for you to find a mate and procreate, then your giant nose is selected against, even if it has no impact on your own personal survival, because people without gigantic noses will have more kids who also don't have gigantic noses than you and people like you will have gigantic nosed kids.
Obviously factors which cause death or sterilization during reproductive age will have a more prominent affect than other factors because dead people don't have any kids whereas ugly people are just less likely to. Please don't correc people when you are both incorrect and stupid.
Your argument may hold some merit when we're talking about huge timescales (tens of thousands of years), but not in the short term. In the short term, as you say, genetic (and other) diversity allows for a group that can cope with the problem, at least in the short term, a group that has "ADD", and a group that ceases to be functional at all.
Since the evolution in the speed of working is so much faster than the speed of adaptation there is only a tiny, almost negligible pressure for adaptation, which is only taken into account once every 30 years (because multiple kids doesn't matter as long as their parents come from the previous generation there is no adaptation on a per-kid basis).
So in the "short" term (which is everything shorter than hundreds of generations) you will simply see a shift of normal people to ADD, and ADD to full blown mental illness (which is simply a fancy word for being unable to think correctly at the level required for normal functioning. Compared to 1990, today's border of mental illness is located somewhere between fluent mobile phone usage and fluent office usage, where engineers (whether we're talking programmers or architects) have more margin, whereas in 1990, being able to move a mop on a floor was more than sufficient for normal functioning)
This border is shifting, and will quickly envelop more and more of the population. Right now ~2% of people are over the edge, more than 10% are perilously close ("borderline" behavior to use the psychological term), and, let's face it, 20% are over the line, but it doesn't matter because they're pensioners.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable
True, but it doesn't actually contradict my argument. You're falling for the fallacy of the inverted consequence :
A -> B, therefore it must be that B -> A. *Bzzzt* not true.
Every genetic effect is heritable. But because an effect is heritable does *not* mean it is genetic. Religion is almost exclusively heritable (yes even given the supposedly massive shift to atheism, which is in reality but a pathetic trickle), yet it is not genetic, to give but one obvious example.
"There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable"
Yea when mommy and daddy do nothing but sit on their asses constantly flipping channels or watching spaz material for every second of their free time, it does not take a fucking genius to figure out why the kid spazzes out cause sponge bob is not having a seizure every 8 seconds.
but fuck it dope them up at age 4 that will fix them, then the parents just have to pay a minor bill and little fuckoff can watch dragon ball seizure all day long without becoming a nuisance and still fail at school.
Least that is what I got from my nieces ... heh the younger one still uses the microwave in 20 second bursts to heat up leftovers now that she is almost driving. Thanks asswipes, non parenting and handing a 2 year old a remote to cable TV really paid off.
When a couple only produce one child and this child only has one child in coupling with another only child, the relative amount of their DNA in the gene pool diminishes. Compared this to their neighbour, who produces three offspring every generation. It's simple enough to create a proof by induction that you have either not understood what I wrote, or, that you have no idea what you are talking about... please refrain from posting rubbish.
To suggest that this is due to "nature running its course", based on competition, with the end of making the objectively fittest thrive as implied by Darwinism and any notion of natural selection, and not at all influenced or if you will, perverted, by the flaws in those artificial constructs we call societies, is simply absurd.
Thus the notion of who breeds more eventually becomes who makes poorer decisions. You wind up with situations where the smart, careful, responsible, prudent people who take the time to attain an education, establish a career, form a healthy marriage, own a home, and then have only the children they can financially and emotionally afford to properly raise are disadvantaged. Instead of quality, it becomes a race for quantity. So those who recklessly have sex without birth control when they are absolutely not ready to have a baby multiply much more than those who do not.
