The risk to children of tech over-use | Hacker News Reader

The risk to children of tech over-use

uk.businessinsider.com

63 pointscmsefton55 comments

I wouldn't say the problem is tech overuse; more specifically it is internet overuse. Offline is fine, in fact many probably many people have fond memories of tinkering with computers when they were younger, and many even became programmers or similar because of playing with computers when they were young. It is often a very stimulating activity.

However the internet is a completely different beast. Some thought must be had about whether it is desirable for children to have unfettered access to a medium that puts them in touch with anyone in the world, and most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff.

New technology isn't automatically good because it's new technology. We must have these debates.

> most importantly in the net of today, puts them in the targets of hyper-optimized manipulation and advertisement campaigns, and websites and services designed to manipulate your psyche no matter the side effects (e.g. depression from using social media), in order to get you to buy more stuff

I think this is the bulk of the problem. There's nothing in the technology to say that that a website or game must bend over backwards with "engagement" bullshit and microtransaction teases instead of just being a good reading/playing experience. It's a socioeconomic and cultural problem, and blaming the technology isn't going to solve any of it.

The problem is that internet advertising as a model for 99% of companies (Facebook, Google, and a handful of others making it work being the exceptions) is fundamentally broken. When you're a media company you fundamentally trade on people's attention and advertisers pay you to get a piece. You can do that with great content, or with dark patterns and manipulation. Usually its some combination of both. Regardless the vast majority of the web needs a new business model, but I'm not sure what the answer is.

It's capitalist incentives. If the name of the game is maximizing profits, and this is the way to do it, then everything else be damned. The current state of the internet is a direct consequence of the current system of economic incentives.

I think you are right; I grew up in the end 70s/begin 80s with most of my time (from a young age) and most my friends their time tinkering with electronics and computers ; it made people happy. Programming and soldering made us always have something to do, always keeping our minds busy and creative. I think the internet added pressure in every way to that; everything is a performance, everything is compared and everything can have a longlasting effect.

I cannot imagine this kind of connectivity being good for people (young or old) who are not immune to the possible effects. And children can hardly be expected to be immune yet and they might never be.

The big problem in my mind is cutting kids off from their peers. If I kick my son off his gaming laptop, he will be cut off from socializing with his friends. For better or worse, they all hang out and chat while gaming. Sure I would love it if they were all out riding bikes, but alas.

Same with my daughter. If I take away her phone, she becomes isolated from her peers because sadly they mostly communicate through Snapchat.

Even other things they might do like sports ends up creating electronic baggage. My daughter plays soccer, so she ends up talking about things said on the soccer team group chat.

I have basically lost the fight and so have all the other parents of teens I know. I now dread weekends and holidays because I know my kids will be on screens continuously and the arguments to derail them are even more damaging to home life.

There are a few local kids who are mostly gadget free due to parental control...and I predict they will fail out of college because once they are away from home, they will gorge on screens and ignore school.

Every enlightened, educated parent I know who set about controlling tech has failed miserably.

We approached this by punishing with Parental Controls rather than taking the phone away wholesale - at least for minor to middling transgressions.

I wrote my response previously. See link.

https://twitter.com/DnsLearningOrg/status/919058340168306688

Referenced time line.. https://dnslearning.org/img/myTimeline.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547

There's a lot of social pressure for high tech parents to appear as if they limit their children's technology use. Parents are not particularly forthcoming about their children's technology use. I suspect that many parents don't actually know how many hours a day their children are interacting with technology.

Perhaps this story about Bill Gates is being spun a bit to serve a particular goal? For example, here's a picture of Bill Gates' son with a mobile phone.[1] He says his child didn't "receive" a phone until he was 13. That doesn't mean he didn't "use" one.

"Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'.

He admitted that monitoring online activity is 'a very tricky issue for parents now.'

Also, Can anyone link to the original study referenced here? I can't seem to find it.

"Research has found that an eighth-grader's risk for depression jumps 27% when he or she frequently uses social media. " Googling leads me back to a bunch of other pages, with no references.

Here is an alternative take on Jean Twenge's thesis with some criticism of her conclusions [2]

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2270869/Bill-Gates...

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/20170...

