Not all "screen time" is created equal

boing
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And if you move the cursor a little bit over you see that the states with the dots are not necessarily the ones with the lowest vaccination rates. For example, California has (had) 93% MMR rates, while dotless Utah was at 88.7%

This is mostly a phenomenon of upper middle class on up, whites, and the impacts are clustered heavily in cities. Often times most heavily in cities with big tech businesses .

Of course the impacts are where people are clustered together; that doesn’t say anything about the vaccination rates.

Since you don’t like my sources, here’s a CDC report which makes it clear that vaccination rates increase with income, and are higher in or near cities than outside them:

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I guess this is part of the article’s point in an indirect way, but “screen time” is an asinine term that should go extinct as quickly as possible. Screens are simply a delivery device, no different than paper. Limiting time on a phone, computer or tablet based on the technology involved rather than the content is absolutely a moral panic. It’s the equivalent of banning your child from the library because you don’t think a handful of the books inside are appropriate for them. It’s a lazy solution for parents who can’t be bothered to communicate with their children and provide guidance, explanation and encouragement.

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I agree with that. Tech-aware parents are more nuanced about these things and pay more attention to the activity than to the device that’s delivering it. From what I’ve seen and heard, their focus on “screen time” per se is more time/place based (e.g. “no screens at the dinner table”, “no screens – except e-ink ones – right before bed”, etc.).

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At five, our daughter barely sees a tablet screen. She loves books, exploring outdoors, singing, dancing, playing tabletop games as well as on the playground. I hear over and over from engineers and makers that coding right now isn’t necessary. Learning to think creatively and stay curious is.

All the kid coding apps and tablet programs in the world aren’t nearly as potent as meat-space learning and exploring. They’re cool and nice and all, but I’ve yet to hear a single argument why I need my kid on a tablet.

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On the one hand, I agree. My son and daughter occasionally have minecraft sessions with their friends where they are as interactive with each other as if they were playing a board game.

This, I disagree with. If you are at school or with peers and being bullied, you can always go somewhere else, or just go home. But, if you’re being bullied online, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to go (unless you just don’t go online, but that just ostracizes you even further). When you have kids chatting online, unless you (as a parent) put severe restrictions on their screen use, their “giggling and passing notes” bleeds into every aspect of their lives without escape.

My son is 11 years old, and we are waiting as long as possible to give him access to social media, because I know how damaging it can be for kids who aren’t prepared for it.

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From my experience, it is entirely age-based. The most important thing is to foster the child’s love of learning and exploration. At 5, the only reason to put a kid on a tablet is for your own sanity. Now, at ages 9 and 11 y kids are getting much more screen time (online classes with live teachers, kahn academy, chess, Kurzgesagt, and some games), but NO social media.

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In addition to noting that not all screen time is the same, I think it’s worth noting that kids are individuals.

Too much of this conversation is taken up by the idea that screens are somehow magic, or that app designers have mind control rays.

My family has a 20 minutes-per-sitting rule for the tablet. We set a timer with an audible alarm. When the alarm goes off, the conversation with my 7-year-old goes like this:

Me: That’s the alarm, tablet time is up.
7 [agitated]: I’m almost finished!
Me: I know you’re responsible and you know your time is up, you’ll finish up in the next minute or two.

Then 7 does stop playing in a minute or two and everything is fine. The app designers and advertisers, for all of their efforts, don’t have control of 7s body or mind. And in case that makes you think, “Wow, not all kids have that kind of control,” you haven’t met my kid. They have tremendous emotional regulation problems and I dread nearly any activity that will get them excited (don’t worry, we’ve got a play therapist, we’ve taken courses, we’ve been to see psychiatrists and things are gradually getting better).

So this stuff that is supposedly extremely addictive is one of the few things that I can count on my kid to be completely responsible about.

This is just an anecdote, and someone might be tempted to say, “Not all kids are like that.” But that is exactly my point. A therapist once said to me, in discussing whether a public figure had a drinking problem, “You have a drinking problem if your drinking is causing you problems.” If your kid’s video game playing, or social media usage, or youtube watching is causing them or your family problems then you need to change your approach to parenting your child to account for who they are.

Adapting society-level correlations from conflicting psychological studies to universal parenting advice is mind-boggling.

Anyone who is convinced the devil lives in their phone has never seen an LOL Surprise doll. The same techniques that the people in silicon valley use to try to manipulate people into using apps are being used to sell toys and food, to get kids to do schoolwork, and all other aspects of their lives. The devil these people are worried about is not confined to the phone.

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That goes without saying. I posted those articles to point out that the people who invent and market these technologies in general make a point of not letting their own kids “get high on their own supply.”

No-one’s offering universal parenting advice, except to suggest exactly the kind of mindful parenting when it comes to technology that you yourself engage in.

I’m no Luddite myself and appreciate the benefits of technology. However, I’ve been in the tech business long enough* to know that dark-pattern design is currently being targetted at kids via all sorts of digital vectors – all in the service of concentrating wealth ever-upwards to an ever-smaller group. Technology is a tool that’s enabling this much larger problem.

[* including a stint in educational technology during Dotcom 1.0]

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I hope that my quoting of the byline from one of your links at the end of my post didn’t make you feel like I was going off on you. The post was going off on my experience with parenting advice and the way that parents discuss “screen time.” Many of the parents I know seem to think it’s very important to limit screen time to far less than the amount of TV they watched as kids. At the same time, I know parents who have had very serious problems with their kids reading books - the kinds of problems people associate with playing video games: staying up until 3 or 4 AM, reading instead of eating, reading instead of getting ready for school, etc. But somehow they feel paralyzed by that - they can’t take action to deal with reading because reading is good.

I’d just like to see parenting advice being more focused on children as individuals and less focused on what feels a lot like virtue signalling to me.

What I was trying to say was that that is also going on outside of digital vectors. I referenced LOL Surprise dolls because they strike me as malign. They are a physical toy, not an app, but they seem to be fairly successfully designed to be less something you play with and more something you want another one of.

I think people need to be mindful of the manipulation and how it works and how they can help kids navigate it, and less focused on specific vectors or instances of it.

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