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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Computer games are also addictive. Back in my days soccer and basketball were addictive as well. I vividly remember my grandpa despising my uncle for having obsession with playing soccer and not spending more time on his homework.

It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.

Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless things ?

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I spent my youth with my nose buried in books, and for a couple years it had become a problem. My parents would force me to stop reading books and spend some time talking to them, looking outside, doing anything as a kid. I would read a book at any chance I could get, I'd even sneak them into bed and use a dim flashlight to read, anything to get me out of where I was at that time. At the time I hated my parents and everything they did. In hindsight I was in a complicated phase of my life (for reasons besides this post) and I needed the kick to go out and get out of my own head. Should we ban books so kids can't get addicted? Parenting is hard.

With a book at least a parent knows what their child is consuming. I wouldn't mind if my child was consuming books (as long he stayed healthy with activity and social connection).

With the firehose of social media its whatever the providers algorithm decides it wants the user to consume.

My 11 year old son is limited to 30 mins of YouTube per day, 15 mins of Snapchat. TikTok is banned. Overall phone usage is limited to 3 hours per day, and PS5 is the same. And it's still not enough for him.

And yes, he uses these in conflict with the provider terms.

Without any exposure he lacks any commonality with his peers (who, as far as I can tell, have unfettered access to devices, apps and video games) however he will forego food, water, bathroom, hygiene if not forcibly limited.

And he agrees with statements like "I just can't stop myself" and "I feel like I've got to have it" and "I don't know what to do unless I have it". Which makes me very sad. When he goes to play with friends, he makes a bee line for those same devices and apps that he's limited from accessing at home.

He cannot self-limit his consumption and billion dollar companies are using his mind as a disposable fuel to make money for no better purpose than profit. I honestly don't know how the folk at those firms live with themselves (other than luxuriously).

I honestly wish these platforms did not exist at all, for the arguments they cause.

It's not only that. Books are not ads. There can be bad books filled with stupid ideas and garbage stories but the purpose of literature is not to advertise something.

Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.

The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.

That’s almost 7 hours or screen time, nearly a full time job. Does he go to school as well?

Social media is correlated with many negative issues. Like depression, suicide, etc. meanwhile playing sports is correlated with many positive outcomes.

It’ll take some time to prove causation. But I think we have enough evidence to know that curtailing social media will improve lives.

Cue the usual correlation and causation caveat. Also, playing sports is not all sunshine and roses. If you're an overweight kid, which is even more common these days, it's hard and can cause feelings of shame and inadequacy.

I’m not sure if you have children.

Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects)

Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that they are concerned their kids are becoming addicted before they turn 10.

Kids are as different from each other as adults can be, so there's not really a one size fits all solution. That said, we've found that setting limits works fine. At least for the ages under 10.

There's a limit in duration and time they can use a screen, both of which are easy to keep taps on. It's 5-10 minutes before leaving for school, if and only if they are all ready to leave. It encourages them to be done quicker and it's lost time anyway. The other block is while we're cooking. That started out as a way to keep overactive little kids busy and out of the kitchen, because the parent is busy and it's dangerous to be in the kitchen when cooking.

We also have limits on what they can do on the screen. They need to spend a minimum time on some educational apps, before they are free to do whatever the machine allows. They are on Android tablets restricted by Google Family Link, but things like YouTube (YT Kids for the youngest) are still available.

I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities. Even so, it's very limited because they als use it to just veg out. But one kid basically learned to count and spell in English from BBC videos, before they could do so in their native language. There is some advantage to just letting them go.

The time limits turned out to be pretty good motivators to learn to tell the time too. They are now pretty good at keeping taps on the time themselves.

We have changed the limits a bit over time. Mostly stretching them to new areas of interest. And kids are different, so what worked for the eldest sometimes didn't work for the youngest. They do like their tablets a bit more than I'd like, but I'm not worried about addiction. They're honestly using it far less than I watched TV in the age of cathode-ray tubes.

> I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities

I wish that was how it was used, however my own experience (and that of parents I speak to) is that the firehose is determined by the algorithm, not the individual which subsequently drives the habits and interests.

