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Comment by fabbari | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see the raw data, but from their own plots you can see that 2017, 2018 and 2019 show a trend that would make the 2020 and 2021 data consistent with the trend.

As they show data comparing 2020 and 2021 to the previous years, they could have shown a matrix to compare year over year across the data.

I will wait for someone to look at the raw data and peer review the paper before jumping to conclusions.

I'm not discounting that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on child development, I would be surprised if it didn't, but I expected a bit more rigorous data analysis from this paper.

View on HN

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this.

Appreciate the caution.

We took a different approach.

Unlimited screen time.

Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible.

She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad.

Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime.

I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings.

A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when new tech is the explanation for diminishing returns in our existing systems. Children are in aggressively structured, impoverished educational systems nationwide - bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets. Teachers & administrators have raised the warning that as many as 80% of children have not engaged at all with their schooling in the past two years.

Maybe iPads aren’t the problem.

Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse.

> Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse.

What's your household income?

Enough to buy their kids tablets like it's nothing.

The most notable difference between TV and computers of various sizes is it's interactive vs. passive, so the "reducing screen time" needs more nuance to the discussion - likewise Roblox etc together as a family sounds lovely vs. isolated dopamine hits from Instagram potentially allowing your peers/strangers dictate how you should feel about yourself (wrongly in either direction).

This reminds me of all the screen time I had as a kid with my parents, taking turns on single player games (a life or a race). A lot of time spent thinking about how the next turn would go, who would be better at this level (my mom was great at some Zelda temples and I was better at others). Way more thinking happened than any other TV activity.

My father mentioned he noticed that when I played video games with my peers as a child, it was very much a social activity. I think it somewhat changed his paradigm on the medium after the 1990s having a bit of a moral panic on the topic.

I have a friend who was always the best in his class at Uni and has become a lead doctor in a major hospital. He once told me that he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day when he was a kid because his parents needed to work all the time. He turned out just fine.

I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not just dull watching.

Please define what you mean by "just fine". "Just fine" is what parents who abused their kids say. Those kids later go to therapy to understand their treatment was abusive and to deal with it, and they don't turn out just fine, they turn out traumatized. I really have no idea what the situation is, but "they turned out just fine" is to abused kids the same as saying the phrase "calm down" in a heightened situation doesn't do shit to calm the situation down.

Just fine this is the assessment of the previous poster, not that of his friend's parents.

You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words. And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.

Or maybe you suffer from survivorship bias. I mean, anecdotes are nice and all, but totally useless in determining whether unlimited screen time has negative effects or not.

And my educated guess is: it depends.

That’s how I was raised, and I turned out TV.

He might be fine now, but he missed 2-3 hours of childhood per day.

If I had to give up either my well paid job today, or my happy childhood playing outside, I would definitely be poor now.

> he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day

Surprising comment, that this is seen is unusual! I grew up in the 70s-80s (in Australia). 2-3 hours would've been pretty much universal, I think, and more likely to be >3 than <2. And half or more of it really, really bad. I've never admitted to anyone some of those deeply crappy US series from the 80s I watched, and am not starting now! Yeah, I turned out fine.. but all those hours watching crap. The movies/series had ads in them too, a lot of them.

I've been trying to make up for that, by watching just good/great stuff from around the world, no ads, during the last 10 years: see http://www.adamponting.com/movies/

What kind of things does your daughter play?

Personally I wonder whether there's a big difference between playing YouTube stimulation videos vs logic puzzle/math/mystery games vs the latest dopamine-addiction-of-day game

I think so. We don't have tablets, but we let our daughter play plenty of videogames. There is no hard limit, the limit is when we notice herself "coasting" instead of playing, but in those cases it means she's bored,so she happily explores alternatives. Playing an engaging videogame has the result of her deeply describing what she is doing (yes it's very annoying to the parent that has to acknowledge every detail, but it's a price I'm very happy to pay), as well as stimulating her duplo-building skills ("I've built a level for Yoshi!")

We also have a unlimited screen time policy with our kids

It’s been nothing but great!

They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers.

Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself.

He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt park for example. It’s the result of watching the pro’s do it on YouTube and then practicing relentlessly!

Society has this thing where everything new is stamped as bad…book, bad! Bicycles, bad! Radio, bad!, TV, bad! Computer games, bad! Drugs, bad! Sugar, bad! People are just a bunch of scaredy cats

We ought to provide kids some more nuance about the things in the world

Is there bad things to watch or do on your screens, like scary stuff or things that are incredibly dull…absolutely. But the only way to learn what that is, is to let them experience it and learn.

Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day?

And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy?

Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.

> Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day?

Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.

Thanks to the pandemic, my son has learned that screens can be boring, and it's not all that exciting anymore after too much time. He's learned to put it down and find something else to do. We don't have to enforce screen time anymore, he mostly does it himself.

> That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.

Not necessarily. Not when social media and gaming companies hire psychologist PhDs to explicitly entrap children through addictive traits

> Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.

Not really... games are designed to be incredibly addictive, can be social activities and have much lower physical consequences/withdrawals from misuse. Don't find Rat-Park as a convincing explanation for why high schools boys might prefer Fortnite to Zoom Class.

And kids will have to learn to deal with that!

It’s your job as a parent to provide exposure and teach

I tend to agree- at the very least an important hypothesis to consider

"Bicycles bad"? I don't think anyone has said that since Victorian times. Probably not then either.

If your son hadn't been into BMX/MTB/Cross (are you sure you mean halfpipe?) before the unlimited screen time policy, don't you think he might have ended up obsessed with computer games or youtube instead?

We have never had a screen time policy. I was always unlimited. He also watches a bunch of dumb crab on YouTube…but hey, I enjoy my stupid TikTok memes too…so why wouldn’t I let him.

I make fun of him when I think he does something stupid…but it’s in good spirit. My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live…my job is to enable him to live his!

And Yes, our 5y old takes a full size dirt park half pipe…has done so ever since he has been 3y or so. I wouldn’t do that myself…but he does

He also is into skateboards, snowboards, plays basketball, soccer and what not. He got me into skateboarding at 40…don’t worry though, I wear a helmet :)

In this moment I am watching him race an RC car with 30-40mph across a meadow

Earlier today he was had. oculus headset strapped on and was playing job simulator

How do you ride a dirt bike in a half pipe? I think you're mixing up terminology here. And he must be very big for his age if he can ride a full-size dirt bike.

> My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live

That happens to be exactly what your job is. Children don't know what's best for them, that's why they have parents.

You're misreading the words. It said "full size dirt park half pipe"

So what does he take to the "dirt park half pipe", and what is that? I've never seen a half pipe in a dirt park, do you ride it like a snowboard half pipe or a skate ramp?

What has the key to having them focus on “good” online content? Lots of discussion?

How have the kids not been consumed by unlimited screen time? How do you keep them interested in real activities as well?

I grew up having unlimited access to candy

Unlimited meaning whatever I could find in the house

My wife on the other side grew up not having unlimited access to candy

Guess who of the two of us as adult now can control their candy consumption and who if there is candy in the house will eat every last bit of it with 2/3 days?

Forced limiting of anything won’t teach a person how to deal with it…quite the opposite

Same with my household (at least with snacks and treats). I remember being baffled when friends would come over and gorge themselves on all the snacks at my house. Then I realized it was because they considered these things a limited resource.

To this day a quart of ice cream can last me weeks even when it’s the only treat in the house. But then my wife joins the fray and suddenly it’s like a competition to finish it in one night.

Most parents treat tablets like fancy TV sets.

The resulting harm can not be understated.

Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age.

TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume.

The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.

Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds.

My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools.

I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15.

At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.

> You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.

That was true at one point, but it is worth noting that Cartoon Network is about 30 years old now. And even before cable became the dominant TV delivery mechanism, VHS enabled lots of binge watching (and rewatching).

> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets

The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.

The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes.

The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.

> The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.

Educational spending covers a different set of domains in the US than it does in other countries. There's a lot of backfill in the social services area, for example.

That doesn't mean schools are under-funded. If it's true it implies schools are over-funded and some of their budgets should be transferred to social services.

What it means is that you can't compare funding between the US and other countries.

Then what's your benchmark for "underfunded"? How are we to determine whether we're getting value for our investment, or whether it's something other than funding that's handicapping the outcomes?

A really easy benchmark would be to check whether funding pays for basic classroom supplies (tissues, chalk, paper for assignments, etc.), or if teachers commonly pay for that stuff out-of-pocket. In the US the latter is common.

Read the thread, this is not a problem of funding but allocation of funds. I know schools that can't find $50 for supplies still find $80,000 each for 3 assistant principals who don't do any work, even in theory.

Yes, well, and that would require a willingness to maximize the population.

