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Comment by nikhizzle | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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

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 :)

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.

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

> tactile keyboards

That’s arguably an upgrade.

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.

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

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