Unless you're a big subscriber to that most puerile of justifications, known as "might makes right", you have to notice something there is not as it would naturally be, if there were a struggle for survival as Darwinism assumes. That means we are talking about something other than Darwinism. Having established that, let's recognize it and move on to something that might work. No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
The hinge of this whole turn you've decided was best for the thread is the notion of "fitness" and what that means. You've decided to twist it to mean "whatever happens to be common" with no sign of an appreciation of how and why it became common. Then you offer this "breeding contest" type of response to my comment which was about personal decision-making and willingness to assume responsibility, something that is "nurture" and not "nature" if you insist on dividing the two.
So alright, tell me I don't understand what you did there. If you think I'm personally insulting you by asking you not to post about what you do not understand, then okay, repeat my own format to mock me, only substitute "rubbish" for "things you clearly don't understand" like a variable in a formula. You really want to prove my point for me about shallow responses to things, don't you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
They had better come up with alternative proposals what to do with the babies when there is no full-time Nanny around.
I would have imagined limited watching of tv and computers would be recommended for people of all ages. Personally I limit tv to one hour a day and computers to a few hours a week even for my older child.
Most children today may not be reading books off printed paper in the future anyway, so I consider it funny.
In times gone by women worked the field and carried their babies with them. As the children learned to walk to would first play work and soon work for real.
Or are you talking of days gone by in which very young children were send down the mines because they fit in the narrowest spaces, don't get paid much and nobody cared to much if they died?
What yesterday are you talking about?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...is news? Really?
You are perhaps right, but I have ADD and I am both introspective and attached to long-term goals which I have no qualms about following. However, without stimulant medication I simply can't keep long enough threads of thought to (say) study (or even play videogames well) and the medication does nothing about the high-level executive dysfunction causing me to have a really low intuitive ability to break down tasks into pieces leading to sometimes rather slapstick behaviour (think "absent-minded professor").
You and other posters make it sound like it's some sort of problem put upon me by my surroundings, but I haven't had any greater exposure to strong or varied stimuli than my siblings or friends, none of which have my problems. And my personality isn't of the kind that readily gives in to petty societial demands either.
It's possible that what you're describing is a general attitude in society rather than the actual medical condition, but the two shouldn't be confused.
Emotions! In your brain!
If I had a kid, I would not have Cable/Satellite TV. Its Books and Playtime, with very light internet exposure. I'm 20, and I don't even watch TV save for the Discovery and Science channels every once in a while. Hell, even the news (At least in the US) is absolutely terrible.
When babies put things in their mouths, it's usually not to taste them, but to feel their shape. Their mouths are better developed than their hands at that age.
http://www.babycentre.co.uk/baby/development/inmouthexpert/
That doesn't mean that they necessarily see a butterfly. My cats will chase a laser pointer or a flashlight.. I don't think this is unusual feline behavior. So it's not outside the realm of possibility that they just see a flickering blob of light on the screen and chase after that.
The corners aren't rounded, I think the magazines might have a slim chance.
Slim not allowed. Prior art.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I had to; it was right there.
Its meaningless marketing. Find something almost all parents occasionally do thats mostly harmless, as the greeks said, all things in moderation. Make the parents feel guilty about it. While they feel bad, make some suggestions that are easier than burning the TV and are highly profitable, like maybe bring your child in for a checkup every 4 weeks from birth to 18 years. Also its hard core authoritarian trip, use guilt to prove their superiority and authority over the lowly stinking masses and use their superiority and authority to encourage more guilt. I've opted out of their little game and everyone else should too. F those people.
Personally I think its an incredibly offensive marketing scheme. No one really likes being guilty, they are fundamentally being anti-social. If they want a guy like me to bring my kids to the pediatrician every month and worship the ground they walk on, I'm not saying revealing "naughty nurse" costumes would do it, but I sure as heck wouldn't complain about it. If they have to do something demeaning and inappropriate and objectifying, at least make it hot.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wrong. Darwinism also works if e.g. people having that trait have on average 2.10 children while people not having that trait have on average 2.11 children. It will take a long time for such a small effect to win, but evolution is generally a very slow process. The only important thing is that this effect persists (and is not cancelled by another effect).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.
http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html
"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."