The U.S. asks the schools (and prisons) to deal with all societal ills. Many country filter their non-university bound population prior, and this saves a lot of wasted cost.

So basically a deregulated, market based approach. This will work great in wealthy areas with good schools with educated and supportive parents.

The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs.

What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.

The root cause is that you have more or less four choices

* private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality)

* rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district

* magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets

* poor public

At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead.

But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...

> At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts

Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems.

> But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail.

Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.

So we are in agreement that what you suggest doesn’t work.

Did they suggest something?

The existing system is the inverse of what we need.

Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence.

It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school.

We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.

Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close.

What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents constantly fighting to have their resources applied to their own children, sometimes without considering what that means overall.

If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.

One interesting way might be to allow free bussing up to 10 (or more?) miles for any child, and allow parents to choose whatever school they want. Those wealthier schools in nicer areas will have to start splitting those funds between more and more students. Of course this would never be allowed for long.

> Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close.

Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing that doesn't get you into the school, only money does.

> If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.

This is the idea of school choice. You give every kid in the state the same amount of money for school and don't gate admission by street address and the poor kid at least has a chance to go to the better school.

You would then end up with admissions criteria like test scores for the better schools, which would have some disparity in them, but how is that worse than the status quo of every rich kid going to the good school and every poor kid going to the bad school? At least there would be a path for getting out of the hole based on something other than having your parents make more money and buy a very expensive house.

And then you can work on improving admissions criteria so that promising students with low income parents get to go to better schools. Or better yet, start your own good school that does exactly this without needing permission from the parents of dumb rich kids who want your slot.

> Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases.

That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes).

Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.

As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.

> Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.

There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.

> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?

This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.

The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.

It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.

>>supportive parents.

supportive parents are the key to success, rich, poor, black, white, asian, Hispanic, gay, strait, etc.

children with rich parents may have more doors opened, and access to things, but proclaim wealth is the only factor or even the biggest factor is false.

unsupported rich parents turn out children that fail all the time, and supportive poor parents turn out children that go on to success.

A support system at home is the biggest determinate for success or failure in life.

First, stop trying to regulate education from the top.

The US doesn't regulate education from the top. Japan and France do. US education is very locally controlled.

The US has a worst of both worlds garbage system. In theory there is local control, where "local" often means at the state level and "state" is generally a thing with a GDP larger than the median country.

Then on top of that the federal Department of Education sucks billions of dollars in tax revenue out of everywhere and sends it back with strings attached. This isn't even a majority of the budgets, but it's enough that it hurts to turn the money away, and so you get all the strings.

Whereas actual "local control" would be at the level of an individual school or classroom.

>The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries

Correct. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.

>in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.

Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

Sounds like we should put an end to the systemic racism dragging down black and hispanic people.

The good news is, there’s zero cost in changing one’s mind to no longer be racist.

No. The problem with the US is that private schools exist. Once you separate kids in to private and public there is no will to improve public schooling.

“I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!”

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...

My daughter began an extremely unhealthy relationship with screens during COVID.

She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic.

She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history.

She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends.

Maybe iPads are the problems.

It's almost as if the way you use the tools is what matters.

I hope that works itself out for her.

That is fascinating and surprising; I previously considered a Darmok-like language to be implausible, but it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re experiencing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

(Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).

I'd argue we've had hints of it for centuries in the form of idioms, such as "kicked the bucket".

The important part of the Darmok episode is that the language is just catchphrases from longer stories, not that it contains some examples of that.

She’s 10, not a teenager. And I meant “cultural vocabulary.” It’s difficult for her to talk about anything but memes.

And if you haven’t seen the same memes she has, she’ll try to tell you about the YouTube videos she’s watched. If you don’t find this interesting (nobody does), she’ll stop talking to you.

Again, not a teenager. A little girl.

It sounds like she’s seeking stimulation that she doesn’t get otherwise. The iPad isn’t the cause here, it’s just the tool of the moment.

I'm also steeped on wine all day through since it provides stimulation burp I don't get otherwise, it's just the heat of the moment! Cheers!

Most people have access to alcohol and do not drink all day. Among those that do drink all day, it's common to use alcohol to self-medicate for various mental issues like depression and anxiety. Removing the alcohol will not fix the underlying problem and may simply result in a different choice of self-medication.

I'd argue that the more you're stimulated, the greater your need for stimulation becomes.

Why?

