A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines.

Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use.

The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of boring by design. Regulations force us to make them boring. (And that is a good thing, I will not work on this industry otherwise).

The future of on-line games and mobile games is regulation. Micro-payments, push-notifications, etc. cannot be used without limits. People have right to their mental health more than companies have to higher profits.

But yes, I agree with your point in the general sense!

Or just not letting kids get into those games. At some point my wife pointed out that I had a problem disengaging from certain types of games (for me it was MOBAs specifically). They are super-addictive.

It never really got in the way of anything and if I had anything else to do I would go do that, so it wouldn't really qualify as "addiction" in a DSM sense. But the issue is what it does when you don't have anything to do. They have a way of swallowing up basically ALL of your free time. And I didn't feel happier or better off for having spent my time that way, it felt more like compulsion than desire. I see a lot of young people on the internet being enslaved by compulsion like this, engaging in somewhat problematic consumption of video-games, porn, or social media.

I decided to just uninstall and stop playing those sorts of games, but I was also a grown-up with life experiences, hobbies, social connections, and responsibilities before I ever started. I knew what I was missing with "real life" by letting myself sink into that so it was easy enough for me to stop, I had other, more edifying sources of dopamine to go after. Kids, often times, either don't have enough freedom of movement to go do those things or just plain don't know what else there is out there. It's the same reason drug and gambling addiction tends to take hold among people with depression.

In the old days, the focus was on playability. Games were fun. But a new genre has emerged particularly in mobile gaming that does something strange: it compels play even when it isn't fun anymore. In the old days when a game stopped being fun, you would stop playing. But these games, when they stop being fun, you make an in-game purchase...

In 'old school' game you receive reward after period of effort. You have to perform better and push yourself. Game is designed to be fun but selling the game once is where the money is. Good game is measured by the short peak experiences, not by the average feeling.

Another (more advanced but evil) way to design addictive game is when it the difficulty and reward frequencies are optimized to keep you playing for as long as possible. You are offered cheats or the difficulty automatically adjusts to optimize the time you spend with the game. The goal of the game is stretch the interest over time just above the threshold where you would quit. In the end the game just removes lows from the boring moments.

Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't get to see very often.

Conversely, I have ZERO tolerance for advertising. I am increasingly convinced that marketing is the source of a majority of modern society's ills and I don't want it anywhere near his brain until he's able to properly comprehend its purpose.

Buy older computers (1980s/early 1990s) that don't provide access to those games or the internet.

Right... the game is designed to hook you in, that's games, they've all done that since the year dot. You're invested. Except now, in order to continue getting the same high, you need to spend money. They're purposely engineered this way. Just like drugs.

I grew up as the public internet took it's first breaths. When you had to figure out just how to get an internet service provider before you could even get started. In the era of IRC and Newsgroups and that was about all. Nobody even understood what websites were.

Google didn't hit its stride until 3 or 4 years after I started using it. Things were different back then.

These days everything is designed to hook you and keep you coming back and when those hooks are no longer enough to keep your eyes on it, it hooks you to pay something to get more of a high.

My kids have just come off a two week iPad ban yesterday, and already one of them has fallen off the rails and was unable to get out of bed for school this morning. Their behaviour was significantly improved by the time they came off their ban than it was the day the were banned.

I'm seriously considering removing iPad use on a more permanent basis.

Being involved changes a lot, making agreements, talk about feelings and evaluating. So like you would with any activity.

Let they play but add mandatory walks i.e., or mix up with physical actvities. I mean, kids don't have THAT much time at hand to spend after school.

I think modern games absolutely do harm, I don’t think they should really be called games either, because they are build for addiction to make you play their built in slot machines.

My children never had smart devices because nobody under 15 should ever touch a smart device. They grew up much healthier than their peers and I think it was the strict rules on technology that did most of the work.

I’m not against technology or smart devices by any means, but it’s hard to use both in a healthy manner and children are really bad at making the right decision.