> "Asked if he keeps passwords to his son and daughters' email and Facebook accounts, Mr Gates said that he doesn’t for Jennifer, 16, who he describes as 'independent'.

I mean, honestly, I am very much about giving children their privacy, but when I have children I don't know how I feel about letting them on the internet unsupervised until they're twelve or so. Not to snoop on what they are doing, but because I don't trust what the internet is trying to do to them. There is so much active exploitation and manipulation going on. Not just from malicious individuals trying to get your credit card data, I mean that the most popular platforms themselves are Skinner boxes algorithmically optimised to make you click and consume more. James Bridle had an excellent article about that a few weeks ago, in which he called this "infrastructural violence", and I don't think that is an exaggeration[0]. and children are still innocent in the sense that they are not aware or capable of understanding these tactics. I want to be able to intervene until they are independent enough to judge those things on their own.

For off-line usage it's a very different story.

[0] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

His daughter has a de facto net worth of billions so I have imagine the ‘16 and independent’ vibe is a little different than your average 16 yr old.

"Bill and Melinda Gates have said that they intend to leave their three children $10 million each as their inheritance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

This is why I pre-emptively set up WPA2-Enterprise on my wireless network and replaced my EdgeRouter X with a VM running Sophos XG.

I just ordered parts to build myself a new PC, my 5 year old will inherit my old rig as her first real computer. Any device connected to the network with her profile automatically triggers the Sophos VM to enable filtering (including HTTPS) for that client, so I can give her access to basic educational sites and games without worrying too much about the big bad internet and what a child with unfettered access could run across.

Even when she hits her teenage years she isn’t going to get totally unsupervised access, adolescents deserve some privacy but not at the cost of their safety - I made plenty of mistakes online when I was younger and want to ensure I can help her avoid them (especially given how social media loves to deanonymize you).

Your daughter soon won't care about your PC, PCs are for old people. She will be on her phone using LTE. If she can't get that, you will have arguments so loud the neighbors will look out their windows. I was once in your shoes, prepare for defeat.

She loves using my Wacom tablet, so I’m going to install my Corel Draw license on her machine - not to mention she loves playing Minecraft and wants to play all the mods and custom maps she’s seen on DanTDM’s YouTube channel. She may not use it as heavily as I did with my PC when I was younger, but even I make frequent use of my iPhone and iPad for some casual tasks these days.

I have two boys 4 and 8.

We both have limits and then things I don't want them to do.

Whats' ok:

Play games, watch a tv-series, movies, learn

Whats not ok:

Watch someone else playing, watch some family opening up a toybox, i.e. everything where someone else is doing the work for you.

We are fairly liberal. They are allowed to binge watch once in a while, other times even though we have a whole weekend we don't allow them to use our ipads or phones.

They both love being outside and play every day at the play-ground.

My primary guideline is to look for whether they prefer computers to playing with others.

For now it's not been a problem and I don't believe there is any right amount.

What's the issue with "watch someone else"? I have an 8 year old, and I don't have issues with it - in moderation. Watching other people play games has taught him how games are played.

As my mom taught me: you need to find balance. After an entire day at school with almost no screen time, and lots of social interaction and learning, I'm ok with him coming home and sitting in front of a screen. Assuming his homework and chores are done. He also has lots of after-school activities (martial arts, basketball, right now).

Mostly I think he is growing up in a world deluged in screens and information and propaganda flowing at him, and he needs to learn how to swim in it.

My opinion, and just from watching kids watch gameplay videos - it would seem to squash/not foster a grit/curiosity that one needs to figure stuff out/create solutions for problems. Instead one immediately because a Google programmer/user - "I'll just google it". I've gotten a lot of joy of playing computer games and figuring out the puzzles - it really seems like rote repetition to just watch someone else figure it out and mime them. Most puzzles/gameplay mechanisms in computer games are not meant to be that indecipherable/difficult unless that is the point of the game ala Dark Souls and one is mostly meant to get a sense of accomplishment by figuring stuff out, though I guess if one gets that by copying a gameplay video it works out in the end in a way.

Why are you okay with someone milking your child's attention for profit?

