> According to the rules of the experiment, the children had to explain the next day how they had coped with being alone under such conditions.
Title is misleading; the children didn't have access to any modern technology.
tl;dr no modern technology (no TV radio) and no other people.
> the today’s generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy, and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination.
The experiment doesn't imply that.
Even yesterday's generation was also entertained by things not of their making (books, radio, TV).
Talking to an imaginary friend can't replace real human interaction, especially for 8 hours.
Plus with modern technology they are able to keep themselves busy.
Every generation complains that the children of today can't entertain themselves are anti-social, etc.
When I was a kid (in my 30s now) I remember people saying it about me reading/watching tv/playing videogames.
Now it is smartphones/computers/internet.
When my mum was a kid apparently it was listening to records.
I am sure if you go back 1000 years you will find some record of an "old" person complaining about how the young ones have no respect for their elders and can't keep themselves entertained.
>I am sure if you go back 1000 years you will find some record of an "old" person complaining about how the young ones have no respect for their elders and can't keep themselves entertained.
Try 1000 years and some chage earlier:
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” - Socrates
"The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13497021
is a recent, excellent, balanced, well-researched and -written book on this topic from Nick Harkaway -- a first-rate, under-read author of literary sci-fi. It's his first and only work of non-fiction. In my experience, it's common for "us" (speaking to the HN core demographic constituency here, i.e. the educated, privileged, connected and technology-empowered) to be too hasty in dismissing potentially valid criticism or objections from "them", presuming (and reinforcing) a binary choice between polar worldviews. IOW, "progressives vs luddites". IMHO reality will always be subtler than that. Harkaway -- though obviously writing as one of "us" -- examines a broad spectrum of perspectives and maintains a rare degree of objectivity in his analysis of the cultural impact of what are undeniably profound changes in humanity's interconnectedness and technology-driven capabilities. I offer no particular "TLDR" summary of the work, other than to say it reminded me there is more insight to be gleaned when we resist the temptation to divide the world into simplistic categories.
> Talking to an imaginary friend can't replace real human interaction, especially for 8 hours.
"It was forbidden to communicate with others according to the rules of the experiment"
So no imaginary friends either ;)
In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised if the outcomes had little to do with removal of technology, but were rather due to the removal of the ability to communicate with _anyone_.
I remember the first computer my family bought that had a modem. The internet was a novelty and because it tied up your phone line you had to be careful when you used it (lest you miss out on a call). No mobile phones also meant that solo activities were limited to what these scientists listed: reading, writing, drawing, etc... BUT, I had access to my friends. I could go out and play basketball, run around on the play-gym playing tag, and just walking around town.
It's no wonder that these kids had anxiety! Forced solitude is brutal.
This experiment is interesting but doesn't only test what happens when the kids do not have access to internet, it also tests the result of social isolation. They were forced to be alone and not have any contact with other kids.
It would be more interesting to redo the same experiment but allow the kids to meet and talk with each other. I think there would probably be a lot less anxiety.
What makes you think that it's real. It's just the same text in russian language... With no references to the study or whatever... With ending like "А что вы об этом думаете?" meaning "And what do you think about this?"
It's the text signed by the named author, it's not some retelling, and it's from 2012. It's imaginable that it was included in some of her books afterwards. She still writes regularly online:
It still bothers me. I don't know whether I just don't understand the differences in culture (between theirs and mine), or whether I can't remember how I used to socialize back in my high-school days, but the reactions always seems a bit excessive.
I wonder if perhaps misdirection would change things? "You have 8 hours of this remaining" would make one very conscious of the experiment, and when it finishes.
It's interesting to read about the reproduction of the experiment. Some takeaways:
* The number is low, only five, but I think it's enough for an informal experiment of a newspaper (not a peer review article)
* They don't have a control group. What happens if you must log all your activities for 8 hours and feel that someone is looking over your shoulder? (Can you be with your SO?)
* It's not a 100% reproduction. It's nice that here the children were allowed to talk with families/friends, instead of being forced to be alone or with unknown people.
