The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

Worthless study. They categorize all time spend in social media as „socializing“ even though tiktok,facebook,and instagram serve up a lot of video content that is consumed passively. Instead of asking participants, what type of media they consumed YouTube vs Instagram, they should have asked what type of activity participants perform on these platforms. Creating tiktok videos is very different from writing YouTube comments or watching Videos on Facebook. Aggregating all „gaming“ activities together further negates all potential information that could have been gained through this study. Playing Chess online or competing in and training for E-Sports Tournaments will have very different cognitive outcomes from playing candy crush. For a first approximation they should at least have differentiated between casual and non-casual gaming though further granularity would of course be even better (at the cost of requiring larger sample sizes to be meaningful). Their Crime is not in conducting a worthless survey though. Lack of time and resources might explain that. No, it is their baseless and unscientific „discussion“ of their results that should disqualify this preprint from publication in any serious journal. Speculation is not Science.

"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming had no correlation. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect."

i have kids as immediate relatives and i have taught a now 4+ year old kid to user a laptop for doing a lot of stuff. the kid cant read (blame covid) but he remembers maximize and how to go to youtube or kids websites. he also used to do Gcompris but sadly the allure of 5 minute crafts and shit shows is too great.

i am planning to pseudo-force all of the kids to learn to type. one 9 year old already does around 15 WPM.

i don't know. i had a computer growing up but smartphones didnt exist so i could not go and search for stuff. either do it yourself or drop the idea. Today its much easier but there isnt some effort to instill the fun of science and technology in them. online schools dont help