Comment by crmrc114 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crmrc114 | Hacker News Reader

So, per this page:

"The study followed them over the next 2.5 years, bringing them into the lab at 18 months and 3.5 years. At the 18-month and 3.5-year visits, toddlers took part in a computer task in which they were trained to search for a red apple amongst a varying number of either blue apples (easy search), or blue apples and red apple slices (difficult search). An eye tracker monitored their gaze and visually rewarded the child when they found the red apple, allowing them to perform the task even though they were too young to verbally describe what they were doing."

No discussion as to any other effect of screen use. Why did this need study? Humans who use a thing more often are better at working with thing?

Better studies on kids with screen time focuses on spatial development: https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

"Greater daily digital usage was associated with lower visual spatial performance. Spending even small amounts of time daily with integrated technology was associated with lower WPPSI-IV overall intelligence test scores, and visual spatial scores. Those with the least amount of resources are at the most risk for lower visual spatial abilities"

In addition there is a key qualitative element: are all uses equal? Is watching Teletubbies or Paw Patrol equal to nature documentaries? Is playing addictive repetitive games different than those solving puzzles or following a story? Is videoconferencing with grandma the same or better or worse as doing a math training game?

The key issue often is the parents' role and guidance. Let your kid aimlessly click through YouTube? Or are you fostering their skills and challenge and motivate them to learn something new?

Exactly what I thought. A few years ago, I was in a hotel where one family gave their kids tablets to watch movies during breakfast. I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.

Thats lazy parenting IMO. My 2 yo son was not inteoduced to tablets or phones because there are so many more things they could do. He loves for example snap in puzzles where a lot of faculties develop but almost anything physical is beneficial at this age. There is time for computers and tablets later on, whats the rush?

How about both? I have older children 21 and 22, and I have some new ones, ages 1 and 5. I have always done as much as I can with my children. I also have learned to set them up with an activity and let them go at it without my constant supervision. They don't always look for outside answers, but instead figure it out on their own. I was anti-TV and computer with my older children, but I still allowed it, and they are doing great (one a physics major, the other in medical school). My current children seem to be doing just fine too compared with their peers.

Since you were anti-tv you probably kept an eye on what they were watching. TV or tablets aren’t the concern themselves, but the content pushed on them. I learned quite a bit from TV back in the 90s, luckily back then I didn’t have access to addictive junk.

Yeah this is an important detail that is typically glossed over: the device is just a content delivery platform, and the content is what really matters. As a parent I find that policing content is a much more challenging and stressful task than simply managing screen time.

Yes, I curated their content, but I do believe too much of any one thing is bad. We didn't get a phone until I was a 11 or 12, not because of beliefs, but money. I became a real bookworm to the detriment of getting outside and exercising for a few years. I try to mix everything up a bit. I also believe in a diversity of intelligence. Each one of my children has a different angle on intelligence. It's amazing to see the different manifestations even within the same family. I think what we think is good content evolves every 5 to 10 years; a study comes out refuting a solidly held confidence in a technique or manner of raising children. I think if you keep it diverse, and try and challenge yourself, your kids and you gain tremendously.

As a parent myself who is guilty of this from time to time, I think it’s easy to judge those moments without seeing the full picture. Nowadays parents are expected to attend to kids basically 24/7 and keep them engaged, etc,. Just because you saw that happen at breakfast doesn’t mean it was happening all day, every day. Maybe they were out visiting museums or nature parks for the rest of the day.

There are mornings when you just want a quiet breakfast while you’re on vacation without an embarrassing meltdown happening and, for better or worse, the most effective way to accomplish that is by giving your kid a movie or show to watch on the iPad for 30 minutes while you eat.

People shake their heads when the kids watch a tablet during breakfast, they'd also shake their heads if the child misbehaved and disrupted their own breakfast. Sometimes there's not a third option. Most parents would be delighted if they could simply ask their children to be well-behaved and eat in a crowded public space.

I don’t think people really shake their heads at kids disrupting meals (unless it’s really egregious). If a kid screams or something, people naturally look, but you don’t know what they’re thinking. They could just be wondering what’s going on, or remembering their life when they had kids that age. You have no idea. Mostly I would think that the parents are doing their best and they have enough to deal with without me also passing judgment.

For sure, I think everyone who's had kids understands, and a lot of people who haven't also understand. But I've read plenty of comments like the one above that refer to the disruption rather than the placation, and I think people have different definitions of egregious, as well.

Oh they do. A lot. And they complain about it on the Internet too, a lot.

But also, as a parent, I am kind of inclined to hear and accept that my kid being noisy or something is sewhat disrupting other tables. In all honesty, sometimes it disrupts me.

I am significantly less inclined to accomodate randoms whose issue is completely made up problem with phone or tablet during hotel breakfast. I do not care at all. I use tablet to make hotel meal pleasant as opposed to disciplinary issue, for me and for people around other tables. These people don't have problem or pain, they are making up problems in their heads.

It is just that part that makes this complain particularly dumb. Of course public situation is when you are much more likely to use phone. And of course in grand scheme of things it does not matter at all. It is one of millions situations you solve in one way or the other, nit exactly queen visit.

