A silver lining to this is new parents are very aware of the dangers of screen time. In my little community, I haven't seen parents of kids under the age of 3 give their kid any type of screen especially when they're out. It's a real generational divide, since I used to see kids with tablets in restaurants everywhere back 5 or 6 years ago. The new thing is screen free electronics, like a device kids can stick cards in and it repeats words in English or Spanish.
My take: When punk originated in the UK it was hostile and highly political. By the time it got to NYC it was still hostile but pretty much lost the political part. And by the time it got to L.A. it got sucked into the TV/media machine as a fashion show object of derision. R.I.P.
Even worse is what the screen is showing...Every new animation on youtube appear to involve some toilet reference, like if I look up dinosaur cartoons, most of the hits will be showing farting dinosaurs or potty training dinosaurs with animated shit (literally). Disgusting...
WTAF?
Thankfully there is also a wealth of 90s and older cartoons to be had if you care enough to search for them...
I’ve noticed a lot of fear mongering with screens and kids. So called “experts” have taken a few correlational studies and concluded that screen time is the devil. Instagram is full of these podcast clips of experts warning parents of the terrible effects of screen time. However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.
Giving your 2 year old an iPad with YouTube everyday for 2 hours is obviously going to be bad for them. That’s a terrible extreme. But 20 minutes of Bluey here and there throughout the week is not gonna mess anybody up.
So while I’m glad people are more aware of the negative effects of screen time, I also hate how extreme it has become. Parents, specially new parents are so susceptible to this kind of fear mongering.
First there is the challenge where "sceen time" is a statement that bundles together a whole bunch of different behavior, that affects children differently.
My kids when they watch tv they completely disconnect: I have to pause the tv to ask if they want to eat something or they won't hear me, so of course we drastically limit that one (I didn't have that problem, is that because I watched way more tv than them?)
At the same time, I don't let my kids play any videogame on a tablet or phone because I am a gamer and I recognize that quality of games on phones is terrible, it's an attention grab (there are exceptions).
I do let my kids play videogames quite freely though (nintendo switch, sometimes steam games).
The difference in engagement is enormous: they play together, they roll on each other and make jokes and afterwards they create something with their toys that's similar to something they liked in the videogame.
Yesterday my daughter got a new videogame (the new yoshi): she played way more than any other day in her life, but she was DEEPLY invested in it, loving every minute,you could see passion.
I sat near her, working from my laptop, she cuddled against me and proceeded to tell me everything she was discovering and her thought process to solve some of the more complex levels.
These are the situations that I don't understand: how can that be bad?
I did not stop her, I let her play as much as she wanted. It doesn't happen often and it's so rare to see her finding the right videogame (looks like puzzle is her genre!)
What's the difference between doing that for a book you love and a videogame you love?
> However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.
The "does smoking caused cancer" question took about 20 years to be settled, I believe between 1950 and 70 or something like that. And yet, a lot of people already knew already in the 20s that smoking does all sort of weird things to your throat. So the common sense take got to the right answer much faster than scientists.
Likewise with screens. Common sense tells us that 1) we FEEL the distractions and the addictions, common sense says that children will too, 2) we KNOW that the companies building these products have an interested in distracting us, common sense says that they will act on it.
But then we have takes like "akshually if you read the papers".
> "She actually looked at a motion picture and went, 'I get it! He's going to be the villain and they're going to do this'," he recalled.
Is there something teachable in making a kid sit through the thing even though they instantly understood front to back?
I get it if your goal is learning. Doing the questions in the math book makes the lesson stick. But - when it comes to entertainment - why put a kid through the frustration?
I'm not a parent, but I have siblings. Screen addiction is a failure of parenting above all else, so is drug abuse and other kind of issues that are rooted in addiction, barring mental illness and bad luck of course.
EDIT: Of course parenting is very difficult, and I don't believe that any of it is easy. I wouldn't blame parents for bad parenting, I would blame a system that creates parents that have no time or energy left to spare.
I don't know what the solution is, but it probably doesn't help when kids are uneducated, being failed by a system that is supposed to educate them, that maybe the parents trust SHOULD educate them. Ultimately those kids grow up to have kids. Aaaand that's the plot of Idiocracy.
I feel like - I dunno, people hate that there are just incentives.
I’m moderately disciplined and yet - my level of athleticism is directly related to how far away the trail is from my house. When it was 15 minutes away, I had to drive so my run was 45 minutes. Now I don’t so my run is 1:14. Same discipline, better athleticism.
30 years ago both a good and bad parent could kick their kids out of the house and they’d go get in a bike with the neighborhood kids and explore. Now. It’s soooo much more work to get your kid focused on an activity that’s not a screen, because if you kick them out of the house changes are they’ll just got find a screen (if it’s even legal or socially legitimate to do so anymore). The idea that you can “educate your kids” to ignore all those incentives is bananas. Part of educating your kids should be finding a way to put them in environments to learn themselves, and those ways are increasingly gone. Parents don’t understand the new world as well as their kids. It’s probably illogical for most kids to listen to their parents too much anyways. Which also ignores the fact that kids are inclined to do the opposite of what their parents say. I have no idea what my parent do could have done to keep me from smoking. Educate me on the dangers? They did.