I mean, you wouldn’t give your kid free reign in the candy store, so why would you do it on their smartphone?

People said the same thing about WoW and Everquest and pretty much every video game. Go back far enough people said the same thing about nintendo and gameboy. Every generation thinks they are unique. You aren't unique. Your father thought the exact same thing as you are thinking right now. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

> Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.

How about being a parent rather than blaming games. It's always human nature to blame others for one's own failings.

Now it's social media and smartphone games. Before that it was people were blaming video games, simpsons, south park, mtv, etc for violence, dumbing down kids, etc. In 10 years, it'll be something else. Maybe virtual reality or sex dolls. Who knows. The same complaints, different products.

It robs a child’s body and brain from developing social and motor skills in a 3D world. Time spent in the trance state is habit forming and is in general stolen from time spent exploring the world, and letting the brain learn from full bandwidth experiences.

So yes, It is the screen.

Children’s real life unstructured full-bandwidth play is learning on steroids. All systems engaged, constant observation, endless questions, simulations etc. think social simulations, physical and motor skills challenges, puzzles. It takes life to prepare human brains for life.

Source: I have 6 kids between the ages of 9 and 16

I have no doubt video game addiction will at some point become an actual diagnosis, just like gambling addiction.

You can still find the oldschool-style. I.e. I just played CHUCHEL adventure game alongside my 4 year old, and it is a simple ~4 hour long adventure game, costs ~10$, no micro-transactions funny business.

Reminds me of my time at my grandma's house playing Neverhood :D

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe still works on modern machines.

Shovel knight, Tooth and Tail, Guacamele, Into The Breach, Shadowrun, Reigns, Abzu, Magicka, Undertale ... and many more. Of course, not many FPS/high-budget rpgs?

I actually am strongly considering to be the first in my family to buy an actual gaming console, once my daughter is a tiny bit older. Nintendo with its Switch lineup seems to be quite in line with the old-school mentality of "Pay once, get the game, have fun" :-)

There's a increase of 'frequency' at the expense of depth.

Screen time modifies your behavior. That modification is compounded as the quantity of access time increases. This change is determinate and quantifiable.

You can quickly validate this with a simple experiment. Take any child and take away access to screens. Look at what they do to fill their time and how they respond to people in the first 30 minutes after screen loss and against after 2 hours. Also notice the longer term modifications to behavior after screens are removed for a week.

Part of this is a component of addiction, missing social stimulus, and lack of physical activity.

I'm now playing Crossout, where you can build your own car, and my son also loves building his own cars and fighting with them.

I don't think you have to look at it so negative, kids actually enjoy creating stuff in games, and I think that's a good thing.

Indeed, some of those could desperately use a little polish to stop firing off the pain centers of our brains. :\

In this instance, the medium is not the message. Books, movies, etc. don't suddenly become more addictive just because they're on glowing rectangles. The glowing rectangles enable additional, potentially-addictive experiences that weren't possible without them—but you as a parent have complete ability to disable these experiences. A glowing rectangle that can "only" function as a library, encyclopedia, movie theatre, radio, and (if you like) chatroom, is still a useful possession, but likely not an addictive one.

I have two adult sons. They were online as early as ages 2 and 5. I beg to differ and all that.

If kids are being ignored and not getting their needs adequately met, etc, then what happens online can have a huge adverse impact on them. But I don't think this is a problem we solve by trying to "fix software." This is a problem we solve by trying to fix social fabric.

Oh my god, what hyperbole. This is like the cringey hyperbole equating rock 'n roll with devil music back in the 50s.

Things will be fine. Every older generation thinks the newer generation is "mad". It's not the end of the world.

Is hacker news mostly grandparents now? Just worried about every new technology? So many comments here feel like my grandparents talking.

It's so sad how old and scared HN has gotten. HN isn't supposed to be like it.

(And, to parents here who aren't familiar with their movie reviews and other resources, check them out: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ )

Movie and TV reviews have gotten so hung up on performance, star power and visuals that they give us parents very little idea about content. They’re useless in many cases.

