Screens are designed to distract, not educate. A screen is a great place to learn if you are not in a classroom or if you are trying to avoid class. It's a terrible way to be "in class".
I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
So, you learned it before moocs were invented? The internet was a very different place 15 yrs ago.
I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays.
It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available.
Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
Agreed. The difficulty is in the details here. Arguably TV was largely, almost entirely entertainment in days of old. Yet, the internet screens are a step back from that, offering both more entertainment potential and far more education potential. It's a dangerous and powerful tool, but one that we need a certain resolve to use productively.
I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals.
Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
> Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement.
I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
i notice better retention when i add content to an Anki[0] deck as cloze type question and actually repeat the content a few times.
just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you.
Note-taking is a learned skill. When I was in school, they actually taught us several different techniques for taking notes and I am not sure that is a universal part of education. They told us that studies showed people typing notes just write down verbatim what was being said because they can type so fast, which then is useless information as far as later reference is concerned. Writing notes properly actually forces one to distill the important information and take note of particularly confusing parts so that when you come back to the notes they are a helpful recall mechanism for important information.
I find this to be true when observing how friends with children raise their kids. People with more education seem to have severe limits on screens and lower education folks seem to let screens entertain their kids all day everyday.
This strikes me as some weird virtue signaling, as part of the package of well-to-do enlightened whiteness. Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad; you have to think about what content you're delivering. I spent most days watching old-school History Channel while playing with Legos or army men. Likewise, almost all of my knowledge of geography and a significant chunk of history comes from playing strategy games on the PC. If I was watching the Disney Channel and playing Fortnite, then that would be less productively used time, I suppose.
I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.
Using 'enlightened whiteness' is mildly insulting both to people who happen to be white and those who are non-white who share the same beliefs and behaviour.
i'm white and i don't find it personally offensive. there is a certain set of risk-averse behaviors that seem ubiquitous among the white (upper) middle class. and maybe this is uncharitable of me, but i do actually think these people feel more virtuous because they do these things, or at least do them to signal virtue. when someone uses a phrase like "enlightened whiteness" or "SWPL", it seems there's a high chance that we both instantly picture the same loosely related set of things that would be hard to describe otherwise.
Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.
We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.
Screens are cheap. Sure a tablet is a few hundred dollars, but figure it's a hand me down from a relative, and it can entertain a kid for thousands of hours with minimal effort.
Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.
The main concern is that it hurts socialization, which is actually a really important skill. I don't think there's anything wrong with screen time, especially if it's productive time for the person using the screen (adult or kid). The issue is like anything - when that screen time is so great it chokes out other activities like socializing or fitness.
> Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.
Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
Throwing an anecdote into the bucket: my 2.5 year old gets _very_ cranky when it's time to turn off Masha and the Bear, and it seems to be - without running any objective numbers - that she's crankier in general and less willing to be patient and wait if she watches too much of it on any given day or weekend.
We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
Yup; I know they've shown them a few Youtube videos, mostly a few funny songs. I'm fine with that; she's very happy to try and sing along, and they don't just plop them down in front of a TV for hours at a time.
It was just the same about 23 years ago. My cousin was raised by TV/PC screen, drunk dad and overprotective mother that would do anything to keep him quiet (screen worked the best).
He was kind of ADHD person, never confirmed by anyone, but he was jumping in place everytime something exciting was on the screen, always wanted to move around, hit other people. And most noticeable - he was furious when somebody told him to turn off tv/pc.
I've seen many not behaving kids of course, this one had uncontrolled access to technology even then.
And now we're alarmed? We had a lot of time to notice. Don't forget that TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones (without internet of course, just SMS) even 10 years ago.
> TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones even 10 years ago
It used to be rare to see teenagers with cell phones, let alone toddlers. The iPhone is ~11 years old, and in that time it has become common for me to see people of all ages, from toddler up, always on a smartphone or tablet.
I disagree strongly that the situation is just the same as TVs decades ago.