A third option is to systematically beat the children whenever they deviate from approved behavior. ("Beat the sin out of them.") The guardians will receive lots of undeserved admiration for their obedient children. The children may suffer from life-long emotional problems.

I do not recommend this option.

I've seen exactly this with some friends and their kids. If they're at a more adult place to eat the kids are allowed to watch cartoons so they don't get bored and start wanting to leave before the meal's even started. The rest of the time they're limited in their screen time, read books with their parents and go out to all sorts of fun places like nature parks etc.

It's lazy to judge parents just because you see a 30 minute slice of their day

We improved this by always carrying color pens and a minimal playdoh set (couple of colors and tools). First they paint, then they do playdoh, and then, if the meal isn’t over they watch cartoons.

We have almost completely eliminated devices with this tactic because by the time they are done with those two the meal is almost over. And if it isn’t then we also sometimes tell them that they must just wait or engage in conversation with us.

We are lucky that they like painting and playing with playdoh, though.

When I was a kid, we carried a game system to restaurants and we usually played while waiting for the meal to arrive.

The game system was a notepad and pen. The game selection included Hangman, Tic-Tac-Toe, and dots-and-boxes.

We made the mistake of letting our first born watch Mother goose club on the tablet during meals, the upside is she always at her food but then we realized that absent the tablet she would throw a tantrum and refuse to eat and if we left the house and didn't have the tablet that was another mess. We made the decision to get rid of the tablet as well as any electronic stimuli during meals, food time is food time with conversation. We invested in books, playdoh, puzzles, crafts, bug catching kit etc and 2 kids later we have no complaints.

I would also be surprised if tablet during breakfast would destroyed the kids in the future in any realistic way.

This is really just nitpicking parental decisions that basically don't matter.

I hope you are aware, that this discussion is not about 'destroying children'. It is about the effects of early touch screen usage and if it is beneficial for the development of a child. So the question is if a kid would do better or worse, not if one kid would be destroyed.

That these things have an effect shows the study above. In addition, you have to evaluate the magnitude of an effect. For example, not every high IQ person who wants to have a well-paid job has one even though a high IQ is known to have a positive impact on reaching that goal. Similarly, not every toddler who uses touchscreens regularly will show increased anti-social behavior, even though that might be a related effect.

To elaborate, it completely absurd to fret over hotel breakfast touch screen usage.

First, it is extremely unlikely that sight of touch screen does any harm at all for development of children. The possible small effects are quite unlikely to show up unless the kid is using them a lot, to the exclusion of other activities.

Second, you placed emphasis on during as if hotel meal were the special one place where parent would exclude screen even if the kid is overusing it everywhere else. I hope you are aware, hotel/restaurant is the place where movie is more likely to be used then normal. Restaurant time is not special sacred non-screen time, it is the screen time.

You also wrote:

> I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.

I can hardly imagine harm. I can hardly imagine kids to gain on it. In all likelihood, taking in all minuscule effects touch screens have on kids, watching movie during hotel breakfast is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Running around causing total havoc in the hotel's dining room, like we did as kids 30 years ago, might have been beneficial for us, but I'm sure it wasn't helping with my parents' high blood pressure condition. And I'm sure other guests would appreciate more us sitting quietly and looking at the screens if it was possible at that time.

From watching friends and family in the last ten years, I would like to add economical class and education level (maybe what we would call cultural capital) as one factor to this.

It might sound a bit fascist, but factors that is commonly questioned and scorned nowadays such as screen time, sugar intake, lack of outdoors activity and not wearing bike helmets are more common among families with generally lower status. The more upper middle class a family gets, the more important it seems to be to avoid doing harm to our children. Maybe mostly to save face among our peers?

My point is that kids with more screen time may overlap with not being read to as much, not given as much attention to tell their family about their thoughts, not challenged to exercise their ability to focus, and so on. In a very general sense.

> No discussion as to any other effect of screen use.

That's not what the study is about. The study was about a particular effect, and they published their conclusions. The need for such a study can be debated but there is a difference between "common sense" and a proper peer-reviewed study. And to be published by what looks like a serious journal, I guess it wasn't so obvious to experts.

I am fed up with articles that proves a controversial point and then the reporter has to add a "but...". Maybe useful on prime time TV, so that people who are unfamiliar with scientific work don't get the wrong idea, but this is a university, and people reading this are supposed to be familiar with the scientific process.

Maybe some other group will later use the results of all these study and say something like "even though kids with more screen time are better at video games[citation], there is no significant improvement in related activities, we also noticed a decrease in...". But that's another study.

My interpretation of the summary was that the researchers will follow the same kids later in life and see the impact. They are just reporting the current results. Per the article

"What we need to know next is whether this attention difference is advantageous or detrimental to their everyday life."

A lot of the comments on HN imply that the researches found a negative effect, when they did not conclude that.