I feel like common sense media is an amazing tool for those of us that are concerned with the content in media and helps parents make better decisions.

Since I work from home on a computer all day, it seemed wrong to send mixed messages about screen usage. One trick we use is to set Alexa timers when starting screen time with our preschool and kindergarteners. You can argue with mom and dad, but Alexa is implacable. Also, the play room must be cleaned up and homework done, which seems to provide the “privilege, not a right” context we are looking for. It helps we have far better behaved kids in general that I have any right to expect. I blame my wife.

Your website helped me get control over what my wife and parents were exposing my four year old daughter to, by establishing a neutral source of extremely valuable information. It became very easy to set guidelines thanks to your rating system and the wide range of titles reviewed.

The new 3D animation style and cutesy animal characters are dangerously subversive. My mom thought I was being a grinch until I made her read a review from CSM of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie she wanted to show my daughter:

"There was a scene where the male Air Marshall (who was following them), woke up in a drunken haze (yes, there was a scene where shots and drinks were involved) with 2 new tattoos and in the bedroom or hotel room with another man (and all that that implied)."

There is just no way this stuff is age appropriate. I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.

The Illumination Studios pictures are particularly insidious. I believe their content is generally inappropriate for young children, deleterious to moral character, culturally degenerate, etc. The character design aesthetics are offensive and stupefying. I wasn't surprised to find the same creative oversight involved in the duff Chipmunks pictures.

Case in point is Sing, which when I looked it up, it turns out the movie is notorious for culturally stereotyped presentation of Japanese people, and animal singers who shake their butts around. There's no way young children can appropriately contextualize either of these things.

it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen

How about driving technology? Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16.

There's plenty of precedent for young children being unable to safely & responsibly handle certain things.

Was it Luddism that I wasn't allowed to operate a table saw when I was eleven?

And how are you supposed to teach kids about privacy when most consumer technology from the get-go is privacy harming? If you buy a child their first smartphone, do you tell them to not use SMS because it's plaintext, to not use any of the popular communications apps because they're owned by FB or whoever else, or to not use their phone at all because of cellular location tracking? How to you explain to them they can't watch Netflix on the TV, because the TV isn't allowed to connect to the internet to prevent it phoning home? No, convenience trumps all, and we all know the current state of things is that even if people are made aware of privacy issues, they'll disregard them if even slightly inconvenient.

There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology, at least not the way you mention. I mean, how exactly is the generalization "too much tech isn't good" relevant to technology? This is just common sense, it applies to everything. If kids are staying up late reading comic books and subsequently performing poorly in school, this is no different than the habit of staying up late on your phone. And, I reiterate, the latter has nothing to do with technology but with consumption. You either foster a (ever-growing) dependency in them, or you don't. And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology.

Yet you sneer at it, calling it Luddism.

You missed the point. It's not that there's FUD around tech. It's that the people who understand tech the most (see the headline) are restricting children's access to it more than you (the general reader) might realize.

- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.

- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.

Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.

If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.

Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."

I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.

Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.

But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.

Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.

No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.

> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact

Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.

Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.

Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.

To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]).

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...

A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.

What a glib statement.

Although, a meme here on Hacker News, it doesn't take a data scientist to make addictive games and video content.

This is also one of my bigger fears. There is a strange mix of people in my generation (born 1990's), who are non-techies, and are either responsible with their internet use or display worrying signs of unhealthy internet presence. Even though tech has been around for some time now.

Some, I realised, were introduced to technology rather late. A fun example is how some people would be offended if I were to call them "gamers". They don't own PC games, don't own a console, but they spend their entire commutes and more playing mobile games.

Personally, if I had to select one "easy avenue" to ban or restrict, it would be not screens but internet access. This has the side effect of putting the parent in charge of acquiring new content.

It's hard for parents to fight off all these temptations.

Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

Having said that, I do think there's a big, big difference between playing games of that sort and... Candy Crush.

