Hot Topic's "You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're all the same" shirt sold in every mall across America in the late 90s has always been my favorite.
> One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma's coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead...
Rage Against the Machine was signed to Sony. Did it make their song “Killing in the Name Of” less valid or consequential? Sometimes usurping dominant mindsets can benefit from using the very channels in which they are delivered.
Then again this may be over your head as a concept.
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.
The awareness is nice, but the friction is still there. So much energy goes into discussions about screen use, it's a real drain on the relation with my kids I feel.
It's important to be clear and set boundaries, but there is always that one friend where they go to and just watch YT shorts until deep in the night falling asleep like a zombie. Moreover, my kid is often the only one with a locked phone (gets 2 hr a day which is also the time he is on the bus). I think it is already insanely much. But he still wants to plays Minecraft as soon as he comes home, this is also quite obsessively (he's in a lot of SMPs). Again it's nice he has a passion but too bad it's for a screen. My daughter in contrast can just play in the garden for hours.
Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.
My eldest kids are allowed 2 hours of screen time on the weekends. Zero during weekdays. No phones, only tablets and computers. No social media allowed.
Most of their peers seem to have unlimited or at least plentiful screen time, and often use their phones at bus stops and things like that so the friction you mention comes up. "It's not fair. Jane has a YouTube account and Instagram!" -- to which I mentally reply "tough shit" but verbally provide more polite answers.
But I've got a younger one not yet in school, who is strictly limited to things like sesame street under supervision. I've noticed other daycare parents are similar as strict with screen time, with similar opinions about social media, something that wasn't the case with my older kids.
> Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.
Definitely. We have similar, although have never given the kids portable screen devices (well, they had a tablet in the house and it was still too much, so we took it away). There are our phones, which they can rarely use and only for specific tasks like "play music on the speaker" or "do fantasy football", and there's a game console with a PIN, and there's a TV with a PIN. So everything requires us to do something, and uninstall games is on the table as a severe consequence. The only autonomous device is a Yoto, which is a card-based story playing device.
It's not perfect, but they definitely want screens less than they used to.
There is definitely the trend of "allow more, they whine about it more".
At some point they're very absorbed indeed. Being stricter is harder at first but certainly becomes easier than them feeling they always have the option to maybe get screen-time (when it's maybe they strongly feel that whining may win them something, of course that has been the struggle of raining kids since forever), imho.
I recognize this too. There must be a correlation between the parents' level of education and the screen time the children have. Would be an interesting study.
I‘d wager that the correlation is with how exhausting the parent‘s job is. Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy. After working a hard job, running a household and worrying about whether you run out of money before the next paycheck I can imagine that many parents just don’t have the mental resources.
> Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy.
It could also be that the parent wants to be on their screen at the same time, or wants to be on Instagram later into the night. There will be some correlation with work, but I doubt that explains most of it.
From a parents perspective, I feel you are incorrect.
Almost every other parent I speak to are well aware of how detrimental screen time is to their kids, and yet often still use devices when they're too tired for much else.
I don't know what you think unemployment looks like, but for most people it's incredibly stressful and not a time when you can just sit on your ass and watch TV all day. The benefits, if you manage to secure them - are barely enough to get by.
Someone who is unemployed, especially if they’re poor, doesn’t suddenly have a lot of free time and headspace. On the contrary, they just got more stressed and pay even less attention since now they have yet another urgent issue weighting on their mind.
We got my daughter a Yoto and it's a great device. She sticks a card in and it plays music or an audiobook. There's a "screen" but it's a low resolution pixel grid that shows pixel art of the current track.
We use luuni which is similar (except that it also enable choose your own story with audiobooks). Even then, we limit it because otherwise he would want to listen to it every time before sleeping (and it prevents him from sleeping)
I see small children in strollers (prams?) with devices in front of them every day on public transport, sometimes as little as a few months old. Breaks my heart.
Not to mention that basically everybody around them disappears into screens on trains/buses. It’s emotional abandonment. We are not here any more.
When I make eye contact, the children light up. But the parents often don’t seem to like random strangers to make contact with their child like that. That I have to avoid or break up contact that the child themselves obviously enjoys, while their caretakers disappear into screens, then breaks my heart a second time.
We have over 100 years of developmental psychology research to know that this is bad. Worse than bad.
> "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?
