New Research About Kids’ Screen Time and Mental Health
time.com
time.com
Sure, I know plenty of parents who stick their kids on YouTube with no monitoring, who end up watching Jake Paul for hours.
But I also know plenty of parents whose kids spend their screen time drawing in paint apps, playing with redstone creations in Minecraft, and generally doing stuff that I (as a parent of 2 who aren't quite that age yet) would LOVE my kids to be doing.
I'm sure the former is more common than the latter, but I wish articles like this weren't so "screen time is BAD" and would differentiate and encourage parents to instead push their kids towards educational-but-entertaining screentime.
If I hadn't spent my entire childhood on screens learning to code in BASIC and playing in Paint, I wouldn't have had my career, which has now let me support my family and give them a comfortable life (whereas I grew up in poverty).
The other thing this article fails to touch on is the damage that can be done to younger eyes. Screens can literally burn retinas. Apple, for example, made quiet reference to the improvements in their new iPhone displays that they are easier on eyes (https://www.cultofmac.com/581646/iphone-xs-max-display-is-sc...). I've also seen the MPE (maximum permissable exposure) metric reference more and more lately.
Finally, I'm sure you spent as much time in front of the screen writing code when you were growing up, just as I did. But it meant going to sit down in front of a desktop. You weren't laying with it in bed, on Facebook or sending Snaps 24/7. The difference of access today is 180 from when I was using technology as a teenager. I don't think technology is bad when it has a purpose, but I would say the majority of youth are not using technology in a manner that's constructive to their future long term.
Kids I see (disclaimer: mostly in the <5 years old range) desperately want to play with other people, but often are left bored while the adults / older kids around are stuck staring at their smartphones. Fertile ground to develop their own screen addictions.
Instead of monitoring and controlling kids’ content, how about working with them on some physical projects, reading aloud, going for a hike, or even doing chores together?
I was in primary schoold in the 80s and I remember seeing my father 10 min before going to bed, my mother was mostly dealing with stuff (administrative tasks, house keeping, shopping, cooking, checking homeworks) and outside of Scrabble I don’t remember playing anything with her. We’d watch tv news or vapid tv drama together at best, rest of time I’d do whatever I wanted as long as it wasn’t hurting anyone nor illegal.
Compared to that it seems to me parents nowadays are a lot more feeling guilty of not spending enough time with their kids, even as they spend a ton more in my opinion.
Lots of “our time” (i.e. yours and mine) growing up in the 80s was surely wasted. I know I could have learned a whole lot more working 1:1 with an expert tutor/mentor instead of in an above average school class of 30 kids. I know some kids who had very high-touch mentorship and turned into real prodigies. (Of course, some others are pushed by controlling parents and feel resentful.)
Even when it comes to extracurricular activities (like building stuff out of Legos, solving logic puzzles, cooking, playing sports, or whatever), I could have learned a whole lot more than I did if I wasn’t left mostly to my own devices, but had someone occasionally suggest challenging projects or show me some new ideas at my current level or fix up my misconceptions. And my parents surely spent far more time with me than average, especially in the first few years.
I learned a great many things just fiddling around for hours and hours by myself, but most of that learning was grossly inefficient.
These days I am a father to a 1 year old and I’ve been spending a lot of time with him (work from home on my own schedule). My worry is that I will spend too much time with him as he grows up, and not leave enough space for him to develop on his own through exploration and individuality. Of course I haven’t had to deal with screen time yet and I realize that will be a serious challenge. My goal is to get rid of any smart devices by the time he is curious about them. We don’t own iPads or tablets in general and I don’t plan on buying any. I have no doubts I can curtail my own phone browsing usage but say the same for my wife who is constantly on hers.
I say this because there's two interesting behaviours I've seen. One is, if I have ever pulled my phone out to quickly check WhatsApp or anything else, he becomes angsty and does things like trying to pour sand on his head (this is mostly fine dust sand). I might be inclined to say he's bored. But there are lots times I can be 50m away and watching him play with grass and he'll look back at me every so often. As long as he knows I'm interested in what he's doing, he doesn't do that stuff. It's not out of fear either. I don't express much when he pours sand on himself. It's just attention.
The second interesting thing I see is all the parents on their phones. It's terrible. They walk around like zombies, barely interested in their children. But always a step behind them. And their child will be doing something quite safe. Of course if you looked at them at that exact moment you'd think they are in a potentially dangerous situation. Like riding their bike at the side of a drain. I'll see the child do this for 2 minutes, suddenly the parent looks up and yells at them to stop. The child looks disappointed and they watch the parent vanish back into zombie mode. It's bizzare and heartbreaking.
And all this passes on to the children. I see parents checking phones during outings and telling children to put theirs away and talk to each other. Sigh. Not going to work.
Kids tend to get handed down devices, so for some families there will be a significant lag between the availability of the fine grain controls and the day their kids will be subjected to it.
Apple is generaly good with retro-compatibility so less a complaint than just an observation.
If kids who are depressed are more likely to spend more time on social media/the internet, limiting their "screen time" isn't going to make them less depressed.
"But the correlation some studies have found between increased screen time and outcomes like depression do not prove one is to blame for the other, he says. It may be that kids who are anxious or depressed are just more likely to spend a lot of time using screens."
Seeing automation at factories is what got me into robotics and science fiction. Seeing the awesome machines at farms (massive tractors, trashers, large scale crop watering, etc) blew my mind, and got me into mechanics and vehicle tech. I now hack on cars as my primary hobby (both mechanically, and electronically).
>>> Young people who spend seven hours or more a day on screens are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety than those who use screens for an hour a day, finds a new study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports.
Are you suggesting 1 hour is harmless and 7 hours is extremely rare (assuming that is already proven) and hence nothing is new in this article?
If the same number of kids have mental health issues as before there were so many screens, there is nothing to worry about. I'll start to worry if more kids have mental health problems, and then it makes sense to figure out what is causing that increase.