Now she's older and retired, and whenever I visit to see what she's doing with her leisure time, she spends most of it on her laptop playing a fish aquarium game or Farmville on Facebook.

I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me cringe. They look designed to be addictive - not in the way that playing C&C was addictive, but that they're designed to form real addictive behaviors.

So I don't know what I'll do. It's a hard problem. Banning all screens doesn't seem like the answer. I don't know what is.

I think the problem is not screens or technology, it is, as with so many things, greed and the 'marketing' tactics that it breeds.

And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot.

I remember my internet was so bad I had to add wait;wait;wait between issuing commands to the server or they would be dropped -- have been dealing with latency ever since :)

I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue.

99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.

This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.

I think video games are beautiful. I just finished Detroit: Become Human, and I've been playing games since Wolf3d came out. I suspect that the digital story telling in many video games is every bit as much "literature" as any novel, poem, or play.

I also personally saw more people drop out of college because of WoW than drugs.

Just an anecdote.

But I don't feel that video games are any better or worse than smoking cannabis or drinking alcohol, and I don't mind feeling a little grated when folks marketed them to my kids in ways that directly attempt to increase their addictive potential.

> At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments. I feel that I had a capacity for better things; but, under the ascendancy of this idle habit, it sunk into a fatal lethargy, from which neither shame nor ambition could awaken it. The drunkard, in the intervals of sobriety, feels most keenly the evils of intoxication, and, if self love allowed him to be candid, could a tale unfold of disease, of mental and bodily suffering, that would do more for the cause of temperance than all the societies in the world have ever accomplished. The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.

Reading novels will make your brains pour out your ears, kid.

Any new form of entertainment will meet resistance.

I'd say it's important to avoid Skinner box style games, but otherwise they can be fun and mentally productive. If I had a kid I'd introduce them to games like Kerbal Space Program, racing games (e.g. Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo) [1], and maybe some RTS games as they got older. I think it's important to choose what games children. The examples listed above reward learning, discipline, and skill. Not luck or pure time commitment.

So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design.

The notion of "nations" or "civilizations" as discrete, immutable, and clearly defined categories is actually straight up wrong. The idea of history as the story of competition between these civilizational entities is likewise wrong. But tons of people of our generation think of history this way. They think of technological advancement like a "tech tree" as if all of human progress can be charted on a map with no consideration for alternative ways the world could have shaken out. Monotheism MUST be invented after polytheism, you MUST have invented the wheel in order to invent agriculture, and so on. Overall you're being fed the idea that the world as it is is the only way the world could have been, which is just not the case.

We were being acculturated into a specific (and imperialistic) worldview about what history is and how culture works. But because nobody ever took video games seriously, they never bothered to understand and unpack their influence as pedagogical tools. It's not like a novel or a movie where the morals and themes of the narrative are there to make an intentional point. With games the logic of needing to have a game to play and goals and objectives to meet winds up transmitting themes and morals that people either don't intend or don't bother thinking very hard about.

And some games really can be educational, or develop thinking skills, etc. I wonder what game critics would say about a child spending hours a day playing Chess.

But all chess and no soccer is not a good mix. All Fortnite and no chess is not a good mix. In fact, I seriously question the value of any Fortnite or Minecraft. As entertainment, a little bit isn't worse than many other entertainments. But too much is too much.

And as far as entertainment goes, I'm tired of yet another Marvel movie where we can blow up as many things as possible in the most spectacular ways and never even think about consequences. I know it's goofy to worry about real life when we are talking about mythological characters and aliens. But I do think that we spend a huge amount of time and money to train youth to disconnect from real life. If somebody dies on the other side of town, it isn't real so it doesn't matter. If you have to kill 100 opponents to get to the princess, it's all part of the game.

But many years ago we played cops and robbers and killed each other, too. Or cowboys and Indians. And we argued about whether somebody should be dead or not because of how many times they'd been shot. And we graduated from pointing fingers to rubberbands to add some realism. Then paintballs.

So I suppose the human brain is capable of sorting it all out.