Kids like repetition in their media. They often ask to watch the same movie for days/weeks on end, or read the same story every night, or the same story. And if you don't tell it the same way they remind you...
Suffice it to say, repetition isn't the same frustration that it can be for adults
During development, children are in a condition where their fears are predominant. The world is big and scary and they need conditions and support to begin to process their emotions, all of them, into what I consider a “rainbow.” Each should be adjacent to another, as life is best lived with access to and the benefit of each when appropriate circumstances call them from their “library” so to speak.
It’s not “forcing” a child to sit through it, as much as it is “presenting” them with an outside work of art which REFLECTS BACK TO THEM a validation of their experience along different stages of development.
One of the best examples of what I’m talking about is the book “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. It is canon. Perhaps you had shitty parents who didn’t “make you” engage with literature.
An interviewer once asked him “Don’t you think the book is too scary for kids?” His reply lambasted the question with “What is wrong with you? Were you never a child? EVERYTHING IS SCARY TO A CHILD.”
So, there it is buckaroo. You may not like the tone of my response, but I think your question was phrased in a flippant and pedantic manner to begin with. Fire, meet fire, and you’re welcome.
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.
I think that it's been happening for a while. Movies in the 70s and 60s tended to have more pause in the dialogue, more silence than movies in early 2000s.
Take a movie like the Godfather, it had a 8.4 seconds average shot length compared to the Departed 3 second average shot length.
I've noticed my parents no longer having the patience for movies with longer average shot length despite having been young during the era when movies were less fast paced.
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)
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.
But here is the thing: lots of parents (or people in general) are not able to use common sense and they need to be told absolute statements, because they will break them anyway, just like speed limits. So if you told them "absolutely 0 screen time" they will give them anyway some here and there screen time - which is fine. If the "expert" writing books, speaking on podcast or showing up in reels tells you "ah it's fine, here and there is fine, just use common sense" you will have an army of parents thinking that 2 hours YT for a toddler is "here and there" because "hey, it's not 6 hours a day like my neighbor!"
Yup, the advice is geared towards being very conservative, rather than lenient. An example I like to give people is that here in Wisconsin, drinking culture is huge. A friend of mine's father had pancreatic cancer and went to see his doc and wasn't given too much time to live. He was a big fan of having a nice glass of scotch with his fish fry, so he asked if it was still okay to have it, especially with how much time he was given. The doctor was like: "I have to tell you no, it's not okay. But the reason why is because if I tell my other patients that they can have a drink on "special occasions", well, suddenly, Monday becomes a special occasion, and Tuesday becomes a special occasion, and you see where this is going."
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?
Screens aren't inherently bad. It's about the quality. I think your instincts are 100% spot on, keep trusting them.
But quality/distractions aside, there are other dimensions to consider. For example, reading does take more effort than most videogames, and that's brain exercise that will make a difference in aggregate (the assumption being that books and videogames are both entertainment, they compete against each other to some degree, and doing a lot of one means you'll do less of the other). So in short, playing videogames a lot isn't bad in itself, depends on the videogames. But on the other hand books have additional positive sideffects on top of the primary effect which is entertainment.
They definitely compete, but reading is somewhat of a "poor hobby" from the social aspect (reading out loud takes away from the experience), but the imagination part of reading is way more than you do in videogames.
At the same time, the "puzzle solving" skill you do in videogames is way more than you'd do in a book, so there is that.
I played Blue Prince with my wife and daughter recently, I think I have 40 pages of notebook written down, along with spy-like photos of everything relevant in the game: that was very intense from the brain perspective.
But I do see your point.
However, I second guess myself constantly, it's really hard, especially because I did go through some form of game addiction and my way out was going very deep until I realized I wasn't even having fun (yes, mmorpg are similar to free-to-play games: compete for your attention).
I push strongly for single-player pay-once videogames, especially indie games, on consoles and PC. Split-screen coop games without online component are great too, or where the online component is a way to "split screen with people not in your home".
Anyway, thank you for the message, gave me some relief I'm not ruining my kids life, lol.
Lots of kids aren't spending 2 hours a day on a tablet/phone, they spend every waking minute on a tablet/phone. When you see someone walking and scrolling on their phone, you can already tell that they do not turn it off, ever.
> 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".
I don't think screen free kids won't miss anything by not watching Bluey for 20 mins, OTOH not so great parents will keep pushing those 20 mins further and further with worse and worse content, so I guess it's just easier to say any screen time is bad since the border between reasonable/good screen time and bad screen time is very small.