With the first link, the chain is forged.
My daughter has been watching TV shows since she was very young. She just turned two in august. She can count to 20, she can sing her ABC's, she knows her colors and shapes. She sings AND dances along with the fresh beat band. She misses words and doesn't have the choreography down. When they spin she spins when they fold their arms she folds her arms. We had to get her her own ipod touch so she would stop accidentally calling people on our iphones. She opens the apps she wants and lets us know which videos she wants to watch, elmo street, olivia, the beats. She LOVES to facetime grandma and grandpa. We can't always read books to her and give her our undivided attention, but these technologies, I think, have helped her learn and develop faster than not having them, and she still plays imaginatively with the low tech toys as well. Children under two won't benefit from the Soaps, or prime time dramas, but that does not mean they will not learn from educational shows and attentive parents.
'Unlike school-age children, infants and toddlers "just have no idea what's going on"
That's why it's best to have them watch shows like the Teletubbies. That way, nobody of any age can figure out what's going on, and the toddlers don't feel like they're being left out.
Mike!
Haven't seen you for a while. Nice to see you back on /. Where've you been? Did you bring us anything?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
That all kids are different. Some kids can eat an entire jar of peanut butter, other kids break out in hives if they touch something that was covered in peanut butter last week. Some kids can play video games and be perfectly fine, others play Doom and then shoot up a school. A part of being a parent is observing and providing for the individual needs of the kids. Some kids may learn and benefit from a little TV, others may suffer for it. You just gotta pay attention and figure out whats right for your kid. If your kid goes nuts after watching Sponge Bob, then its probably best to stop letting them watch it.
My 18 month old daughter watches the caramel dancing video on you tube and loves it. She dances and sings and it makes her happy. She also claps with the people on the Price Is Right and dances for Seseme Street. She chants "cookie" everytime she sees a big blue fuzzy thing. When we Skype with her grand parents she runs up to the TV even before the connection is made and starts waving and chatting away at it (before the grandparents are there to chat back). She doesn't wave or talk to the TV for normal programming, just when Skype or other video features are on. She gives her grandparents high-fives in the TV and tries to hand them things. The idea that she doesn't understand her surroundings is rediculous. She knows where I keep the bananas. She knows that at the end of the day her doll stroller gets parked in front of the fireplace and the firetruck goes to the left and it is head-in parking only. She is actually better at picking up the living room than me and my husband. Just because they can't talk to you doesn't mean they aren't extreamly smart or that they don't know things.
I also recommend against TV for kids over 2. The overwhelming majority of it is a wasteland.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Don't let her fill up the DVR with it.
I drank what? -- Socrates
tl;dr
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.
http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html
"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."
I wasn't talking about multitasking or "several streams". I was talking about being able to focus and concentrate on a single thing indefinitely, i.e. until you are actually done with it. That's something the ADD crowd cannot do. Many of them wouldn't last one minute.
The next time you watch a news program, pay close attention to how often they change (flash) scenes. They suddenly switch scenes and put something else on the screen several times a minute, usually as frequently as every 10-20 seconds. They do this to accommodate the ADD types. It makes them feel comfortable and engaged. This has been the case for some time now.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
My daughter started watching Signing Time (http://www.signingtime.com) when she was 10 months old. She loved the show so we watched it once per day, for about 25 minutes per day.
By the time she was 14 months old I could take her to the zoo and she could sign Monkey, Zebra, Horse and many other signs. Here is a video of her doing exactly that: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikejenphotos/3467807751/in/set-72157604954739094
By the time she was 20 months old she had a huge vocabulary of hundreds of signs even before she could say all of the words.
Now that she is 3.5 we communicate via sign language all the time. That TV show has been influential in teaching her to spell and read by incorporating finger spelling.