Found the non-parent! Hey we all started out in the same place, coming home from the hospital with our bundles of joy...envisioning a future when our kids are either curled up in a corner reading "Godel, Escher And Bach" or disassembling a motherboard for fun... unfortunately your retrospective fantasy childhood is not what your child actually wants, and by time the teen years hit, you have lost dictatorial power

I personally don't have any illusion that they should read Godel, Escher and Bach or anything like that. It's much more simple in that age.

If you want to spend time on your ipad/iphone/computer/xbox. Either have fun participating in something, see something someone else spend a lot of time creating (tv shows, cartoons etc) or learn something.

There is no need for them to become a couch potato at that early an age.

report back when you try this strategy with a teenager

I would never try this strategy on a teenager. My boys are 4 an 8 it works on them. With teenagers, it's about something else.

Because they provide value to him?

It really depends on the situation. If you watch a game to see how it's played that's one thing. But if you just watch someone else play a game you already know and aren't looking for anything specific and it becomes the thing you do (instead of playing the game yourself) that's where I put in the limit.

I don't mind my kids watching people create something (like how to do a trap in minecraft) what I am particularlly after is when it becomes entertainment.

The balance is always fuzzy. In theory I have priniples in reality I always judge it based on context.

But I have had to tell him to watch something else when I can see he is just watching it because he is lazy.

I would argue this title is a bit sensationalist. Limiting screen time (much like Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs) is a very common practice in our community.

Our family follows the standard guidelines for doing so:

https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...

My children are only allowed to use monochrome monitors and tactile keyboards.

Great! Can you tell us a bit more about this?

My second computer was 286 with Hercules monitor (~199x). Not being able to play many games, I took on the "herculian" effort to try to make it so. It kind of worked with the Trolls game (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls) where I found that they kept the video buffer in main memory, and then were copying it to 0xA0000. I did something simple - a TSR program that would copy (actually some made up bit transform) every once in a while (interrupt driven I think) the 320x200x256 colors screen buffer into the hercules by just taking some of the bits... ignoring the palette... Somehow it almost worked - like 5-10fps :) - but I was able to ... almost play the game... It was more fun coding it!

I also found the message which is listed in the mobygames page :)

> tactile keyboards

That’s arguably an upgrade.

Haha. But for anyone seriously considering something like this, when your kids become teens in the US they either have smartphone access or they have no friends. Basically school hours are the only time they are reliably unplugged. This is the only way to do it: unplug everyone...now, no network effects.

More than a bit, I agree. We replaced the baity title with language from the article.

I always found the idea of limiting "screen time" quite odd. Because this can mean so many different things, from playing games, writing messages to friends, using social media, reading books. Which can end up in some odd contradictions, because e.g. "reading books" is often considered as a positive thing while "screen time" is considered negative. So does "kindle / ereader time" count? Is cooking also considered screen time if you look up a recipe on the Internet with a phone or tablet?

I think the idea of "screen time" limiting is rooted in an odd suspicion around technology and an unwillingness to consider the impact of the individual activities.

I agree that it is rooted in suspicion around technology, but I think the suspicion is well justified.

Even those who are pretty sophisticated about maintaining control of our own technology can easily lose control of ourselves when using it.

I bet that if the AAP could expect parents to follow an advice like 'never allow screen time in a stationary position', they would. Posture is a serious concern, kind of talking from own experience - no serious issues yet, but not quite ok either.

Honestly, I think it's disingenuous to think that your whole community consistently limits screen time based on those guidelines.

Have you ever seen what parents do when their kid is throwing a tantrum? No matter how disciplined they think they are, shoving the tablet in their faces gives them an immediate solution.

It seems to me that low-use of smartphones/facebooks in rich families are not because of restrictions but because of much more expensive and broad education, that includes schools and after-school activites that are not available to “regular people”. Rich kids just don't have enough time to spend in facebook.

This whole article is a huge "appeal to authority" fallacy, and with a sample of 2. I'm not a fan of smartphones or FB myself, but this barely proves anything. Does America only have 2 tech gurus ? The argumentation borders on cult of personality.

A countervailing authority:

Why keep kids away from tech they will create their lives with? Creative, not passive. It's like keeping our generation away from pencils.