Yeah, right. “Kids who spend a lot of time on tablet are better at playing a tablet game”

Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence. If it were true that usage of touchscreens cause lower intelligence test scores, we would have seen this show up as a population-wide reduction in scores as touchscreens became widely available. No such effect can be observed. Instead, the children who were neglected with random household items to play with by themselves or TVs to watch by themselves are now neglected with touchscreens to play with by themselves, and studies such as yours misattribute the effects of childhood neglect to touchscreen usage.

I agree that this study doesn't measure anything useful, but in my circles, I have heard of and seen children younger than 2 years old learn to read by playing touchscreen games and children younger than 3 learn the names of states, capitals, and other trivia from playing touchscreen games. Achieving that is possible without touchscreens, but it would require an incredible amount of work from the caretaker.

Yes, unless I'm greatly misunderstanding the tables, what the study actually measured is that:

* Spatial intelligence is positively correlated with socio-economic status.

* Screen (TV + Digital) time is negatively correlated with socio-economic status.

Concluding from this that spatial intelligence is negatively correlated with screen time is dubious. Similar reasoning is used to promote all kinds of class-correlated fashions, e.g. breast feeding.

> Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence.

I think their method does count as a natural experiment and as such does have empirical evidence. From the article:

“Preschoolers from a 2010 study (612 children) were compared to preschoolers from a 2014 study (492 children) because of the digital explosion into everyday life that occurred between the two time periods. Television viewing patterns have remained similar over time, but technological device usage has increased.”

> If it were true that usage of touchscreens cause lower intelligence test scores, we would have seen this show up as a population-wide reduction in scores as touchscreens became widely available.

Exposure in formative years is vastly different than adult exposure. The affected cohort in the study is now only in middle school and population wide effects will have a lagged appearance.

> Your "better" study is not an experiment

Strictly speaking, the discussed research of toddlers using touchscreens is not an experiment also. In experimental setup researcher must control independant variable (touchscreen use). For this research it would mean to get a group of toddlers, split them randomly into two groups, give touchscreens to one group and some "placebo" to other. Researchers didn't do that, they split toddlers into two groups on the ground of the existing touchscreen use. So what they did is called a "correlational research", not an "experiment".

Correlation doesn't allow to speak about casuality. Maybe children ability to a visual search drive them to use touchscreens. Maybe touchscreens teach them to search. Maybe some other factor (like parenting style, or family income) teach them to love touchscreens and to effectively search for visual stimuli.

To be frank, I do not like this reseach much. It is correlational reseach, and there were no attempts to exclude interfering variables: if toddler used touchscreen more, than he/she would be better at tasks on a screen, wouldn't he/she?

Sooo you’re telling me that if I give my toddler a pain brush he’ll be the next davinci? Could you follow up with some more specific direction? I mean if I want to raise a pop-star does the microphone need to be plugged in or does using it like a lightsaber also get them closer to the target?

Sorry for being silly in my reply, but the reason we have studies confirming simple “obvious” to you correlations is that we can’t just rely on random peoples intuition without proof. Even simple things need to be studied and sometimes our expectations are broken and we discover that no, everything isn’t made up of combinations of earth, water, fire and wind, even though that was what was “obvious” to the smartest elders of all the lands.

Thats a black or white fallacy: I think carried to the extreme it would be like me making the claim that kids who use tablets will become software engineers. My argument, is that screen time makes kids better at interacting with screens.

For clarity to your point; I think it would be hard to argue that among kids tested playing piano that those who had an interest and practiced more would sound better statistically. Your toddler may not be davinvi, but they should end up with better fine motor control and maybe learn to enjoy expressing themselves in that medium.

> Why did this need study?

The answer is probably the usual: money.

Someone got a "use it or lose it" budget.

The same sort of stuff was said about the 80s kids in my cohort because we were "latchkey" kids and watching lots of TV. It was bullshit then and bullshit now.

I don't put much stock in intelligence assessments. There's no real standards around the exams. My school placed you in cohorts based on IQ, and it was pretty obvious that the scoring system was measuring something other than your innate ability. My dad worked in civil service for many years, where promotions and appointments are governed by exams that were a combination of grammar tests and proxies for IQ exams. I didn't see any evidence that those assessments did anything other than reducing patronage and making it harder for non-native speakers to move up the ladder.

You don't know that. The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years. Researching the causes and dynamics of these changes are very hard to study and even harder to correlate and then much more to prove causation. We basically don't have the scientific means or theory for this type of long term changes.

It could very much be that kids that grew on TV have some other thought patterns that caused the reality we live in today. It's extremely confounded on so many things. We cant really know for sure anything about it.

The fact that some knowledge and intelligence is not accessible to science (today) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that we don't have the tools to study it, yet.

> The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years.

I doubt it. We reward some behaviors differently in 2020 vs 1980, and have different inputs from an information perspective. But people are wired the same way. The "racist uncle" stereotype of 2020 was "Archie Bunker" in 1980.

God damn it. I've been searching for a way to loaf of my very high IQ my whole life. I wish someone had told me this 30 years ago lol. Join the civil service.

And no, high iq is not particularly useful in other areas, not when I don't have the ability to work hard on anything except what I'm actually interested in. So formal education was painful.

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