And I'm not interested in the picture of the people reading newspapers on the subway. It's always been common to ignore strangers of public transit, I'm more interested in a photograph of friends/family staring intently at their own newspaper while at a dinner table or some other social event. This is the norm with smartphones, and color me skeptical that it isn't new.
This happens with my school aged kids as well. I don't think it's "addiction" but the nature of kids and screens.
I've learned to keep my kids' screen time limited and it works best if it's a rigid timing (after homework but before dinner). I give them additional time if they watch in French audio track - in fact that seems to minimize the crankiness when its time to put away the devices.
My kids get school supplied iPads. They get some real life experience from this: how to deal with terrible school mandated applications. This mirrors my experience working at IBM.
For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done.
Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
Figure out what interface they use when reading the emails and if it's HTML compatible, put an email signature in every message that has a random set of curse words in white.
Or, alternatively, they should make a group project to write an essay about the town of Scunthorpe, its railroad to Essex, and a local grower of shitake mushrooms; and make sure to diligently discuss its contents in email.
Source: my 13 year old little brother was recently expelled for YouTube videos on his personal google account. As if he had committed a crime. Its asinine.
That's the thing that bothers me which is why I commented.
School administrators are using the existence of any videos to kick him out by all means necessary. They don't care about the contents or the context. He said the word Hitler in one of his 10 ish videos or a joke about it. He's extremely into history and all he likes watching are youtube history videos. Playing games based on history. Sharing memes with his friends that have a historical context. Some of it isn't funny some of it is.
Doesn't make it ok to permanently ruin a teenagers academic future over a stupid silly completely explainable video less than one minute long.
Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues. He doesn't have any. It's just straight abuse to be completely honest. It's not right.
This concerns me because when I was is school, hardly anything I did online was visible or stuck around very long. Now it's trivial to upload pictures and videos for everyone to see. Either people calm down and stop pretending kids are perfect and fully aware of what they're doing or we punish everyone for every single character they type and bear the consequences. Randomly screening the stuff kids upload and judging it on a similarly random basis effectively means every family has to live with the reality that schools might arbitrarily decide to smite them because someone had a bad day. Really, it sounds rather distopian...
EDIT: I should say that I can think of two ways they can argue this: since it is school property, nothing on there has the expectation of privacy, and is monitored (my work does that, and as a result I don't log into personal email at work). They could also argue the "in loco parentus", in which they are acting as parents by searching it.
However, legally or not, that is a massive breach of trust, and if I were that kid, I have been taught a hard lesson not to trust electronics I own and not to trust authority figures.
Many (public) schools seem to forget that they are bound by the first amendment like any other government entity. If the child was harassing or bullying another student (or inciting such acts) I could see an argument being made, but beyond that free speech is free speech.
A child learns first from their parents. I feel sad for kids when I see parents involved with phones while walking a baby carriage or attending a soccer game. Parents show by their actions which is more important, people or tech.
Would you feel better if the parent were deeply involved in a newspaper or book? How about if the parent was constantly screaming obscenities at the referee? Parents aren't honor or duty bound to pay rapt attention to every second of their child's life. It's one human caring for another, and few humans have identical interests.
Or they could just be present in the actual social situation they were attending. All of the options you suggest seem preferable to staring at a random glowing magic square in their hands.
Just had a baby girl and my wife and I are planning on how to manage this... When we go out we see families where every kid is loaded up on an iphone, including the adult kids. Lets go out to eat and every go on the phone, very nice. I'm speaking from an odd spot, i grew up playing a shit load of computer/video games. However I also enjoyed running around outside with my neighborhood friends doing whatever , playing sports and all of that good stuff. Curious to find what the future holds and I think my own screen time will be limited as the baby gets older. OR i'll say your only screen time is dark souls, better get started young
Screens are fine. But wasting time is not. My middle schooler is allowed unlimited screen time for ebooks, video editing, photoshop, and writing (other than messaging). youtube and social media is rationed.
