Should Parents End 'Screen Time' For Children? (indianexpress.com)

The New York Times reports that in Silicon Valley, "a wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high." One Facebook engineer doesn't allow his own kids to have any screen time, according to this article shared by schwit1, and even Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, believes screen time is addictive for children. "On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it's closer to crack cocaine," Mr. Anderson said of screens. Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naive, he said. "We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain... I didn't know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences... We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about...."

Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads. But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts....

John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology. "I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way-- I'm trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling," Mr. Lilly said. "And he's like, 'I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.'"
What do Slashdot's reader think? Should parents end 'screen time' for children?

Comments

Re: Some parents limit screen time too tightly

[ShanghaiBill]

The kid learning to hack on a PC are gone. Computers no longer provide opportunities to tinker

Absolute nonsense. The opportunities today are vastly better than when I was a kid. There are tons of programming tools to download, and more than can run in a browser. A kid can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero, with a full Linux stack, including dev tools, for $5.

Re: Some parents limit screen time too tightly

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'll completely agree with the availability of tools has generally increased; as has the access to information to tinker and create more. It just doesn't translate to more tinkering or even exploring.
I tried the very route you speak of with a Kano raspberry pi kit, my kids have hardly touched it. We use the little orange keyboard on the living room pc the most. The main go-to is YouTube in a browser, and Minecraft. My son, who is 9 at the end of this year, only coded one house with my help so he could instantly produce a built house on the fly. I tried to get him to do more but he shows no interest. Same with my daughter, who is two years older. The problem I see is lack of interest and motivation - this stuff becomes like homework/schoolwork; and the more I explain the more they tune me out. I was the kid who got excited when someone gave me a book about how to code on my Commodore 64. I've yet to witness that level of motivation in kids today.
I've witnessed the neighboring kids struggle to find the power button on a custom built pc in my kitchen, as well as holding down the power button during shutdown cuz it did not shut off immediately. Don't get me started on what I've witnessed millennials do at work. I scoff at the notion that we're raising the tech elite, quite the opposite really.
As long as the appity apps continue to be convenient, hardly anyone except those already astute in the ways of a tinker will bother to explore anything under the hood. And as long as the next kid gets their dopamine fix via fortnite or any other like-minded avenue and things 'just work,' I cannot fathom this younger generation venturing too far outside their comfort zone; yet alone creating the next Facebook or anything for that matter.
As far as the main topic in question, screen time should absolutely be limited, depending on the child, and their usage. So if kids are using it for productivity or school, they should absolutely be given leniency to get said work done. Personally, I've got parental controls that set a curfew so they are not awake all night buried in a screen. Make sure kids get adequate rest, very important.

There is an important distinction

[jd]

Between monitoring and controlling.

One does not imply the other. In either direction.

A rev limiter on a car does not control where you go and, if you're a good driver, places no meaningful limit on how long it takes to get there.

Real teaching doesn't tell people what to think, real teaching is about guiding people into thinking. It doesn't matter how they think or what they think, as long as they can show their working and the logic is sound.

Parenting isn't that different. Optimize, maximize real freedom and real will, minimize stupid harm and pessimization.