* No suicidal thought. Perhaps the problem with the other experiments was the isolation? Did the subjects in the other experiment have suicidal though before the experiment? Was the suicidal part exaggerated? For example:
- "Do you think that you can survive one week in the conditions of this experiment?" "No, I'd kill myself. (as a figure of speech) [1]"
- "Did you think about suicide?" "No" "Not even a little?" "No" "Not even for one moment?" "OK, whatever, perhaps only once."
* I think that an important quote is:
> "When I wanted to play the guitar, I didn't have my phone to search for new chords. Luckily I had some chords printed out already," she said.
Perhaps doing a two hour rehearsal and repeating the experiment one week after will remove most of the problems due to the lack of preparation. It's like trying to go to a camping without previous experience. You will put the cans, but forget the can opener. (Been there, done that.)
[1] I'm a native Spanish speaker, so I don't know the exact idiom in English. In Spanish from Argentina we sometime use phrases like "Cuando se me cayo el florero me quiería morir." -> "When I drop accidentally the flower pot, I wanted to be dead." but everybody understand that it's a figure of speech and not a real suicidal feeling. I'm not sure how to translate the exact feeling with the right idiom to English. I even had to add the word "accidentally" to the transition to make the first part of the sentence clear.
Edit: Seems like you are questioning if the author actually carried out the experiment that she claimed. In that case there is indeed no proof or cross-reference available.
Thank you. Though I'll be honest, even if this were published in Nature, I'd still be shouting "yeah right". Good luck to anyone who wants to see it replicated.
I have an issue with something in the debunking article:
> A supposed child psychologist set them alone in a city by themselves with noone to talk to, no one who cares.
> The point is even if you believe the study to be true, it was unethical. Kids were unsupervised and let loose.
I lived in Moscow, Russia from birth to right before I turned ten. Towards the end, when school let out, I'd get on a bus or subway, and I'd go home to our apartment. Unsupervised, alone, "loose". Sometimes end up playing with friends living in my apartment complex, sometimes I'd just spend time by myself in the apartment. And I was not an outlier in this; this was common among my friends. There wasn't a school bus that would shuttle us to our front door, nor did most people's parents pick them up in 4th grade.
I was nine. The supposed kids being experimented on in this article were teenagers, between 12 and 18.
The idea that allowing teenagers to be unsupervised in a city is dangerous or unethical is ludicrous.
They where not allowed to communicate with friends for 8 hours and stripped of their usual entertainment, while normally they would spend most time in school, sports clubs and with their families?
I think you could have done this experiment 20 years ago and get the same results.
What will be different nowadays is that your friends are always an your pocket. A situation where you are confronted with something emotional and unable to talk to a friend right away might be more unusual and frightening than it was 20 years ago.
Maybe kids 20 years ago could handle boredom better, but I think this study has too many flaws to judge about that.
I was a teenager 20 years ago, and I'm not so sure about that. My brother was an actual child then.
The equivelent would have been to take away all social contact, plus television and video games and some freedom of movement to see folks for 8 hours. It wasn't like I generally had 8 hours to myself back then - between school and homework and chores and church (parents insisted) and the few friends and outings I did have, I simply didn't have that. And then, suddenly, some person doing an experiment wants to isolate me for 8 hours? I'd have been horribly bored as well.
Exactly. Even staying at home alone while the supervising parent went shopping sometimes got boring after the first 30 minutes. Albeit no horrible experience, I went along shopping most of the time, not to stay home alone.
I actually find the results to be pretty optimistic. We've become a more connected society because of our technology and it feels good to communicate with other people. That's why we developed the technology in the first place; to shorten the distance between us. What's so wrong with that? We're only moving forward to a world that's even more connected, not back to the 1800's. Sure, we're dependent on things we did not make; we stand on the shoulders of giants, but that's how we move forward. We take the things passed to us, use and build on them to make a better world. It's ok to have some psychological issues when you take it all away.
I question your premise. Are you and I actually communicating right now in an emotionally meaningful, fulfilling way?
Am I less alone now for having this exchange of posts on HN with you than I would be had I spent this time reading from a book, which is of course also a communication, if only in one direction?
My instinct tells me that neither of these states involve meaningful (which I'm defining here as personal) human interaction, but I'll freely admit that's more a gut feeling than a scientific truth.
