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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.
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.