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.
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...
Don’t give kids YouTube access. More curated platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime at least filter out the worst dreck.
I find German public tv (I live in Germany) actually has relatively high quality programming for kids. I rather have my kids watch TV than streaming (when they’re allowed screen time), we bought a TV after almost 20 years of not having one.
> I find German public tv (I live in Germany) actually has relatively high quality programming for kids.
Die Sendung mit der Maus! I haven't watched it much, but as an Australian trying to learn German, I remember finding it a useful show. That, and I appreciate it being referenced in the Eisbrecher industrial metal song "This Is Deutsch".
Can you name something worthy from German public TV? Imho it’s too political with greenwashing and other shit I don’t want at home. We had a discussion at home for whole week after Checker Tobi complaining about deforestation in Brazil. Germans want to know it better for the whole world while their home country is not performing well at all. The quality is good, but the content should be curated better.
KiKA is the program for children, it only runs (at least as far as I recall) during hours which kids should be awake anyway, and ends in the evening with some silly programming.
Germany is very political, and very "green" in its programming, everywhere. People have an acute awareness of the impact their actions have on the planet, and the ability to vote and cause change.
This might be quite foreign to foreigners (lol) especially from countries where voting makes no actual difference, but since we have so many political parties, so much choice, and your various elections actually make a meaningful difference, its good for kids to get involved and be aware early on.
If your kids' show talks about deforestation in Brazil, I don't see the issue with that. You can give your kids a balanced viewpoint by discussing other arguments, and teach them that way. It's not a bad thing to teach kids that things said on TV might not always tell the full story, and this seems like a harmless way to do that.
Only without intervention does TV indoctrinate. With intervention, such as discussions at dinner about current political topics, at least in families that aren't extreme/radical, discussions should yield pretty reasonable, varied results.
That is not greenwashing. Germany and Norway are the largest supporters of anti-deforestation programs in Brazil, because there is not much they can do domestically, and it aligns with conservation goals. It is a real issue when you’re losing thousands of square km of forest every year to cattle farming and soy exports.
Nothing wrong in making kids aware that we have a duty as a species to preserve nature, and that this type of collaboration can happen across borders.
I find the opposite to be true. It’s easier to curate YouTube than it is to vet Prime or Netflix because YouTube’s algorithm keeps recommendations pretty tight to what is currently being watched. If you seed it with benign enough content, it’s hard for your kid to get to the good stuff without effort that they may not know to apply.
A devil with a giant bare ass flinging pork butts and taters with a catapult to an anthromorphised cow and a chicken, whose parents are only pairs of legs.
Disney, here to save kids from screens.
Reminds me of when I saw a bunch of tshirts with the word "PUNK" written on them displayed in a window in a mall.
Hot Topic's "You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're all the same" shirt sold in every mall across America in the late 90s has always been my favorite.
Che Guevaras Image used to be the most widely sold T-shirt print (or maybe still is?)
Why would I extend the creative energy to figure out how to look punk when I can get the shirt for just $49.99
Only $49.99?! I missed the sale!
> Disney
in this context, 'Disney' represents a plurality, and it's likely that there's people at Disney that want their kids off screens
> One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma's coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead...
Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium.
Or how the Ramones sold more t-shirts than albums.
Between popularizing the perfecto jacket from Schott and “rock and roll high school” the ramones were 10/10
I remember when Pixar created a virtual skinner box.
which one?
Rage Against the Machine was signed to Sony. Did it make their song “Killing in the Name Of” less valid or consequential? Sometimes usurping dominant mindsets can benefit from using the very channels in which they are delivered.
Then again this may be over your head as a concept.
That last sentence was unnecessary.
I think it would have been slightly more valid if they were independent, yes.
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.
The awareness is nice, but the friction is still there. So much energy goes into discussions about screen use, it's a real drain on the relation with my kids I feel.
It's important to be clear and set boundaries, but there is always that one friend where they go to and just watch YT shorts until deep in the night falling asleep like a zombie. Moreover, my kid is often the only one with a locked phone (gets 2 hr a day which is also the time he is on the bus). I think it is already insanely much. But he still wants to plays Minecraft as soon as he comes home, this is also quite obsessively (he's in a lot of SMPs). Again it's nice he has a passion but too bad it's for a screen. My daughter in contrast can just play in the garden for hours.
Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.
My eldest kids are allowed 2 hours of screen time on the weekends. Zero during weekdays. No phones, only tablets and computers. No social media allowed.
Most of their peers seem to have unlimited or at least plentiful screen time, and often use their phones at bus stops and things like that so the friction you mention comes up. "It's not fair. Jane has a YouTube account and Instagram!" -- to which I mentally reply "tough shit" but verbally provide more polite answers.
But I've got a younger one not yet in school, who is strictly limited to things like sesame street under supervision. I've noticed other daycare parents are similar as strict with screen time, with similar opinions about social media, something that wasn't the case with my older kids.
I find that change refreshing.
> Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.
Definitely. We have similar, although have never given the kids portable screen devices (well, they had a tablet in the house and it was still too much, so we took it away). There are our phones, which they can rarely use and only for specific tasks like "play music on the speaker" or "do fantasy football", and there's a game console with a PIN, and there's a TV with a PIN. So everything requires us to do something, and uninstall games is on the table as a severe consequence. The only autonomous device is a Yoto, which is a card-based story playing device.
It's not perfect, but they definitely want screens less than they used to.
There is definitely the trend of "allow more, they whine about it more".
At some point they're very absorbed indeed. Being stricter is harder at first but certainly becomes easier than them feeling they always have the option to maybe get screen-time (when it's maybe they strongly feel that whining may win them something, of course that has been the struggle of raining kids since forever), imho.
I think it’s a class divided too- (financially) poor parents give their kids their phone but richer/more educated parents don’t.
I recognize this too. There must be a correlation between the parents' level of education and the screen time the children have. Would be an interesting study.
I‘d wager that the correlation is with how exhausting the parent‘s job is. Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy. After working a hard job, running a household and worrying about whether you run out of money before the next paycheck I can imagine that many parents just don’t have the mental resources.
> Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy.
It could also be that the parent wants to be on their screen at the same time, or wants to be on Instagram later into the night. There will be some correlation with work, but I doubt that explains most of it.
If that was true you would see unemployed parents being best at keeping their children from the screens. It is awareness, i am pretty sure about this.
From a parents perspective, I feel you are incorrect.
Almost every other parent I speak to are well aware of how detrimental screen time is to their kids, and yet often still use devices when they're too tired for much else.
This is consistent with the very old topic of television as babysitter
I don't know what you think unemployment looks like, but for most people it's incredibly stressful and not a time when you can just sit on your ass and watch TV all day. The benefits, if you manage to secure them - are barely enough to get by.
Someone who is unemployed, especially if they’re poor, doesn’t suddenly have a lot of free time and headspace. On the contrary, they just got more stressed and pay even less attention since now they have yet another urgent issue weighting on their mind.
We got my daughter a Yoto and it's a great device. She sticks a card in and it plays music or an audiobook. There's a "screen" but it's a low resolution pixel grid that shows pixel art of the current track.
We use luuni which is similar (except that it also enable choose your own story with audiobooks). Even then, we limit it because otherwise he would want to listen to it every time before sleeping (and it prevents him from sleeping)
3 years old is very, very young as a "no-phone barrier".
True for children under 3, however I see plenty of 8-9 years old glued to their tablet in restaurants.
I see small children in strollers (prams?) with devices in front of them every day on public transport, sometimes as little as a few months old. Breaks my heart.
Not to mention that basically everybody around them disappears into screens on trains/buses. It’s emotional abandonment. We are not here any more.
When I make eye contact, the children light up. But the parents often don’t seem to like random strangers to make contact with their child like that. That I have to avoid or break up contact that the child themselves obviously enjoys, while their caretakers disappear into screens, then breaks my heart a second time.
We have over 100 years of developmental psychology research to know that this is bad. Worse than bad.
Typing this on public transport.
> "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?
Kids like repetition in their media. They often ask to watch the same movie for days/weeks on end, or read the same story every night, or the same story. And if you don't tell it the same way they remind you...
Suffice it to say, repetition isn't the same frustration that it can be for adults
Answer:
During development, children are in a condition where their fears are predominant. The world is big and scary and they need conditions and support to begin to process their emotions, all of them, into what I consider a “rainbow.” Each should be adjacent to another, as life is best lived with access to and the benefit of each when appropriate circumstances call them from their “library” so to speak.
