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Comment by throwaway31131 | Hacker News Reader

That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

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I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.

yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.

Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.

I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is that the entertainment was finite, in this case because it was only available for a set duration.

That Dragonball Z came on for a single episode created a dead zone where it made sense to do homework and it wasn't pulling teeth when it came time to sit down for dinner with my family (something we both would be very privileged to have in our youth btw).

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