For example, my son will want to look up how to do something in Minecraft. Ace, he's using the resources available to him to research and learn how to do something.

Then he's effectively spammed with highly addictive content (relating to Minecraft), with sound effects, music, editing visual effects and voice over from some "creator" whose only goal is to monetise.

Now he sits watching endless (if I don't stop him) clips, and if I ask him what he's watched, he doesn't remember (and he's also highly irritated that I've stopped him consuming).

This stuff is, at least, just as addictive to a young mind as pleasure drugs, and worse, it's available without any barriers and pushed towards the consumer at great speed and volume.

At least with TV, someone somewhere made a decision about what to air. With the current technology, anyone chooses what they publish and the algorithm chooses what you'll consume (based on what will increase your addiction).

The time limits take pretty good care of that, here. I really don't mind them watching braindead stuff for a limited time. Especially so if that's the price for watching something interesting too.

It's also slightly curated, with age limits on videos provided by YouTube, but I mostly care about that to weed out shock videos and extreme violence.

Agree all kids are different. Our daughter is less affected than our son.

But in both cases, they are happier and more creative (as kids should be) when we remove devices altogether.

I’m not sure what curation you’re talking about. YouTube kids is just ads, for example. It’s not violent, but it’s also not … not ads.

YT Kids (the app at least) has a setting where only videos and channels are allowed that are whitelisted by the parent. We used to limit it to stuff from BBC Cbeebies, Numberblocks & Alphablocks, Sesame Street, Disney, and similar stuff in their own language and in English.

I think nowadays we just limit it to the age restrictions (<=4, 5-8, 9-12), so they don't see stuff that gives them nightmares. Everything else can be taken care of with the time limit.

It honestly sounds like you're circling around the idea that the internet just isn't a good place for children (or adults for that matter). Wouldn't an attempt to ban a specific problem of the internet just be dodging the real problem?

If the internet as we've made it over the last 20 years is a breeding ground for addictive content and advertising, why not just stop using it? If we're going to ban anything because of this problem it should be situations that effectively force us to use the internet or be left behind.

Kids shouldn't have to be online for school. Adults shouldn't have to be online to get a job. Banning those kinds of situations would at least leave the door open for individuals to decide if using the internet regularly is really worth it to them.

Because it isn’t the internet, it’s ad driven content services.

I used to be concerned about my kid's video game use a bit, though more Fortnite and Rocket League than Roblox, as we blocked the latter due to the abundance of user-created content and chatting with strangers (because why on earth would you have your 12 year old on the Internet with strangers? We blocked chat other than "quickchats" in the others.). Then he hit high school, and at this point, I miss the days where that was his computer use I was concerned with.

To be fair though, playing sports had a lot to do with breaking the video game cycle -- when you have 12 hour days between school and 2 sports teams, suddenly worrying about your "dailies" and other hooks these games have just stops being an option.

I didn't know any kids who were addicted to soccer in the sense of spending 15+ hours 365 days per year playing soccer. It's just not feasible physically.

Ok, fellow southern European and Latin American HN folks, help me out here.

I am Southern European by the way and I played more soccer than most kids. Even so, it wasn't possible for me to take soccer out of my pocket when I went to the toilet or when I was in bed and should be sleeping or when I was in class.

Football was practically the only sport we could play (anything can be a ball if it can be kicked) but you can only play at recess and after school outside. And most of the time is hanging out with kids learning social norms (you lose sometimes, somebody may be better than you, it is mostly a team effort, rules are for a reason,…). I’m glad I got to spend my childhood offline.

Being addicted to playing computer games and using social media are not the same as being obsessed with playing sports and exercising.

One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.

The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.

>It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.

Thing is, people of all ages are using social media. Grownups recognize it as dangerous to themselves too.

I really think this is less of a rock and roll situation and more of a tobacco situation.

Computer games certainly slot into this. Soccer and basketball do not.

Biologically there’s just no comparison to the dopamine bath your brain takes when using social media or video games.

This is quantifiably not the same thing. If an entire generation was stressed out and killing themselves over Soccer we’d surely be doing something about it.

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