But I think it is healthy to feed the brain some balance. Put down the controller and join a service project now and then. Adopt a highway, or visit a care center. Connect with real people and remind your brain that video games aren't real. And stealing cars isn't the only way to win the game. In fact, it's just wrong.

It's clickbait. The author wants to jam some facts into a narrative. Consensuses are always "growing". Evidence is always "mounting".

Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling.

Youtube kids is also all kinds of messed up. Videos created using algorithms specifically to draw the attention of kids and sometimes contain very disturbing images and themes.

This article is a good overview of how Youtube is not a good choice for kids: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig...

Here is a video on Jake Paul (and many big youtubers) and how he markets HARD to kids while also having videos containing very inappropriate material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c

On top of this, in terms of TV/Youtube vs books, there is a big difference in terms of it's effect on language, communication, and development. Also, TV/Youtube is a passive form of learning, reading books is active:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_1...

Many library cards for <18 year-olds didn’t allow certain adult books to be checked out. Books are mostly not algorithmically/peer generated. Even if you are addicted to some book series you will eventually finish it.

It would be nice if there was a content filter that parents could install that wasn’t curated based on someones opinion but worked more like Waze — routing you around places where everyone was stuck.

So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating.

Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft.

The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.

https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...

More recently, parents used to complain about teenage girls locking themselves in their rooms to talk on the phone with their friends.

Reading: 13:19

Social: 10:27

Education: 2:02

This is despite trying to cut down my use.

and then it drops off into under 10 minutes on various reference apps.

> The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising.

A lot of parents lack sophistication when it comes to "screen time".

I have multiple in-laws who seem to not understand that it's what is on the screen that matters. As you predicted, those same people are also prone to magical thinking about other things: vaccination, fluoride, radio waves, GMOs, etc.

This has multiple effects. First, they tend to over-limit access to useful aspects of computers. Second, they tend to allow toxic uses of the screen-time (allowing an hour of pocket slot machine time each day, which is IMO super excessive).

A stretched analogy: it's similar to a parent who doesn't understand the difference between alcohol and water, and therefore limits their children's access to liquid to a few times a day. However, during those few hours, the kids get to drink whatever they want out of the liquor cabinet. Obviously, the cabinet should be off-limits 24/7 but the water faucet should be freely available.

Similarly, kids should not be allowed to play pocket slot machines or watch youtube with zero restriction/oversight. But there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time for other uses, because it's not the screen itself that's the problem.

Concretely, my kids will have unrestricted access to an Apple ][ with an Apple BASIC interpreter and manual. I doubt that will cause any problems that aren't also caused by unlimited access to microscopes or pH strips.

Of course, their access to iPad games and Netflix will be moderated in the same way their access to TV will be moderated.

But a lot of parents -- especially non-tech-literate parents -- lump it all in as "screentime", which causes them to both under-moderate what's going on when the screen is on and over-moderate access to the screen for healthy uses.

You can't go from complaining about lack of research and then using your single data point, incorrectly.

Anyway, the article may not say it but there is research in the field, and it concludes that screen time is harmful at young ages. I don't believe any research has followed kids for say 20 years (and i mean, we haven't had tiny addictive screens and apps that long anyway) to see if they "recover" or catch up or even surpass their peers when they get older.

Lastly, if you literally only allow her to use the screen once/week for a couple of hours, you are not near the realm where they are finding screens to be harmful. I'm sure you've been out at literally any restaurant and half the toddlers are glued to the screen, as a first resort.

She'll be way, way ahead of all those kids whose parents decided to not let them use iPads and screens, that's for sure. That's regardless of what she chooses to pursue in life, but especially if she wants to go into technology.

This is a valid complaint about the article, but not a good reason to declare that screens are perfectly healthy.

And thank you for your anecdotal data; we let our kid watch some screen time too, and anecdotally have noticed some negative correlations - after watching more than an hour of TV, she gets more cranky, less patient, a lot more demanding and in general behaves worse.