Since going [near] unlimited screen time we have seen a huge change in how our son (8yo) engages with the iPad and computer which has resulted in a much happier and healthier use of technology.

As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. He was much more open to using it for things other than games and funny videos.

I felt a bit dumb when I realised it was me putting these limits on his use of the iPad and computer that amplified how much "power" they had over his desire to use them.

Obviously there are still some limits but we follow them for ourselves as well (such as no screen time before bed, taking breaks every hour) so they haven't been an issue.

I certainly don't think the devices are the problem but more how we give these devices so much power over kids by holding this magical machine in front of them that can do so damn much then restrict access to them so all they ever want to do is very basic things like game.

> As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him.

Back in 9th grade when I was 14 or 15, we had a substitute teacher who was just out of college and our regular teacher hadn't prepared any sort of lesson plan for her, so instead of doing what we were supposed to we somehow got into a long conversation about adulthood.

The part that's always stuck with me is when one of the other students asked something like, "now that it's legal you must get drunk all the time, right?", and she described the same thing you did here about screens: All the allure was from it being forbidden, and once she was legally allowed to drink she just didn't care anymore.

In a way it sounds like a naive question but some percent of people will get drunk all the time because it is available, or over use games/devices to the detriment of everything else in their lives. I think in the end all parents can really do is try model a more balanced, well rounded life and hope their kids want that for themselves.

A relative of mine works in NYC schools and routinely notes that whenever he subs in a poorer district the teaching strategy basically revolves around making students sit and behave so they'll learn how to be obedient unskilled labor when they grow up. They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.

> They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.

Oof. A teachable moment for the instructors hopefully becomes one for the student. Good teachers are amazing; bad ones are horrible at both teaching and learning from their students.

That's one impressive extrapolation from an anecdote. I won't point at the significant amount of research that disagrees (since that would be ironic considering the parent of this thread) but instead I'll point to the anecdotes of children I know whose iPads and screen time are the source of significant problems. Sounds like your daughter is great and that you are an involved parent

Looking at the paper, the statistical story is a bit complicated.

In figure 2, the authors argue that there is a trend. But the graph seems to show the direct measurements of dependent variables with confidence intervals, and they are all non-significant. This means that there is no reason to talk about a trend, especially if the difference between significant and non-significant is not significant :)

[edit]: Would really have loved if they showed marginal effects here, removing the influence of control variables.

But the models themselves do something else: Table 3 suggests that covid was used as a binary variable to test for. So they are comparing pre-covid to covid-time and see a significant result there.

Methodologically, it doesn't seem like a bad design, but the sample size is really a bit small to have sufficient power.

Apart from that, the effect size of covid (31) seems really high, but developmental psychology is not my field so I can't say anything about that.

> In figure 2, the authors argue that there is a trend. But the graph seems to show the direct measurements of dependent variables with confidence intervals, and they are all non-significant.

From the Figure 2 caption, I'm pretty sure it's showing standard deviations (of the sample) not 95% confidence intervals (of the mean). Two samples may have overlapping ± 1 s.d. intervals despite having significant different means.

Thanks for catching this, that's even more straight-forward (and arguably less informative, but the best solution would be to have both plots of raw data and marginal effects of course).

I wonder what could be driving that trend.

The collapse of rational thinking abilities.

As evidenced by?

The large scale antivax movement for one.

Funny enough I expect Venn diagram of antivaxers and people who don't let their kid use screens to have a significant overlap. Sometimes raw distrust is justified.

This probably used to be true, but (in the US) the demographics and politics of anti-vaxxers changed significantly after 2020.

Antivaxxers tend to use scientific/rational language though, as opposed to new age vibes or what they heard from their priests. They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong.

> using a modernist mindset

Would be curious to see data on this. I most frequently see an emotional appeal against authority, vague anxieties and fears and/or slippery slope arguments.

Use of rational language does not mean that the conclusion is reasonable, nor free of fallacy. For example, people saying the covid shot interferes with long term immunity is rational and modern, just not based in fact (or misapplying fact).

There are mechanisms that could cause that (“original antigenic sin”) and it does happen with dengue fever. Of course, it’s not true here, but it was reasonable to think it might be in 2020.

And covid vaccines being spike-only may be less effective against variants than whole-virus vaccines or actual infections. But flu shots manage to be ineffective a year later with whole viruses in them, so maybe that wouldn’t help.

"They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong."

