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Comment by adrianb | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, so much of this sounded familiar to me ... but from my own teenage years. My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).

So I'd say that no, it's not that phones are like crack. There seems to be a disconnect on the parent's expectations when children discover the possibilities of a technology that's unfamiliar to them. In the article they're talking about the ease of controlling TV time but that doesn't even compare in possibilities of communication, entertainment and education.

Heck... I'm sure if you could go back in time you'd discover the first generation to grow up with books, and their desperate parents noticing how the kids aren't ... working the fields and feeding the cattle, I guess.

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Now is really not like back then.

I was like you, spending inordinate amounts of time with computers during my teenage years.

But back then, I was learning useful skills from it.

The computer I owned had almost no games for it. All you could do was program it in either basic or assembly.

Move forward 15 years, my kid who owned a PC from around age 10 was never interested in using it as anything but an entertainment platform.

There was simply way more interesting things to do with it than understanding how it worked and bending the hardware to your will.

And this was pre-social networks.

Seems like your kid just isn’t interested in the same things you are. If the flashy entertainment were stripped away, they probably would’ve never cared about it.

And that’s okay.

I don't think it's that easy. The dopamine-traps of today can hardly be compared to the ones from twenty years ago.

Compared to the effort of creating, there's some seriously low hanging fruit these days.

The poster said their kid wasn't interested in fiddling with workings of computers before social media was a thing, so I don't think that's the problem in their specific case.

There's always been low hanging fruit. There were video games from the dawn of computing. I played games and did programming, sometimes more gaming, sometimes more coding. My mother worried generically about 'computer time'.

Many of my friends had games consoles, or computers but they only used BASIC to load games from cassettes. They turned out fine. None of them ever expressed the slightest interest in creating anything but they went on to do other useful things, like teaching or social care.

We are way, way too quick to assign complicated sciencey sounding explanations to stuff earlier generations would have described as common sense. Games are fun. Reading is fun. Talking is fun. Parents used to despair at the hours their daughters would spend on the expensive telephone instead of doing more child-y or creative things, and so what? They all worked out fine. The world is not short on creative people.

This resonates with me because when I was a kid I really enjoyed video games and I would program them into my cheap, rudimentary computer. I even sold some games I made on cassette tapes. My parents were really distressed that I was wasting my time. But-- surprise-- I had/ have a long and successful career making video games.

Now I am a parent and I tend to let my kids play a lot of game on their computer. But it is different. In the old days computers weren't really that entertaining except if you programmed them. Now they have a lot of passive entertainment value. It's a lot more like watching television or talking on the phone then the engaging hobby I had as a child. I tell them it is important to create media as well as consume media.

> I tell them it is important to create media as well as consume media.

I agree with you, this is something that I seem to believe deeply. But why is it important? Do they ask you that? What do you/would you tell them?

To create value for society and humanity. To live a free life thanks to the value you created.

That's how our family supports itself. If I were a fisherman, I would teach them to fish.

TikTok is all about creating media as well as consuming media though.

My kids (boys) are not on tiktok. I think social media is a waste of time and I actually would worry if either of them used it. They do go on Discord a lot, and that also has some problems.

I agree the vast majority of computer users do not get those benefits, since their main computer is their phone. Phones do not lend themselves to learning about computers, they provide sterile environments that try to get you to forget its a computer in the first place and scroll facebook instead.

I spent from age 7 to 12, treating computers as entertainment device and then started programming.

My dad never really pushed for me to do it, it was out of necessity. My mom actively fought it. Somehow it stuck with me and I realised the potential to automate my entire life and, later, that I could use it to make money, even if I was underage.

For my own kids, I'm planning to put them in a situation where they will need to learn how to create and be independent, without pushing them in that direction, or helping them out.

Arguably they're learning the most useful skill in the modern attention economy: online marketing.

Yup. There was a moral panic about fiction specifically in the early-to-mid 1800s. Kids (and women, too) were sitting around staring at these made-up stories instead of going out and doing real things.

Passingly comparable but a completely different scale

Chess was no exception to moral outrage either:

   "We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while at the same time it affords no benefit whatsoever to the body" - Scientific American, circa 1859

https://books.google.com/books?id=90hGAQAAIAAJ&dq=%22a+perni...

> not only playing games but also learning programming

I think the basic question is: Are you consumer or producer? When you program or using excel or writing a blog posts, you grow as a person. Apps can be both, so It's more about the ratio. You can try to make nice & creative photos for your Instagram profile or just browse and see what others are up to.

The problem is that kids will tell you that they will produce and learn, but then spend most of the time consuming, which will slowly kills their creativity.

I spent thousands of hours in front of my Vic20, C64, etc. Back then the platforms really encouraged creativity. Now I feel every single platform just encourages consumerism.

There is a substantive difference between a computer and a phone; only one is carried with you every single second of the day. Until you account for the drastic difference in how they can be used, it's pretty hard to equate your experience with a computer to a kid's experience today with a smart phone.

> My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).

Whatever, social networks are a different thing. I wouldn't mind my kids spend as much time using their gadgets as they want except for social networks. Consuming information, hacking and even some chatting are okay, Instagram addiction is not.

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