Of course, I wasn't just sitting her down and leaving her there. I would watch with her (that's how I learned to sign) and incorporate real world items so that she could see that link between the signs on TV and her own things (like toys, food, etc) but that TV show was absolutely instrumental in her language skills. (It didn't hurt that she's a genius... I'm not biased...)
My second will be born in January and there is nothing that could convince me not to repeat the same process with her.
Yeah, but if they really saw that fast then they'd pretty much always see a moving blob of light. Our cats seemed to like butterflies and occasionally other wildlife.
Fully willing to admit that either my cats were special/dumb or I'm suffering from confirmation bias here, that's hjust the way it seemed to me.
It's not the TV that causes harm, it's the lack of face-to-face interaction. The TV is the time suck, taking away precious face time during the earliest, most formative years, when a child should be watching their parents' eyes and mouth and expression to learn how to communicate with other humans.
It depends on how the kid's genes are wired for early childhood development. If he's a late bloomer with language development, then he needs extra attention early on, which means less screen time and more face time, to help avoid any development delays.
The problem is that we cannot know how a child's genes are wired until it's too late. So stop being so selfish with your me-time and give your attention to your infant. You only get one shot per child.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
I'm an introvert. My parents were introverts. My wife is an introvert. Can someone explain what "normal parents" do with their toddlers? We take our kids to the park occasionally but distance prohibits doing it every day. We let them play outside, but they require constant supervision due to their age. They do have some activities with children their age a couple times a week. But I think they probably have what this organization would consider significant screen exposure.
Is it television programming, or anything that comes out of that box with the moving pictures?
My daughter loved watching Signing Time, which we got as a gift, and we ended up buying the whole series. It teaches them sign language. She was signing before she could talk. My other two kids followed suit. We found it greatly beneficial.
Now the programming they watch (@ 2, 4, and 6) isn't quite up to that standard of educational learning, but Nick Jr (formerly Noggin), PBS Sprout, PBS, and a couple of other channels offer what I consider to be great programming.
It's like saying the internet is bad because of goatse (or facebook, for that matter).
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Is it like a computer?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I looked around for data when writing this story, The Evolution of Digital Natives -- The Touch Generation http://j.mp/pyKxXF, and quotes from medical experts seemed to be based on old data. Appears nothing has changed. Meanwhile, children are looking at magazines and touching them expecting them to act like iPads http://aol.it/o4eCnZ.
No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
Except that this is exactly what you're doing. Darwinism is about survival of the fittest for the propagation of the species. You are applying your own values on what you want to be selected for (intelligence, strength, focus, whatever). The sad reality is that the people who are breeding the most ARE the ones ensuring the continuation of the species and that fits perfectly with Darwinism, no matter how much you might want to twist it because you don't like the results.
Forgive me, I didn't see anything in your initial post that addressed heritability - either genetic or cultural. I understood you to mean that ADD was a response to the increasing pace of change in society. I've seen reports of decreased attention span and what looks like a decrease in depth of thought and yes, these get lumped in with ADD and ADHD. I think there's still value in distinguishing between people who are not primarily visual/auditory learners and who don't find mono-focussing for hours at a time a natural mode of thought and people who, by dint of being exposed to a large amount of stimulation and competition for their attention have a poor ability to discriminate or focus.
It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
I agree and as someone capable of the meta-cognition necessary to recognise my own preferred learning methods and to adapt to the ones being offered, I understand the value of that choice.
And also how few people are equipped to recognise it, let alone make it.
I am not sure of your educational background, but I was certainly never taught to think about thinking. That was something that a fortunate combination of aptitude and circumstance allowed me to develop on my own. I'm far from unique, but equally, I am far from common.
I'm certainly not comfortable condemning those who both lack the ability to live comfortably in the world as it is and who also lack the means to recognise how they might change that. Doubly damned, to be sure.
I acknowledge that there are those who play the victim and who demand sympathy and/or consideration for their lack of effort but that's not the whole story.
And my personality isn't of the kind that readily gives in to petty societial demands either.