To say that all parents got worse in the age of social media and YouTube, and ignoring that the environment fundamentally changed to put so much more ownus on the parents to constantly fight incentives.
I don’t know what the solution is, but to call it bad parenting is, I dunno.
Funnily enough, even with such emphasis on children, the problem is touching adults as well. And that's completely ignored. Movies in recent years have changed dramatically in subtle ways to work with impatient audience.
not just that, but movie plots are deliberately dumbed down these days (i.e., unnecessary flashbacks or camera pans or dialog to "explain" what is happening)
Parents of young children should know that the kids need sunlight and to look at distant objects on a regular basis to prevent the development of myopia.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadReminds me of when I saw a bunch of tshirts with the word "PUNK" written on them displayed in a window in a mall.
in this context, 'Disney' represents a plurality, and it's likely that there's people at Disney that want their kids off screens
WTAF?
Thankfully there is also a wealth of 90s and older cartoons to be had if you care enough to search for them...
Giving your 2 year old an iPad with YouTube everyday for 2 hours is obviously going to be bad for them. That’s a terrible extreme. But 20 minutes of Bluey here and there throughout the week is not gonna mess anybody up.
So while I’m glad people are more aware of the negative effects of screen time, I also hate how extreme it has become. Parents, specially new parents are so susceptible to this kind of fear mongering.
- Homer Simpson
First there is the challenge where "sceen time" is a statement that bundles together a whole bunch of different behavior, that affects children differently.
My kids when they watch tv they completely disconnect: I have to pause the tv to ask if they want to eat something or they won't hear me, so of course we drastically limit that one (I didn't have that problem, is that because I watched way more tv than them?)
At the same time, I don't let my kids play any videogame on a tablet or phone because I am a gamer and I recognize that quality of games on phones is terrible, it's an attention grab (there are exceptions).
I do let my kids play videogames quite freely though (nintendo switch, sometimes steam games). The difference in engagement is enormous: they play together, they roll on each other and make jokes and afterwards they create something with their toys that's similar to something they liked in the videogame.
Yesterday my daughter got a new videogame (the new yoshi): she played way more than any other day in her life, but she was DEEPLY invested in it, loving every minute,you could see passion. I sat near her, working from my laptop, she cuddled against me and proceeded to tell me everything she was discovering and her thought process to solve some of the more complex levels. These are the situations that I don't understand: how can that be bad? I did not stop her, I let her play as much as she wanted. It doesn't happen often and it's so rare to see her finding the right videogame (looks like puzzle is her genre!)
What's the difference between doing that for a book you love and a videogame you love?
The "does smoking caused cancer" question took about 20 years to be settled, I believe between 1950 and 70 or something like that. And yet, a lot of people already knew already in the 20s that smoking does all sort of weird things to your throat. So the common sense take got to the right answer much faster than scientists.
Likewise with screens. Common sense tells us that 1) we FEEL the distractions and the addictions, common sense says that children will too, 2) we KNOW that the companies building these products have an interested in distracting us, common sense says that they will act on it.
But then we have takes like "akshually if you read the papers".
Obligatory link to Ricky Gervais roast at the Golden Globes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgson2Q3nog
Is there something teachable in making a kid sit through the thing even though they instantly understood front to back?
I get it if your goal is learning. Doing the questions in the math book makes the lesson stick. But - when it comes to entertainment - why put a kid through the frustration?
EDIT: Of course parenting is very difficult, and I don't believe that any of it is easy. I wouldn't blame parents for bad parenting, I would blame a system that creates parents that have no time or energy left to spare.
I don't know what the solution is, but it probably doesn't help when kids are uneducated, being failed by a system that is supposed to educate them, that maybe the parents trust SHOULD educate them. Ultimately those kids grow up to have kids. Aaaand that's the plot of Idiocracy.
I’m moderately disciplined and yet - my level of athleticism is directly related to how far away the trail is from my house. When it was 15 minutes away, I had to drive so my run was 45 minutes. Now I don’t so my run is 1:14. Same discipline, better athleticism.
30 years ago both a good and bad parent could kick their kids out of the house and they’d go get in a bike with the neighborhood kids and explore. Now. It’s soooo much more work to get your kid focused on an activity that’s not a screen, because if you kick them out of the house changes are they’ll just got find a screen (if it’s even legal or socially legitimate to do so anymore). The idea that you can “educate your kids” to ignore all those incentives is bananas. Part of educating your kids should be finding a way to put them in environments to learn themselves, and those ways are increasingly gone. Parents don’t understand the new world as well as their kids. It’s probably illogical for most kids to listen to their parents too much anyways. Which also ignores the fact that kids are inclined to do the opposite of what their parents say. I have no idea what my parent do could have done to keep me from smoking. Educate me on the dangers? They did.
To say that all parents got worse in the age of social media and YouTube, and ignoring that the environment fundamentally changed to put so much more ownus on the parents to constantly fight incentives.
I don’t know what the solution is, but to call it bad parenting is, I dunno.