I've had to go as far as completely router blocking twitter, Snapchat, certain websites, discord, certain Google pages to block new accounts from being created, locking a phone with parental controls so I can disable the camera and only apps that work are texting and calls, bios locking a laptop so I'm able to control usage, disable the camera and plenty of other apps, using my personal email as a recovery option for all the old social media (because you can log right back in within 90 days and it's all back).
If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
>Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.
And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
This is actually why I want to get my 6yo a real, old-fashioned boot-to-BASIC computer.
We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing.
My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long.
Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction.
It is a food story all over again. Few hundred years ago additional body weight was a sign of riches, as they could afford excess food. These days with the prevalence of sugary and processed food tables have turned.
Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)
Technology in schools always takes a lot of adjustment to enhance learning than make another distraction. Technology should be seen as just the medium, not the ends to education
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadI learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays.
It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available.
Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals.
Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement.
I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you.
[0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html
Studies disagree. Too much screen time isn't great for kid development. At best, we're not sure what sort of effect it has on kids.
Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.
We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.
Anyway, we do know and suspect a lot of stuff:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-an...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too...
Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.
If they get addicted, az least it could make them smarter
You can get basically disposable tablets at Walmart for ~$50.
Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
Is the daycare cooperating with your desire for near-zero screen time?
What did parents do before that when they need to cook dinner?
I know this is kind of a rhetorical question, but:
- they'd prepare dinner ahead of time
- the other parent would watch the kids
- they'd have extended family watch the kids
- they'd have neighbors watch the kids
- they'd park the kid in the kitchen
- they'd hope that the kid didn't do anything too destructive in the other room
He was kind of ADHD person, never confirmed by anyone, but he was jumping in place everytime something exciting was on the screen, always wanted to move around, hit other people. And most noticeable - he was furious when somebody told him to turn off tv/pc.
I've seen many not behaving kids of course, this one had uncontrolled access to technology even then.
And now we're alarmed? We had a lot of time to notice. Don't forget that TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones (without internet of course, just SMS) even 10 years ago.
Did your cousin carry the TV around with him?
> TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones even 10 years ago
It used to be rare to see teenagers with cell phones, let alone toddlers. The iPhone is ~11 years old, and in that time it has become common for me to see people of all ages, from toddler up, always on a smartphone or tablet.
I disagree strongly that the situation is just the same as TVs decades ago.
And I'm not interested in the picture of the people reading newspapers on the subway. It's always been common to ignore strangers of public transit, I'm more interested in a photograph of friends/family staring intently at their own newspaper while at a dinner table or some other social event. This is the norm with smartphones, and color me skeptical that it isn't new.
I've learned to keep my kids' screen time limited and it works best if it's a rigid timing (after homework but before dinner). I give them additional time if they watch in French audio track - in fact that seems to minimize the crankiness when its time to put away the devices.
For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done.
Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
They should start using archaic and foreign curses.
Source: my 13 year old little brother was recently expelled for YouTube videos on his personal google account. As if he had committed a crime. Its asinine.
School administrators are using the existence of any videos to kick him out by all means necessary. They don't care about the contents or the context. He said the word Hitler in one of his 10 ish videos or a joke about it. He's extremely into history and all he likes watching are youtube history videos. Playing games based on history. Sharing memes with his friends that have a historical context. Some of it isn't funny some of it is.
Doesn't make it ok to permanently ruin a teenagers academic future over a stupid silly completely explainable video less than one minute long.
Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues. He doesn't have any. It's just straight abuse to be completely honest. It's not right.
EDIT: I should say that I can think of two ways they can argue this: since it is school property, nothing on there has the expectation of privacy, and is monitored (my work does that, and as a result I don't log into personal email at work). They could also argue the "in loco parentus", in which they are acting as parents by searching it.
However, legally or not, that is a massive breach of trust, and if I were that kid, I have been taught a hard lesson not to trust electronics I own and not to trust authority figures.
If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
Being able to create such fine grained control on ios seems ... unlikely
And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing.
My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long.
Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction.
Relevant HN discussion about boot-to-BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)