Everybody says that, yet ... well just look at the nearest picture of a star trek convention. I'm not trying to start any trek wars or starwars treks here, just giving an example.
Or just look at a typical street, the clothes people are wearing. We have, what, 4 types of clothing ? Men and women combined ? If people were half as original as they claimed we'd have 3 billion clothing styles. Instead we have 10 ... nobody gives in to "petty societal demands" ... and yet we all know this is one of those demands ...
You are perhaps right, but I have ADD and I am both introspective and attached to long-term goals which I have no qualms about following. However, without stimulant medication I simply can't keep long enough threads of thought to (say) study (or even play videogames well) and the medication does nothing about the high-level executive dysfunction causing me to have a really low intuitive ability to break down tasks into pieces leading to sometimes rather slapstick behaviour (think "absent-minded professor").
This description actually makes me think it's an adaptation to being asked to process lots of little tidbits of information quickly. And the "absent-minded professor" description seems to indicate that it's really actually working pretty well.
TL;DR version of j-stroy's post: "pfft. scientists."
No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
Except that this is exactly what you're doing. Darwinism is about survival of the fittest for the propagation of the species. You are applying your own values on what you want to be selected for (intelligence, strength, focus, whatever). The sad reality is that the people who are breeding the most ARE the ones ensuring the continuation of the species and that fits perfectly with Darwinism, no matter how much you might want to twist it because you don't like the results.
I appreciate what you're saying but ... there is a flaw here. The kind of society that will be built by those who are currently breeding the most is not long-term viable. It is not sustainable. It's a trade between having a few unwise individuals die early here and there, versus having lots of them accumulate until there is a large, widespread catastrophe. You can put off the one to have the other, but just like energy it does not just "go away", it changes form.
Look around you. Everywhere there is deficit spending, and I'm not just talking about money here. It is absolutely bound to collapse under its own weight. When that happens, this kind of imprudent person who does not consider long-term viability is not going to thrive anymore. They are living on borrowed time.
Because it is inevitable, and can be foreseen, I consider it an eventuality. I view it as such, not as some kind of "what if?" but simply the result of a long chain of cause and effect. It is so certain that it may as well have already fully unfolded, and I regard it as such like any other eventuality. We will be forced to change our ways in order to continue. It's a matter of time. Notice how everyting is going broke lately, on a regional and global scale? We're approaching the end of the grace period.
No matter how much some may hate it and try so hard to find ways around it, there is no substitute for prudence and good decision-making. Nor should there be.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
No one sought to teach me to think about thinking either.
I'm simply not one of the passive sheeple who waits for someone else to hand out knowledge and understanding. I am my own person. By trying to understand myself, I understand the world around me. By trying to understand the world around me, I understand myself. Between the two, I discover things about how processes such as learning work and I pay attention as they unfold in front of me.
I know you didn't mean it this way, but the idea that I would be helplessly dependent on a teacher or a professor or a parent to figure this out is nearly insulting.
If others have a conception of themselves that is lower than this, and sell themselves short, that is up to them.
You say you are far from common. In a way, you're right. Just understand that this is not the natural order of things. A great many financial and political interests had to work for their mutual benefits in order to dumb the world down to where you and I are the oddballs. We're the ones on which the training in helplessness didn't take. But the human being as an organism does need to be trained to be that way. It is not how we otherwise would be.
It is a hard thing to be sure, but it falls under "tough love" to say that those who "lack the means to recognize how they might change that" merely haven't become tired enough of the way things are. They still dream of the path of least resistance, and so long as they entertain that notion, they invite and welcome with open arms that horrible "double damnation" you describe.
Self-awareness and a real love of truth and reason is not for the faint of heart. The faint of heart wouldn't remain that way on their own. It has to be inculcated and portrayed as normal.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"Us" you know, the /. crowd. If I'm nothing, does that mean you didn't bring me anything?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
You brought me facts. Awesome! I guess that means I'm not nothing.
Is 1563649 a prime number?