You should see the way young children use YouTube if you doubt that it is addictive.
I watched my nephews, for 20 minutes, simply throw blocks into a box and say "throw and a miss! Throw and a hit!" It was mindless and ritualistic, and frankly we should frightened of this wooden blocks trend. Don't get me started on the game they call "Tag". /s
I feel like the word "addiction" is losing it's meaning. Just because someone likes something and continues to do it doesn't mean that it's an addiction.
// edit: And really, think about your own experience with video games. Sure, we all played video games at the expense of our homework and conversation with my parents. But who could blame me? Middle & high school cater to the students with room-temp IQs, my parents just rambled about the economy and weather and the boring things I talk about now, and I lacked any challenge in my life expect punking noobs in Starcraft.
It's less the homework and more your ability to interact with your neighbor without a reward.
Kids really might stay up all night playing with "addictive" wooden blocks. They might spend 10+ hours a day with the blocks. They may have violent mood swings when you take the blocks away.
But wooden blocks...suck. The types of entertainment kids have had access to in the past is nothing like what they will have access to in the future.
When I was 6-10, I had an unhealthy relationship with comic books. I stole them. I read them to the detriment of education. My parents just had to manage my addiction, because beating it was impossible. And these were just ultimately just crappy drawings on crappier paper.
When my child is 6-10, he will be able to put on a VR Headset and actually BE a comic book superhero. If children can be overwhelmed by a wooden blocks obsession, how the fuck are they supposed to incorporate the type of stimulus into their lives we are now building for them?
If we're at a point where we consider hours of toy unboxing videos and watching adults play with toys on a little screen developmentally equivalent to hours of playing with physical objects or reading comic books, I guess I give up on this whole humanity experiment.
I think that if the games are structured correctly they can be pro-social. I've been playing PUBG and I've made a handful of friends by joining a squad where I only know one person, and meeting the other people, and then next time I see them on Discord saying hello.
I suppose the other parenting fear is that kids who are addicted to amazing games/VR/youtube won't have the drive to accomplish things in life? I think that games can, to some extent, teach and reward goal-setting. I bait-and-switched Youtube for Games in my previous comment, and I am concerned with kids who watch TV for multiple hours a day, so... the youtube/toddler criticism from kodt may be pretty on-point.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a little boredom in a kid's life is important for character development :-/
Fast forward a few decades and I've found a nice niche in hardware supply chain. I think play that becomes an obsession can indeed have healthy effects that aren't immediately apparent at the time, but I share your skepticism about YouTube.
Now our sugar is being upgraded to crack-cocaine. The Amish are always going to be wrong, until they are right.
I work in Las Vegas, where we had to put VERY strict rules on the gaming industry to prevent them from absolutely destroying large chunks of the population (more than they already do). I'm sure that someday our government will have to step in and protect the vulnerable in our society from the Candy Crush of the next decade.
Yes, it is addictive, but not in the same manipulative way that Facebook is.