Study Links Restricting Screen Time For Kids To Higher Mental Performance (washingtonpost.com)

Parents who possess the resolve to separate their children from their smartphones may be helping their kids' brainpower, a new study suggests. A report adds: Children who use smartphones and other devices in their free time for fewer than two hours a day performed better on cognitive tests assessing their thinking, language, and memory, according to a study published this week in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. The study assessed the behavior of 4,500 children, ages 8 to 11, by looking at their sleep schedules, how much time they spent on screens and their amount of exercise, and analyzed how those factors impacted the children's mental abilities. The researchers compared the results with national guidelines for children's health. The guidelines recommend that children in that age group, get at least an hour of physical activity, no more than two hours of recreational screen time and nine to 11 hours of sleep per night. The researchers found that only 5 percent of children met all three recommendations. Sixty-three percent of children spent more than two hours a day staring at screens, failing to meet the screen-time limit.

Comments

Duh

[Spy Handler]

Steve Jobs (even though he was an asshole) was a wise man and he wouldn't let his kids touch iPhones or iPads... he didn't want them to become stupid.

Let kids go outside

[alvinrod]

I think part of this gravitation towards more screen time is an unwarranted fear by parents that something awful will happen to little Johnny if he's allowed to go outside. Gangs, pedophiles, drug dealers, Jehovah's witnesses, or other unsavory individuals will sure get poor little Johnny and cause him irreparable harm.

The wold has only become a safer place since we grew up. Somehow all of us (and the generations before us) managed to survive playing outside for most of the day. Maybe a few of us ran into what might be considered a dicey situation for a child of that age, but part of growing up is learning to navigate those situations. Expecting anyone to turn 18 and magically become an adult is foolhardy. All we've done is created developmentally delayed individuals who are only starting to grow into adults when they go to college and get the hell away from their overprotective parents.

If you trap kids inside all day, it shouldn't be any surprise that they turn to screens to give them something to do. Allow kids the opportunity to play outside and I suspect that many of them will naturally use screens a lot less frequently.

Re:Let kids go outside

[cayenne8]

he wold has only become a safer place since we grew up. Somehow all of us (and the generations before us) managed to survive playing outside for most of the day. Maybe a few of us ran into what might be considered a dicey situation for a child of that age, but part of growing up is learning to navigate those situations. Expecting anyone to turn 18 and magically become an adult is foolhardy. All we've done is created developmentally delayed individuals who are only starting to grow into adults when they go to college and get the hell away from their overprotective parents.

If you trap kids inside all day, it shouldn't be any surprise that they turn to screens to give them something to do. Allow kids the opportunity to play outside and I suspect that many of them will naturally use screens a lot less frequently.

I wish I had mod points for you...so much THIS!!

Sadly, I've heard that in some parts of the US, they have actually charged parents with crimes for letting little Johnny/Susie run about the neighborhood and play unsupervised, like I and all my peers did as children.

Geez, I guess if I were raised by my parents today like I was a few decades back, my parents would be in jail, I'd be in child protective services, and they'd drug me, because I was always running around and "acting like a boy" as they termed it back in my days of childhood.

I actually feel a bit sorry for kids today....and thank God I grew up in an era where there wasn't a fucking camera everywhere to get you into trouble when getting into mischief....

Re:Let kids go outside

[tepples]

All we've done is created developmentally delayed individuals who are only starting to grow into adults when they go to college and get the hell away from their overprotective parents.

If you trap kids inside all day, it shouldn't be any surprise that they turn to screens to give them something to do. Allow kids the opportunity to play outside and I suspect that many of them will naturally use screens a lot less frequently.

I doubt it's entirely the parents' fault. I imagine parents are keeping their kids indoors in order to keep them away from Child Overprotective Services.

• "5 Things Everyone Did Growing Up (That Now Get You Arrested)" by Chan Teik Onn
• "5 Things Your Parents Did (They'd Be Arrested For Today)" by C. Coville
• "Neighbor calls cops, child services on Texas mom for letting son play outside" by Philip Caulfield
• "Mom Lets 4-Year-Old Play Outside, Faces Jail"
• "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS" by Katherine Martinko

Re:Let kids go outside

[cayenne8]

So ... victim blaming?

LOL...nah...but c'mon, you gotta meet them at least half way, eh?

No one wants to be intimate with someone that hasn't bathed in a week, smells bad, has soiled clothing on, etc....I'm talking basic, common sense hygiene at least!!!

Would you want to sleep with a chick that was that nasty?

At least have the same standards of cleanliness, etc....as those you are looking to as potential mates to have sex with or more.

Just have at least a little common sense here, eh?

I think it would depend more on WHAT they do

[Opportunist]

It's less the amount of time spent with computers and other electronic devices, it's more how they are used. I can of course only offer my own experience, but I had my first computer when I was 10. I learned programming, and I did learn building periphery for it, simply because that was a necessity back then. Before I was 20, I was already pretty good at both of those things, developing hardware and programs to disable certain routines in software that aren't too useful for the user and sometimes even detrimental to his plans concerning the application of the hard- or software he wanted to use.

Both of these things kinda let me reach the position I'm in now. Back then there was no college courses for IT security and certainly none for malware analysis. But the skills you develop when redesigning code other people wrote to facilitate the use of aforementioned code translates pretty well into those fields.

Of course if all you do with your screen time is to tap the screen to rack up some points in a clicker game, the net benefit of such an activity is quite negligible. And it also isn't quite stimulating for your higher brain functions to watch some clips or exchange emojis instead of actually talking to people.

The problem isn't so much that our kids use electronic devices, the problem is in what they do with them. And an even bigger problem is that them being mindless, consuming drones without any incentive to actually create something themselves is pretty much what pretty much every corporation out there wants them to be. You're fighting an uphill battle there.

Re:Balance is Key

[scubamage]

And we do. That doesn't mean we can't also do activities that do require screens. It isn't a zero-sum game.