I would argue that the minute you checked back in here to see if anyone had responded to your post - it became a meaningful two way interaction, and you would have received the added stimulus of excitement/gladness (that someone had responded) or disappointment/emptiness (if someone hadn't).
> I question your premise. Are you and I actually communicating right now in an emotionally meaningful, fulfilling way?
I very rarely have that during the 9 hours I'm around people every day at work.
Just because we're not engaging in that way right now has nothing to do with the medium, but the participants and the forum/context in which they are engaging.
My 2$ is that the digital medium doesn't by design take anything away from how meaningful an interaction is. Emotion can be conveyed in a multitude of ways, most of which carry just fine over the internet.
Sure it is. You felt compelled to write a response and to pose the question. It may not be personal, and not very meaningful, but it is communication that you felt some urge to be a part of.
This made sense until I got to the part that said it was forbidden to communicate with others according to the rules of the experiment. This, to me, makes the experiment less convincing and the outcome less of a surprise.
A lot of online activities, no matter how brainless, are social. It doesn't seem fair to say "kids can't live without their mobile phones" when it's really about them not being able to communicate. I'm pretty certain the results would be less drastic if they could have just hung out and played boardgames.
I don't know about the study but when I cut out the Internet my kids become productive real fast - one cleans up her room other will look out the window and find the lawn needs mowing and will happily mow and sometimes even edge. Some times they come and talk to me.
I then give them Internet back - so far it's a good positive feedback loop for them. I guess it won't work with all kids - mine like doing other things but are just too distracted when there's Internet.
It works in my experience with cousins. Kids can easily go through whole summer break without apparent issues. Both the girls and boys enjoyed physical activity (different kinds most for each kid surprisingly with one exception)
Half of the kids liked to draw in a group. All of them liked board games.
One boy liked to take apart and analyse computer hardware and other things mechanical. One girl liked to play with the piano and synthesiser. The other boys liked PE more and another girl liked to play football with them. One girl liked much more complex books than expected and talking about them.
Sample size of 10. Age and 9-12. Generally 2-3 at a time. Kids were very used to social media and passive entertainment as well as computer games. Also movies on demand.
They are allowed to make and talk to friends but not borrow cellphones, computers or watch TV. They were not separated from parents.
(also parents are sadly often busy with their lives and earning money. I bet kids like the personal touch and attention)
I get taking away Internet to see what would happen, but why would you remove all social contact altogether? And why remove the telephone? We've had access to the telephone for decades.
Plus I'm pretty sure you could find some variant of "damn kids, rap music" engraved on the wall of a cave in mesopotamia. It's somehow ingrained in our genetic structure to think our children are idiots (which I suppose is a little beneficial).
> The author of the experiment, a family psychologist, wanted to prove her working hypothesis that the today’s generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy, and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination.
> The author of the experiment, a family psychologist, wanted to prove her working hypothesis that the today’s generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy, and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination.
More accurately would be "What happens when you socially isolate children for 8 hours".
The social isolation part is probably the most important aspect of the study. I'll bet you that if it only limited modern technology, but allowed the participants to interact with people, we would get totally different results.
I think it's quite easy to forego technology for longer periods - you often do that on vacations, to give an example.
Alternative title "teenagers can't be alone for 8 hours without technology". The issue is being alone with their thoughts. The fact that such a significant number had severe anxiety without access to easy distractions seems problematic. Self-reflection, deeper thinking or ability to focus on a task are important skills.
Kids can't entertain themselves "with things of their making". Let's give them books to read instead. What?
I wonder if when books were invented people would complain "this youth, they do nothing but read, they can't even <insert outdated form of entertainment> anymore".
This and the article mentioned elsewhere (http://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/what-happens-when-5-st...) are far more accurate representations of what happens - kids may moan a bit but then they adapt. Your kids are not going to have suicidal thoughts because you turned off the internet for a bit (or if they are it's not the switch off that's the problem). The original article is just scaremongering, HN shouldn't be pandering to this kind of clickbait.
Did you read the whole article? Researchers mention that many of the children thought this was not a good reaction, tried this experiment again by themselves and reported that on second and third tries they fared much better. So it's just more like sudden withdrawal syndrome and they indeed adapted.
