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Screen Time Not Intrinsically Bad For Children, Say Doctors (theguardian.com)
Spending time looking at screens is not intrinsically bad for children's health, say the UK's leading children's doctors, who are advising parents to focus on ensuring their children get enough sleep, exercise and family interaction rather than clamping down on phones and laptops. From a report: The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has produced the first guidance for parents on how long children should spend on their laptops and phones, which throws the ball firmly back into the parents' court. Each family should decide what is best for its own members -- although all children would benefit from switching off the screen an hour before they go to bed to help them sleep. The college says the focus for parents should be on what the family is doing together, saying screen time is not an issue if parents have control over other aspects of their children's lives. The guidance appears to run counter to the thinking of the health secretary, Matt Hancock, a father of three young children, who has asked England's chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, to draw up some rules on the use of social media.
What can we blame bad parenting on now? It used to be comic books, then radio, then TV, then violent video games.
This would possibly imply that kids learn bad behaviors by:
1. Watching their parents
2. Their parents not setting boundaries and sticking to them
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
There’s this quote later in the article:
But Prof Russell Viner, the college president and an author of the evidence review published in the BMJ Open journal, said that while there was moderately strong evidence that screen time is linked to obesity (through TV snacking and lack of exercise) and mental health issues, the way to tackle it was not through universal curfews and bans.
“It is important that we recognise that screens are a modern way of being,” he said. “Reading we see as a hugely positive thing, but it is largely a sedentary thing. We have never done studies to look at the link between reading and adiposity [being overweight] but it is sedentary [lifestyle]. Five hundred years ago we thought it was bad for women’s brains to teach them to read. Reading and pamphlets have radicalised a lot more young people than screens have ever done. Yet we somehow worry about screens being different.”
So, basically, we think it’s tied to obesity and mental illness, but so are other activities we accept, so it’s “not intrinsically bad”.