Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

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

The article doesn't say there has been any peer-reviewed research to show a little screen time is harmful. It just says, oh, check it out, here is a grab bag of assholes, we picked out of a population of like 1 Million engineers, and THEY DONT LET THEIR KIDS USE SCREENS.

Well guess what. I was a video game engineer for 10 years. Now I work in a different area of tech. My wife works for a giant tech company too. We let our 2 year old watch cartoons on Netflix on Sunday mornings. She loves it. We think its cute, because we used to watch Sunday morning cartoons as kids ourselves. She's one of the most advanced kids in her daycare. She can recite the alphabet, count to ten, and speaks full sentences, and tells stories in class. The teachers say she is doing really well.

Whoopity doooo. So what if she knows how to use an iPad.

Please. Stop treating Facebook engineers like they are special snowflakes that know about everything because they wrote some javascript and html that runs a social networking website.

I don't disagree with you, but your personal anecdote is irrelevant and worthless. She's the most advanced. So the 95% of kids are doing worse than she is. Do you have data on how much screen time the other kids are getting, and how it is affecting them?

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.

woosh

> The article doesn't say there has been any peer-reviewed research to show a little screen time is harmful.

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.

Your methodological criticisms are spot-on.

> 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 almost lost me with

> "those same people are also prone to magical thinking about other things: vaccination, fluoride, radio waves, GMOs, etc."

because it is not remotely the the same people who are irrational about each of those things.

Glad I continued reading though, bc I like your "liquid" analogy which is apt. I do let my girls (age 10 and 11) play some games, but it's limited and as much about cultural literacy as their entertainment. They both love to read and spend probably 10h reading (mostly printed books but recently some kindle too) for every hour of tv or video games. Maybe instead of water vs alcohol, it's more a continuum from vegetables to candy. In any case, giving them some agency and trying to instill the foundation for them to make good choices -- ie, parenting -- is an ongoing and worthy challenge.

> "there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time ... it's not the screen that's the problem"

I beg to differ. Humans aren't built to sit and look at screens 1-2 feet from their face all day. There aren't infinite hours to choose from. There are 24 today. Every hour spent on the screen incurs a tremendous opportunity cost: exercise, adventure, socialization, cooking, grooming, sex, sleeping, etc.

Digital and real-world goods are not fungible because humans are embodied.

That's true. I perhaps should have put "allowing" in italics to emphasize it's the permission to use, not the actual use, that's unlimited.

No one worries about allowing 24/7 access to a microscope, because although "microscope addiction" is I suppose possible, it's so bloody unlikely that we don't worry about it.

I think certain computers are similar to the microscope in this respect (e.g., an apple ][ with nothing by apple basic).

Obviously, excessive screen time is always bad. The point is that if you can limit what's on the screen (e.g., an apple basic interpreter), people (even/especially children) will self-moderate their screen time, so you don't have to worry about moderating access to the screen (similar to the microscope).

Obviously, if my child starts spending 10 hours a day looking through a microscope, I'm going to intervene. Ditto for BASIC programming. But I don't feel the need to, a priori, restrict access. The odds of either of those things happening (esp. in a way that's not healthy/constructive/short-lived) is so low that I don't worry about it.

> So what if she knows how to use an iPad.

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.

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