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

Yes but

[spaceman375]

Everything in moderation.
Especially moderation.

Re:Yes but

[_Sharp'r_]

Parents should do what's best for their kids.

There is rarely "one cool thing" which is best for all individual parents to do for all of their individual kids, so questions phrased that way are either useless or an invitation for people to forcibly interfere where they ought not to.

Re:Yes but

[djinn6]

There is rarely "one cool thing" which is best for all individual parents to do for all of their individual kids

What about feeding, clothing, protecting, setting boundaries and educating?

Keeping track of what the kids are doing, online or IRL is something all parents should do. At the end of the day, the internet is a poor substitute for actual parenting.

Re:Yes but

[ShanghaiBill]

Keeping track of what the kids are doing, online or IRL is something all parents should do.

Plenty of kids can make their own decisions without parents hovering over them. Not all kids need their parents to micromanage their social lives.

At the end of the day, the internet is a poor substitute for actual parenting.

The answer is not being a neurotic control freak and making all their decisions for them. Tim Cook sounds like a nightmare of an uncle. He is control freaking and they aren't even his kids.

TFA has ZERO evidence that depriving kids of computers leads to better outcomes. I have worked in after school enrichment programs, and that is the exact opposite of what I have seen. The kids with computer skills read more, have broader knowledge of current events, and are WAY ahead on tech skills. They are even better at social skills and teamwork because they are friends on Facebook and all know each other. The kids without computers at home are at a big disadvantage.

As soon as fire was discovered, parents started complaining that kids were wasting time sitting around the campfire and socializing instead of building character by shivering in the dark. The world has been going to hell ever since.

Screen time isn't the problem.

[Kremmy]

The problem is not screen time, it's unmoderated screen time without an overarching purpose.
When I was a child in school, the schools were in the process of upgrading from aging Apple II systems to newer Macintosh systems. We had decked out Apple II labs in the elementary school and the middle school, alongside the newer Mac lab in the middle school. The Apple II systems booted off the floppy disks that contained the programs we were using them for. When in use these systems were effectively dedicated to a singular task. There was a wide array of edutainment software (RIP MECC) that turned learning into simple games that were *fun*. Education was not solely provided through these instruments, but they were an additional tool to provide more framework for learning. There was no world wide web connection on the Apple II. We weren't introduced to that nonsense until middle school, after we had experienced focused task usage on the earlier machines.
I believe this progression to be incredibly important and totally lost on the people who design modern educational tools using technology.

The Makers Rule

[monk]

Children should not be allowed to use computers of any sort until they are able to build their own.

Re:The Makers Rule

[ShanghaiBill]

Children should not be allowed to use computers until they are able to design and fab a microprocessor.

This is why VHDL should be taught in preschool.

No fucking way

[iamacat]

Would you ban your children from going into the forrest to collect berries and mushrooms during agricultural age or working in factories during industrial revolution? Well then, banning them from online opportunities does not serve them any better during information age. Sure there are downsides, but Internet has benefited humanity just like all innovations throughout history. Keeping out children from benefitting as well doesn't do any good.

Yeah, but _I_ don't have a problem.

[shess]

What I hear, here, is that the kids should have their screen time limited, but the parents have that shit under control.

Once I went on a trip with a boy-scout crew where we spent a week on an island with no services. When we got back, the kids spent the rest of that day playing pick-up games of soccer, some weird simon-says thing, etc. The parents/chaperones all set in ordered ranks with their heads in their phones.

I'm not saying that kids should be allowed free reign, but this is not a problem with our youth, this is a problem with our society. If you want your kids to spend less time on their screens, put your own damn screens away and spend time with your kids.

Re:Yes

[93 Escort Wagon]

You both make persuasive arguments.

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.

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.