They are certainly not using a scientific mindset - they are just using language that sounds scientific, so it sounds smart and solid. But is not, when you look closer and try to find their data and sources. But common people does not do that - and fall for it. It is basically fraud, in most instances.

I doubt that, most of them just copy & paste parts from studies or headlines shared in social networks

One of my latest memories is the introduction of a test that can be used to test for Corona and flu at the same time. The relevant article headline spoke of a test to distinguish flu from Corona. This then turned into the antivaxxers saying that previous PCR tests could not distinguish corona from flu.

Antivax is literally as old as vaccines are. There’s an enormous Victorian corpus of antivax literature, complete with crazy claims that vaccines were causing leprosy. In this respect, nothing has changed.

Nor does it evince the collapse of rational thinking. If people just suspended their critical judgement and did whatever they were told unquestioningly, there would also be no antivax movement, but their compliance would not speak to their capacity for rationality, only their bovinity.

Whatever their answer ends up being will probably kill a few braincells.

The rise and fall of rationality based words in English language (rose until 1980s and has plummeted since):

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118

That seems methodologically quite questionable for the conclusions drawn. Like many blind semantic analysis attempts which consider language of a crash report for bug testing toxic due to the instances of "does not work", and "kill" and "fail". Meanwhile "I hope you enjoy eating your family then." is positive.

Falsely presenting subjective viewpoints as objective would appear more rational. It isn't the trappings which make it rational or even distance from emotions. One can rationally make "non-optimal" decisions from subjective personal costs.

ipad games from the very early age

Would that affect lower socioeconomic status more? Could go either way. I would guess it's an observer/awareness/diagnosis effect. (Lower SE getting progressively more access to child cognitive monitoring; consistent with more attention during covid)

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.

Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

Lazy parents? Don’t be hasty.

A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.

With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.

> But lockdown...

The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)

I had same intention. Even practically largely managed. And then, when I shown toddler first fairy tale, toddler started to have way more varied and imaginative games.

Turns out, it does not destroys them at all. It can actually add quite a lot.

The harm can happen if you overdo it a lot. But some watching or playing is not destroying them at all.

> There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.

I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on work, day care, extracurricular activities, etc.

Happy to read whatever evidence you have on this topic. I’m keenly interested and sure as shit not “lazy” for allowing our children time to play age appropriate games on a tablet.

> I know this is a poor form but fuck you.

Please don't do that here, regardless of how strong and legitimate your feelings are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes yes. Sorry for the vitriol. As you say, emotionally activating (:

no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books

And I think it is a valid concern even today. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad or dangerous with books, videos or computer games. But too much of anything steal time that is needed for other parts of a well rounded upbringing. If you spend too much time in front of a screen or books, you won’t spend enough time being outdoors and being physically active, or being with friends practicing social skills and conflict resolution. And the opposite is of course also true: if you spend all days doing sports or just hanging out with friends, there won’t be enough time for reading or other types of experiences.

Some people have excessive behaviors…got nothing to do with TV, Games, Sugar, etc

They just need help to learn to manage those excessive behaviors

Some behaviours are more immediately rewarding than other. It’s rare to find anyone eating too much broccoli or having problems stop rehearsing German irregular verbs.

Absolutely, even more important to learn how to manage those early in life and adopt healthy behaviors

But surprise for you — I have. And I know that it is more than possible to develop your young ones without engaging them to electronics until they reach at least 2 years old.

Please do not cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"There are evidences" - really? There are certainly people who are of the opinion, but evidence?

> lazy parents

That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.

I am a parent myself and I know very good the cost of it, and yes - I think if you enable cartoons on YouTube for your few months old kid - that’s the laziness. You always can find a way to attract and engage your baby without electronics.

You can report me and ban, I don’t mind

Parents busy with their phones for example.

This post is so typical of all scientific posts to HN.

Person posts negatively to the research and they never look at p valued or sample sizes. Also, they disregard any other possible research .

Then a few to a hundred posts refuting the parent with anecdotal evidence of both positive and negative outcomes especially when science doesn’t work in anecdotal evidence which is the point of science and it basically shows that they didn’t read the story either.

The big problem is that science isn’t one sided. That papers are cherry picked from preprints or even Confrence and journals where one out of ten papers in a Confrence or a journal publication refute the article regardless.

And someone always posts a message like yours without actually reading the parent post.

In the parent they suggest a greater trend spanning 2017 onward which isn't being mentioned. Large or small p value isn't the issue here

And someone always posts a reply like yours without etc. etc.

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