Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphabettsy | Hacker News Reader

I find this to be true when observing how friends with children raise their kids. People with more education seem to have severe limits on screens and lower education folks seem to let screens entertain their kids all day everyday.

View on HN

Screens are cheap. Sure a tablet is a few hundred dollars, but figure it's a hand me down from a relative, and it can entertain a kid for thousands of hours with minimal effort.

Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.

I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.

> keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.

Some 30 years ago, in my country the parent instructions to their kid, for the afternoon, would be: "go outside, play with other kids, I don't want to see you inside before supper".

And all was well. Sort of.

Maybe we need more educational material on them?

If they get addicted, az least it could make them smarter

The main concern is that it hurts socialization, which is actually a really important skill. I don't think there's anything wrong with screen time, especially if it's productive time for the person using the screen (adult or kid). The issue is like anything - when that screen time is so great it chokes out other activities like socializing or fitness.

>Sure a tablet is a few hundred dollars

You can get basically disposable tablets at Walmart for ~$50.

This strikes me as some weird virtue signaling, as part of the package of well-to-do enlightened whiteness. Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad; you have to think about what content you're delivering. I spent most days watching old-school History Channel while playing with Legos or army men. Likewise, almost all of my knowledge of geography and a significant chunk of history comes from playing strategy games on the PC. If I was watching the Disney Channel and playing Fortnite, then that would be less productively used time, I suppose.

I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.

How is Fortnite different from any other FPS we had twenty years ago, like Tribes?

Loot boxes, mostly. Gacha games and the like pioneered it and now it's in everything. The slot-machine pull does something to people, and I'm more worried about what it does to brains that haven't completely set yet.

Fortnite doesn't have loot boxes. There's skins and dances, but you buy them all directly, there's no RNG. At least that I've found in my ~30 hours of playing the game.

It's just like golden eye, but now you've got to pay to play as odjob.

Sorry, you're right, I shouldn't have used the example of Fortnite when I personally play PUBG. And Overwatch. Both of which do. ;) My reach exceeded my grasp.

Although Fortnite doesn't have explicit lootboxes, there's certainly a related addictive effect to simply opening chests, stumbling across a Llama, etc. Have you not heard a younger player squeal 'scaaarrr'?

Using 'enlightened whiteness' is mildly insulting both to people who happen to be white and those who are non-white who share the same beliefs and behaviour.

i'm white and i don't find it personally offensive. there is a certain set of risk-averse behaviors that seem ubiquitous among the white (upper) middle class. and maybe this is uncharitable of me, but i do actually think these people feel more virtuous because they do these things, or at least do them to signal virtue. when someone uses a phrase like "enlightened whiteness" or "SWPL", it seems there's a high chance that we both instantly picture the same loosely related set of things that would be hard to describe otherwise.

That's exactly how a white person would respond ;)

> Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad

Studies disagree. Too much screen time isn't great for kid development. At best, we're not sure what sort of effect it has on kids.

How do we not know the effects? People have been plunking their kids down in front of the TV for hours a day for fifty years at this point.

edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-sil...

Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.

We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.

Anyway, we do know and suspect a lot of stuff:

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-an...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too...

Well, the obvious answer is that the effects are small enough to be very difficult to reveal with simple studies

I’m not sure it has anything to do with whiteness, but it certainly is attached to class.

Oh, is that so? just like that, you've correlated screen time purely on education level of the parents. I bet they're fat too, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com