It’s not “forcing” a child to sit through it, as much as it is “presenting” them with an outside work of art which REFLECTS BACK TO THEM a validation of their experience along different stages of development.
One of the best examples of what I’m talking about is the book “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. It is canon. Perhaps you had shitty parents who didn’t “make you” engage with literature.
An interviewer once asked him “Don’t you think the book is too scary for kids?” His reply lambasted the question with “What is wrong with you? Were you never a child? EVERYTHING IS SCARY TO A CHILD.”
So, there it is buckaroo. You may not like the tone of my response, but I think your question was phrased in a flippant and pedantic manner to begin with. Fire, meet fire, and you’re welcome.
I don't think everything's scary to a child. I think the scary things are. Lots of things are fun and play.
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.
I think that it's been happening for a while. Movies in the 70s and 60s tended to have more pause in the dialogue, more silence than movies in early 2000s.
Take a movie like the Godfather, it had a 8.4 seconds average shot length compared to the Departed 3 second average shot length.
I've noticed my parents no longer having the patience for movies with longer average shot length despite having been young during the era when movies were less fast paced.
[1] https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/movie/2732f3f8-f0d4-43f7-a0...
[2] https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/movie/9d17ce68-0d48-45cc-89...
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)
Star Trek did it decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
The next step in my fight against screen addiction is to have my children not watch Toy Story 5.
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.
Obviously, it is common sense.
But here is the thing: lots of parents (or people in general) are not able to use common sense and they need to be told absolute statements, because they will break them anyway, just like speed limits. So if you told them "absolutely 0 screen time" they will give them anyway some here and there screen time - which is fine. If the "expert" writing books, speaking on podcast or showing up in reels tells you "ah it's fine, here and there is fine, just use common sense" you will have an army of parents thinking that 2 hours YT for a toddler is "here and there" because "hey, it's not 6 hours a day like my neighbor!"
Yup, the advice is geared towards being very conservative, rather than lenient. An example I like to give people is that here in Wisconsin, drinking culture is huge. A friend of mine's father had pancreatic cancer and went to see his doc and wasn't given too much time to live. He was a big fan of having a nice glass of scotch with his fish fry, so he asked if it was still okay to have it, especially with how much time he was given. The doctor was like: "I have to tell you no, it's not okay. But the reason why is because if I tell my other patients that they can have a drink on "special occasions", well, suddenly, Monday becomes a special occasion, and Tuesday becomes a special occasion, and you see where this is going."
I don't think when people say "terror of screen time" they mean 20 minutes of Bluey here and there.
20 minutes of screen time daily is extreme parenting effort. That’s olympic level. I would say the new normal is 20 minutes after each meal.
Yeah I think even 2 hours is an underestimate these days.
According to a few viral Instagram posts it is.
I am conflicted (I am a parent).
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?
Screens aren't inherently bad. It's about the quality. I think your instincts are 100% spot on, keep trusting them.
But quality/distractions aside, there are other dimensions to consider. For example, reading does take more effort than most videogames, and that's brain exercise that will make a difference in aggregate (the assumption being that books and videogames are both entertainment, they compete against each other to some degree, and doing a lot of one means you'll do less of the other). So in short, playing videogames a lot isn't bad in itself, depends on the videogames. But on the other hand books have additional positive sideffects on top of the primary effect which is entertainment.
They definitely compete, but reading is somewhat of a "poor hobby" from the social aspect (reading out loud takes away from the experience), but the imagination part of reading is way more than you do in videogames.
At the same time, the "puzzle solving" skill you do in videogames is way more than you'd do in a book, so there is that.
I played Blue Prince with my wife and daughter recently, I think I have 40 pages of notebook written down, along with spy-like photos of everything relevant in the game: that was very intense from the brain perspective.
But I do see your point. However, I second guess myself constantly, it's really hard, especially because I did go through some form of game addiction and my way out was going very deep until I realized I wasn't even having fun (yes, mmorpg are similar to free-to-play games: compete for your attention). I push strongly for single-player pay-once videogames, especially indie games, on consoles and PC. Split-screen coop games without online component are great too, or where the online component is a way to "split screen with people not in your home".
Anyway, thank you for the message, gave me some relief I'm not ruining my kids life, lol.
2 hours? you don't know how bad it is out there my friend.
"That's how I was raised, and I turned out TV!"
