The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
The mayan calendar ended/started a new. So apparently the doomsday did happen, we just did not really notice while being distracted with our new gadgets ...
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.
Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
I think writing is needed to learn how to organize and express complex chains of thoughts. And to learn how to write well, you need to know how to read critically, too. It goes hand in hand. The same skills you apply to the words of others you can apply to your own, if you have them.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
> Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.
I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.
At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while <driving/cleaning/walking/biking/cooking> is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being able to flip back to an earlier page easily to re-read something. Secondly, sitting down and reading develops concentration and focus.
I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.
fellow Fairfield County native here. Likely around the same age as you. I went to a great public school (I was a terrible student, crippling ADHD but that's another story for another day) in the southern half of the county. I'll let you guess which one. Also spent a few years in another of the top districts (west of the capital, again, easy to guess ;P) before making the move south.
It's NOT the schools. They are well funded and as you say, pretty helpless because teachers, even younger ones, just aren't able to deal with kids whose parents shoved a smartphone into their hands at age 3.
It's NOT the parents - in order to keep up with the jonses in those towns, you have to work like a dog and most likely, both parents are in high stress demanding environments in order to make enough to live there. I was fortunate that my dad did quite well for our family, but there's no way I could raise a kid in that environment.
It's the fucking devices, and the drive to put tech everywhere in the classroom. When I was a kid we had a single Mac in the classroom (besides the teacher's computer), mainly to dick around with Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, or some typing app. We wanted to play games? We went outside and played sports, or stayed inside and played games like scrabble or chess.
In high school we had to do genuine research 15-20+ page papers as early as Sophomore year. There was zero Wikipedia, much less ChatGPT or Claude.
Of course, a book, which requires attention, effort, and has no distractions, is not going to capture the attention and imagination of someone who has had the world and all of its distractions at their fingertips since they gained consciousness, and weren't made to socialize without devices.
And no, we cannot allow people to pass to the next grade without mastering the skills required of their current grade. This needs to be completely iron clad and not up for debate. I was nearly held back 3-4 times. I am an idiot. I was miles ahead of where elementary school and middle school kids are today. I don't care if a wealthy Ivy grad and his management consultant wife donate a bunch of money to make sure their kid can pass - if their kid can't read or write, their kid can't pass.
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
It's not about the reading. It's about: a) being different, and b) making them feel guilty for not reading themselves. I used to get the same for being vegetarian, for much the same reasons. These days it's less weird and, oddly, I feel like people are almost envious that I get to have a "cool" label and they don't. It's strange because it's quite easy to get the label yourself if you want it, but it's hard to change habits.
I read a lot too, but it’s somewhere around 50 a year. How on earth are you getting through two books a week? What sort of books are these? I confess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy that are between 500 and 800 pages each. That’s not all of my reading, but I’d say at least 50% is.
Similarly, people are socially allowed to be buried in their phones while at work and this doesn't get critized by managers much, but god help you if you had a magazine or book open when taking a short break.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated from high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between being forced to read books/topics at school I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
When I first got a portable computer I basically immediately stopped reading. Like twelve years back. It only got worse when I got sufficient smart phone. I read basically daily before.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
Kids do what parents do, and what parents allow them to do. Allowing X hours daily gaming/screens is already bad parenting (depending on age but we talk about kids here), like it or not ask psychologists. At the end its just same genes & upbringing from the same genes (or failure to do so and ie nanny picks up).
Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.
You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me.
Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled growing up, and my parents were fairly strict about screentime. We read anything we could get our hands on, and I feel like I'm a happier, healthier adult today because of it.
While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.
The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.
It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.
It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.
I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.
Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).
Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?
How old are the kids? Honestly two hours of screens and devices seems like a lot to me, so I'm surprised that's where you cut down to. How much were they using them before? But my kids are young, so it's probably different if you're talking about like teens or something.
While this is probably bad, reading gets more credit than it should, especially when it gets to reading junk content, not engaging with the content, and escapism. A baseline level of reading is important, but beyond that, I'd rather kids go out and do things than just read about them.
It means we’re moving back to peasant strata that do the most menial jobs and live in ghettos. Kids that can read will be in charge, mostly managing functional idiots who can’t even watch an entire TikTok short. It will be a huge underclass that will be too dumb to riot.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 79.1 ms ] threadWhat you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.
https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.
I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.
I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.
It's NOT the schools. They are well funded and as you say, pretty helpless because teachers, even younger ones, just aren't able to deal with kids whose parents shoved a smartphone into their hands at age 3.
It's NOT the parents - in order to keep up with the jonses in those towns, you have to work like a dog and most likely, both parents are in high stress demanding environments in order to make enough to live there. I was fortunate that my dad did quite well for our family, but there's no way I could raise a kid in that environment.
It's the fucking devices, and the drive to put tech everywhere in the classroom. When I was a kid we had a single Mac in the classroom (besides the teacher's computer), mainly to dick around with Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, or some typing app. We wanted to play games? We went outside and played sports, or stayed inside and played games like scrabble or chess.
In high school we had to do genuine research 15-20+ page papers as early as Sophomore year. There was zero Wikipedia, much less ChatGPT or Claude.
Of course, a book, which requires attention, effort, and has no distractions, is not going to capture the attention and imagination of someone who has had the world and all of its distractions at their fingertips since they gained consciousness, and weren't made to socialize without devices.
And no, we cannot allow people to pass to the next grade without mastering the skills required of their current grade. This needs to be completely iron clad and not up for debate. I was nearly held back 3-4 times. I am an idiot. I was miles ahead of where elementary school and middle school kids are today. I don't care if a wealthy Ivy grad and his management consultant wife donate a bunch of money to make sure their kid can pass - if their kid can't read or write, their kid can't pass.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
It's the damn phone.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.
Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.
While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.
The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.
They sound deprived, why haven't you got them a bike if you're complaining about screen time?
> It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
You sound like you're convincing yourself here.
It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.
Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).
That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.
0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/