-- Garry Kasparov

I'm not sure that being really bored all the time (whether it was a long car ride or watching bad TV) was much better. I also don't know if reading fantasy novels is really better than watching YouTube. My parents and teachers seemed to be thrilled with the idea of reading but I think you have some dimensioning returns on the actual value if the content is still junk.

A few differences worth consideration are that books don't have popups distracting you while consuming the content, ads, or autoplay follow-on content.

Also the writer and publisher don't make more money if you buy the book and spend 1 hour consuming it vs dozens. If anything, maybe we could argue they make less overall the longer you read it because spending your reading time on one book comes with the opportunity cost of not reading others.

It was better but not from the short term "I must kill the boredom now" point of view. Long version: read Deep Work by Cal Newport. Short version - by feeding our brain with information (doesn't have to be worthless but usually it's not relevant to our situation ) whenever we are bored, we're impairing our ability to focus and think deeply about problems, some researchers say irreversibly.

It takes a lot of reading and years for a kid to be really proeficient with it. The excitement is about you becoming better and better at quickly recognizing words and needing less and less effort to read long text. That relates to ability remember more from text later on etc.

It matters less that what you read was junk.

In my area, the issue is that kids can't get around. The street has turned into a "Death Race" as population levels climb and the streets get wider/faster. Everything is designed to limit pedestrian traffic to major streets only and it takes 2 miles of walking to get 100 ft to another block because of fences. Every strip of land has been turned into a home and had a fence put around it. Parks are turning into a thing of the past and schools are off limits after hours and on weekends.

Then we blame technology for kids being inside all day. What else are they going to do?

I have programmed the home router to turn on and off at various times of the day. Since we stream all video, and many games require an internet connection, this has the result of automatically controlling screen time. I tried it after this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395964 comment, and it has worked really really well.

Children are 14,10,7 and 4 years old. I am waiting for the day the kids learn to hack the router, but so far they are too well behaved.

So if you have kids, try it!

I suspect this will right itself.

The next generation are always hardwired to revolt against the previous ones - and they take all existing tech as the norm - so it's not massively interestingly/revolutionary.

Millennials may well be peak social/online tech - as subsequent gens switch off and start to rediscover what it is like to feel/smell/buy clothes from a real shop and use a pencil/paper/desk light to design something.

Why would they opt-in to being tracked/profiled/segmented/targeted while contributing free social content to megacorps 24/7?

I don't think so. The revolt is not to use facebook, but snapchat instead; it's not using tin-can phones.

Highly optimized to be addictive to the average consumer, you'd have to be well schooled or an oddball otherwise not to fall for it.

I for example hate facebook and I'm far from addiction, but in my social sphere I need it for instant messaging and events. So not even someone who hates a service is safe from using it (or at least the costs of not using it are real enough that in many scenarios the hate against it is not enough).

Exactly. Facebook should be an utility, not a media/advertising company they say they are.

Before the parent can be made to restrict internet use, they first have to understand their own susceptibility to internet over use.

I used to try to restrict use of YouTube until i looked at my own history. It's like a drug user telling you to stop using drugs. So i tried to fix it for myself first. Now I'm the guy that will not watch the video you just sent, for the simple reason that it is designed to be addictive.

The problem is not just children but also parents.

Seems like it could be another case of 'correlation is not causation'. Are depressed kids more likely to have a greater use of technology to communicate? I would suggest there's a case to be made for that. However, there's no evidence shared in this article that suggests increased use of smartphones/laptops/tablets causes depression.

It's much easier to trigger depression in someone who's on the edge. A couple snarky anonymous comments and it's done. This simply didn't happen in the past when anonymity wasn't so easily attained.

I really want to limit screen time for my children. I grew up in an era where screen time only made up maybe 50% of my free time. I think that's a good balance.

I can remember when I self limited screen time to a couple of hours a day at most because the four tv channels only had stuff that was interesting to child me for that long, the rest was directed at older folks and kind of bored me to distraction.

i just bought a gun-safe with a complex passcode to physically lock up our ipad and android tablet. I removed the passwords from the devices (that was just annoying) and moved to actually put the thing in a locked box where kids cannot access it for hours.

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