Voluntary solitude is so rare for people of any age. It's also profoundly useful. 24 years ago, as a high school senior, in lieu of regular gym class I elected to take a course in Survival. This culminated in a 3-day, 2-night "solo" -- a sleepover on the edge of one of Boston's outer harbor islands, during which time I didn't see or speak with another human being. (We each had a large section of the island to ourselves, and were instructed to silently turn and walk in the other direction if we happened to see a neighboring student at our site's edge.) I had volunteered for the most-remote site, on the northeastern edge of the island. I made camp on a beach adjacent to the overgrown ruins of a military installment of some sort. Like my classmates, I'd walked in with a duffel bag containing a sleeping bag, 2 or 3 items of clothing, a 10x10' clear sheet of plastic, 40' of twine, a knife, 2 gallons of water, some non-perishable food, 5 waterproof matches in a ziplock bag with a journal and pencil, and a whistle. That's it. No phone (in 1992 nobody had these), no walkman (my tape-playing music player), no walkie-talkie. Just the same essentials available a century or more earlier.
After picking my spot and building my shelter, I walked, sat, breathed, and wrote in my journal. As the first day waned, I made a roaring bonfire against the outer wall of the fortress, feeding it the end of a massive driftwood log. I sketched the sun setting over Boston's skyline as the stars came out, listened to the fire and the waves on the beach, and had time, and space, entirely to myself.
That weekend gave me a chance to contemplate the myriad huge changes then imminent in my life: things like picking a college, moving out of the home I'd lived in since I was two years old, and moving to a different state in another part of the country.
At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed the solo experience. It flew by, and I was grateful to have had the chance to decompress and spend time outside. It was transformative in a few ways, and in writing this I'm realizing it again, and remembering just how valuable -- and rare -- that kind of solitude is. Human connection is so important. But so is the chance to _completely_ unplug and disconnect. I can't recommend it highly enough. My gratitude for that solo experience is profound.
this is the point where it broke for me, i should have realised when they were going on about feeling physically sick and had thoughts of suicide but kids suddenly "seeing the light" realising the error of their ways and banning themselves from all human contact really seems unlikely to me.
So if you deprive kids of 2 things (internet AND social interaction) for 8h, you can safely infer all abnormal behaviours were caused by the lack of only one of those things?
Also, as someone else mentioned, the "study" appears to be nonexistent.
I have 4 kids. The more I let them use the Internet the less they interact with each other and when they do interact it usually is in a poor way. The less Internet I let them use, the more they interact together, use their imaginations when playing and there are way less fights and bickering.
When my grandsons (4-6) are brought to visit us, we often leave them in the barn for a day while I and my wife go to the city with business. I have noticed they even started using their own words and other odd gestures to communicate with each other. Glad to see them bonding without modern electric appliances instead choosing to play with the hay.
71 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread> According to the rules of the experiment, the children had to explain the next day how they had coped with being alone under such conditions.
Title is misleading; the children didn't have access to any modern technology.
tl;dr no modern technology (no TV radio) and no other people.
> the today’s generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy, and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination.
The experiment doesn't imply that.
Even yesterday's generation was also entertained by things not of their making (books, radio, TV).
Talking to an imaginary friend can't replace real human interaction, especially for 8 hours.
Plus with modern technology they are able to keep themselves busy.
edit: parent comment has been editing and ammending post multiple times.
When I was a kid (in my 30s now) I remember people saying it about me reading/watching tv/playing videogames.
Now it is smartphones/computers/internet.
When my mum was a kid apparently it was listening to records.
I am sure if you go back 1000 years you will find some record of an "old" person complaining about how the young ones have no respect for their elders and can't keep themselves entertained.
Try 1000 years and some chage earlier:
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” - Socrates
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children...
When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.
- Hesiod, 8 B.C.
What matters is channeling entertainment more into active forms. That has always been done with varying success.
"It was forbidden to communicate with others according to the rules of the experiment" So no imaginary friends either ;)
In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised if the outcomes had little to do with removal of technology, but were rather due to the removal of the ability to communicate with _anyone_.
But the experiment forces some element of social isolation that may have distorted the result.
I grew up without the Internet, and sometimes without a phone or TV. But I still had friends to play with.
