Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well:

> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.

My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.

> It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading.

A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime.

The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."

Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good at. Reading and academic performance generally has a snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it more, which makes you even better at it, and so on.

My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun?

I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.

“My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements.”

Nice. I found almost all of the peers of my kid(s) had virtually no restrictions on phone usage. Needless to say that did not help my efforts.

> it’s also kids in elementary school

Maybe it’s because their parents are spending more time on screens (… and probably working due to the stagnation of wage vs. prices) instead of reading to/teaching their kids

The author completely forgot that tablets exist, so their credibility is quite thin.

And this article isn't about you. It's about average people, not 1% elites like you. Average people don't have "1 hr a day of screen time", they have 4hrs or more.

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