- Homer Simpson
Lots of kids aren't spending 2 hours a day on a tablet/phone, they spend every waking minute on a tablet/phone. When you see someone walking and scrolling on their phone, you can already tell that they do not turn it off, ever.
Screen Time isn't the Devil - but it represents the hellish front-line in the algorithmically driven war for your attention.
> 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".
better be safe than sorry
I don't think screen free kids won't miss anything by not watching Bluey for 20 mins, OTOH not so great parents will keep pushing those 20 mins further and further with worse and worse content, so I guess it's just easier to say any screen time is bad since the border between reasonable/good screen time and bad screen time is very small.
From Disney? Retirement time Tommy.
Whoever thinks Disney/Hollywood cares even a little bit about children is delusional.
Obligatory link to Ricky Gervais roast at the Golden Globes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgson2Q3nog
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'd be cautious to dismiss addiction as bad parenting. In many cases its a disease, and not as simple as just coaching or disciplining it away.
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...
Don’t give kids YouTube access. More curated platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime at least filter out the worst dreck.
I find German public tv (I live in Germany) actually has relatively high quality programming for kids. I rather have my kids watch TV than streaming (when they’re allowed screen time), we bought a TV after almost 20 years of not having one.
> I find German public tv (I live in Germany) actually has relatively high quality programming for kids.
Die Sendung mit der Maus! I haven't watched it much, but as an Australian trying to learn German, I remember finding it a useful show. That, and I appreciate it being referenced in the Eisbrecher industrial metal song "This Is Deutsch".
Can you name something worthy from German public TV? Imho it’s too political with greenwashing and other shit I don’t want at home. We had a discussion at home for whole week after Checker Tobi complaining about deforestation in Brazil. Germans want to know it better for the whole world while their home country is not performing well at all. The quality is good, but the content should be curated better.
KiKA is the program for children, it only runs (at least as far as I recall) during hours which kids should be awake anyway, and ends in the evening with some silly programming.
Germany is very political, and very "green" in its programming, everywhere. People have an acute awareness of the impact their actions have on the planet, and the ability to vote and cause change.
This might be quite foreign to foreigners (lol) especially from countries where voting makes no actual difference, but since we have so many political parties, so much choice, and your various elections actually make a meaningful difference, its good for kids to get involved and be aware early on.
If your kids' show talks about deforestation in Brazil, I don't see the issue with that. You can give your kids a balanced viewpoint by discussing other arguments, and teach them that way. It's not a bad thing to teach kids that things said on TV might not always tell the full story, and this seems like a harmless way to do that.
Only without intervention does TV indoctrinate. With intervention, such as discussions at dinner about current political topics, at least in families that aren't extreme/radical, discussions should yield pretty reasonable, varied results.
That is not greenwashing. Germany and Norway are the largest supporters of anti-deforestation programs in Brazil, because there is not much they can do domestically, and it aligns with conservation goals. It is a real issue when you’re losing thousands of square km of forest every year to cattle farming and soy exports.
Nothing wrong in making kids aware that we have a duty as a species to preserve nature, and that this type of collaboration can happen across borders.
Phoenix often has kid-appropriate documentaries, and sometimes ARD and ZDF. Phoenix is the channel they watch the most, by far.
I find the opposite to be true. It’s easier to curate YouTube than it is to vet Prime or Netflix because YouTube’s algorithm keeps recommendations pretty tight to what is currently being watched. If you seed it with benign enough content, it’s hard for your kid to get to the good stuff without effort that they may not know to apply.
Maybe screen time should be limited to such a degree that a parent picks what to watch, not a recommendation engine.
So called "potty humour" aka "poop," has never been funny. What they want is for us to see excrement and giggle. That’s the rule, that’s the goal now.
From the broadcaster that brought Bluey to life (ABC Australian Kids TV) comes the answer ..
Pull Your Pants Up Mr Butt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8X_cR0RbSk
Who is "they"? Rabelais? Mozart? Alas many of us humans DO find poop to be funny, forgive us fallen shit stained beings.
I'm more of a comedic vomiting guy myself, e.g. "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs"
I mean, really, what’s funnier than a monkey flinging poop?
A devil with a giant bare ass flinging pork butts and taters with a catapult to an anthromorphised cow and a chicken, whose parents are only pairs of legs.
For my son poop is literally the funniest thing ever and he never watched YouTube.
Who are “they”? Does this potty humor conspiracy go straight to the top?
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