I remember the first computer my family bought that had a modem. The internet was a novelty and because it tied up your phone line you had to be careful when you used it (lest you miss out on a call). No mobile phones also meant that solo activities were limited to what these scientists listed: reading, writing, drawing, etc... BUT, I had access to my friends. I could go out and play basketball, run around on the play-gym playing tag, and just walking around town.
It's no wonder that these kids had anxiety! Forced solitude is brutal.
It would be more interesting to redo the same experiment but allow the kids to meet and talk with each other. I think there would probably be a lot less anxiety.
http://www.theitbaby.com/wordpress/2016/01/25/they-wanted-to...
My high school-aged daughter went without it for a few weeks on a trip and didn't die, amazingly. She wants to go back and do it again.
A school trip mean you have other friends with you.
I copy paste the url from damian2000's comment here for you convenience:
https://snob.ru/selected/entry/45522
https://snob.ru/profile/5591/blog
She also blogged about the continuation of her experiment here (2014):
https://snob.ru/selected/entry/79799
2016 and it comes to the English-speaking media, here Feb 2016, where the New Paper from Singapore tried to reproduce the experiment:
http://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/what-happens-when-5-st...
I wonder if perhaps misdirection would change things? "You have 8 hours of this remaining" would make one very conscious of the experiment, and when it finishes.
They'd know if the experiment is misdesigned if they cannot envision teens staying sane for this long.
* The number is low, only five, but I think it's enough for an informal experiment of a newspaper (not a peer review article)
* They don't have a control group. What happens if you must log all your activities for 8 hours and feel that someone is looking over your shoulder? (Can you be with your SO?)
* It's not a 100% reproduction. It's nice that here the children were allowed to talk with families/friends, instead of being forced to be alone or with unknown people.
* No suicidal thought. Perhaps the problem with the other experiments was the isolation? Did the subjects in the other experiment have suicidal though before the experiment? Was the suicidal part exaggerated? For example:
- "Do you think that you can survive one week in the conditions of this experiment?" "No, I'd kill myself. (as a figure of speech) [1]"
- "Did you think about suicide?" "No" "Not even a little?" "No" "Not even for one moment?" "OK, whatever, perhaps only once."
* I think that an important quote is:
> "When I wanted to play the guitar, I didn't have my phone to search for new chords. Luckily I had some chords printed out already," she said.
Perhaps doing a two hour rehearsal and repeating the experiment one week after will remove most of the problems due to the lack of preparation. It's like trying to go to a camping without previous experience. You will put the cans, but forget the can opener. (Been there, done that.)
[1] I'm a native Spanish speaker, so I don't know the exact idiom in English. In Spanish from Argentina we sometime use phrases like "Cuando se me cayo el florero me quiería morir." -> "When I drop accidentally the flower pot, I wanted to be dead." but everybody understand that it's a figure of speech and not a real suicidal feeling. I'm not sure how to translate the exact feeling with the right idiom to English. I even had to add the word "accidentally" to the transition to make the first part of the sentence clear.
https://www.amazon.com/Ekaterina-Murashova/e/B00MWS9SN8
http://www.samokatbook.ru/files/Samokat_catalogue2008.pdf
Edit: Seems like you are questioning if the author actually carried out the experiment that she claimed. In that case there is indeed no proof or cross-reference available.
> A supposed child psychologist set them alone in a city by themselves with noone to talk to, no one who cares.
> The point is even if you believe the study to be true, it was unethical. Kids were unsupervised and let loose.
I lived in Moscow, Russia from birth to right before I turned ten. Towards the end, when school let out, I'd get on a bus or subway, and I'd go home to our apartment. Unsupervised, alone, "loose". Sometimes end up playing with friends living in my apartment complex, sometimes I'd just spend time by myself in the apartment. And I was not an outlier in this; this was common among my friends. There wasn't a school bus that would shuttle us to our front door, nor did most people's parents pick them up in 4th grade.
I was nine. The supposed kids being experimented on in this article were teenagers, between 12 and 18.
The idea that allowing teenagers to be unsupervised in a city is dangerous or unethical is ludicrous.
Or did they or society degenerate from medieval times that much?
I think you could have done this experiment 20 years ago and get the same results.
What will be different nowadays is that your friends are always an your pocket. A situation where you are confronted with something emotional and unable to talk to a friend right away might be more unusual and frightening than it was 20 years ago.
Maybe kids 20 years ago could handle boredom better, but I think this study has too many flaws to judge about that.
The equivelent would have been to take away all social contact, plus television and video games and some freedom of movement to see folks for 8 hours. It wasn't like I generally had 8 hours to myself back then - between school and homework and chores and church (parents insisted) and the few friends and outings I did have, I simply didn't have that. And then, suddenly, some person doing an experiment wants to isolate me for 8 hours? I'd have been horribly bored as well.
Am I less alone now for having this exchange of posts on HN with you than I would be had I spent this time reading from a book, which is of course also a communication, if only in one direction?
My instinct tells me that neither of these states involve meaningful (which I'm defining here as personal) human interaction, but I'll freely admit that's more a gut feeling than a scientific truth.
I very rarely have that during the 9 hours I'm around people every day at work.
Just because we're not engaging in that way right now has nothing to do with the medium, but the participants and the forum/context in which they are engaging.
My 2$ is that the digital medium doesn't by design take anything away from how meaningful an interaction is. Emotion can be conveyed in a multitude of ways, most of which carry just fine over the internet.
A lot of online activities, no matter how brainless, are social. It doesn't seem fair to say "kids can't live without their mobile phones" when it's really about them not being able to communicate. I'm pretty certain the results would be less drastic if they could have just hung out and played boardgames.
I then give them Internet back - so far it's a good positive feedback loop for them. I guess it won't work with all kids - mine like doing other things but are just too distracted when there's Internet.
One boy liked to take apart and analyse computer hardware and other things mechanical. One girl liked to play with the piano and synthesiser. The other boys liked PE more and another girl liked to play football with them. One girl liked much more complex books than expected and talking about them.
Sample size of 10. Age and 9-12. Generally 2-3 at a time. Kids were very used to social media and passive entertainment as well as computer games. Also movies on demand.
They are allowed to make and talk to friends but not borrow cellphones, computers or watch TV. They were not separated from parents.
(also parents are sadly often busy with their lives and earning money. I bet kids like the personal touch and attention)
Plus I'm pretty sure you could find some variant of "damn kids, rap music" engraved on the wall of a cave in mesopotamia. It's somehow ingrained in our genetic structure to think our children are idiots (which I suppose is a little beneficial).
That is not how you do science.
That is not how you do science.
The social isolation part is probably the most important aspect of the study. I'll bet you that if it only limited modern technology, but allowed the participants to interact with people, we would get totally different results.
I think it's quite easy to forego technology for longer periods - you often do that on vacations, to give an example.
I wonder if when books were invented people would complain "this youth, they do nothing but read, they can't even <insert outdated form of entertainment> anymore".
This and the article mentioned elsewhere (http://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/what-happens-when-5-st...) are far more accurate representations of what happens - kids may moan a bit but then they adapt. Your kids are not going to have suicidal thoughts because you turned off the internet for a bit (or if they are it's not the switch off that's the problem). The original article is just scaremongering, HN shouldn't be pandering to this kind of clickbait.
After picking my spot and building my shelter, I walked, sat, breathed, and wrote in my journal. As the first day waned, I made a roaring bonfire against the outer wall of the fortress, feeding it the end of a massive driftwood log. I sketched the sun setting over Boston's skyline as the stars came out, listened to the fire and the waves on the beach, and had time, and space, entirely to myself.
That weekend gave me a chance to contemplate the myriad huge changes then imminent in my life: things like picking a college, moving out of the home I'd lived in since I was two years old, and moving to a different state in another part of the country.
At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed the solo experience. It flew by, and I was grateful to have had the chance to decompress and spend time outside. It was transformative in a few ways, and in writing this I'm realizing it again, and remembering just how valuable -- and rare -- that kind of solitude is. Human connection is so important. But so is the chance to _completely_ unplug and disconnect. I can't recommend it highly enough. My gratitude for that solo experience is profound.
Also, as someone else mentioned, the "study" appears to be nonexistent.
I consider internet/games are mental drugs for kids, maybe too harsh, but they can play at will when they grow up and leave my house.