Toy Story 5 shows 'terror' of children's screen addiction, says Tom Hanks

Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium.

in this context, 'Disney' represents a plurality, and it's likely that there's people at Disney that want their kids off screens

It's important to be clear and set boundaries, but there is always that one friend where they go to and just watch YT shorts until deep in the night falling asleep like a zombie. Moreover, my kid is often the only one with a locked phone (gets 2 hr a day which is also the time he is on the bus). I think it is already insanely much. But he still wants to plays Minecraft as soon as he comes home, this is also quite obsessively (he's in a lot of SMPs). Again it's nice he has a passion but too bad it's for a screen. My daughter in contrast can just play in the garden for hours.

Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.

Not to mention that basically everybody around them disappears into screens on trains/buses. It’s emotional abandonment. We are not here any more.

When I make eye contact, the children light up. But the parents often don’t seem to like random strangers to make contact with their child like that. That I have to avoid or break up contact that the child themselves obviously enjoys, while their caretakers disappear into screens, then breaks my heart a second time.

We have over 100 years of developmental psychology research to know that this is bad. Worse than bad.

Typing this on public transport.

Suffice it to say, repetition isn't the same frustration that it can be for adults

During development, children are in a condition where their fears are predominant. The world is big and scary and they need conditions and support to begin to process their emotions, all of them, into what I consider a “rainbow.” Each should be adjacent to another, as life is best lived with access to and the benefit of each when appropriate circumstances call them from their “library” so to speak.

It’s not “forcing” a child to sit through it, as much as it is “presenting” them with an outside work of art which REFLECTS BACK TO THEM a validation of their experience along different stages of development.

One of the best examples of what I’m talking about is the book “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. It is canon. Perhaps you had shitty parents who didn’t “make you” engage with literature.

An interviewer once asked him “Don’t you think the book is too scary for kids?” His reply lambasted the question with “What is wrong with you? Were you never a child? EVERYTHING IS SCARY TO A CHILD.”

So, there it is buckaroo. You may not like the tone of my response, but I think your question was phrased in a flippant and pedantic manner to begin with. Fire, meet fire, and you’re welcome.

Take a movie like the Godfather, it had a 8.4 seconds average shot length compared to the Departed 3 second average shot length.

I've noticed my parents no longer having the patience for movies with longer average shot length despite having been young during the era when movies were less fast paced.

[1] https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/movie/2732f3f8-f0d4-43f7-a0...

[2] https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/movie/9d17ce68-0d48-45cc-89...

But here is the thing: lots of parents (or people in general) are not able to use common sense and they need to be told absolute statements, because they will break them anyway, just like speed limits. So if you told them "absolutely 0 screen time" they will give them anyway some here and there screen time - which is fine. If the "expert" writing books, speaking on podcast or showing up in reels tells you "ah it's fine, here and there is fine, just use common sense" you will have an army of parents thinking that 2 hours YT for a toddler is "here and there" because "hey, it's not 6 hours a day like my neighbor!"

First there is the challenge where "sceen time" is a statement that bundles together a whole bunch of different behavior, that affects children differently.

My kids when they watch tv they completely disconnect: I have to pause the tv to ask if they want to eat something or they won't hear me, so of course we drastically limit that one (I didn't have that problem, is that because I watched way more tv than them?)

At the same time, I don't let my kids play any videogame on a tablet or phone because I am a gamer and I recognize that quality of games on phones is terrible, it's an attention grab (there are exceptions).

I do let my kids play videogames quite freely though (nintendo switch, sometimes steam games). The difference in engagement is enormous: they play together, they roll on each other and make jokes and afterwards they create something with their toys that's similar to something they liked in the videogame.

Yesterday my daughter got a new videogame (the new yoshi): she played way more than any other day in her life, but she was DEEPLY invested in it, loving every minute,you could see passion. I sat near her, working from my laptop, she cuddled against me and proceeded to tell me everything she was discovering and her thought process to solve some of the more complex levels. These are the situations that I don't understand: how can that be bad? I did not stop her, I let her play as much as she wanted. It doesn't happen often and it's so rare to see her finding the right videogame (looks like puzzle is her genre!)

What's the difference between doing that for a book you love and a videogame you love?

The "does smoking caused cancer" question took about 20 years to be settled, I believe between 1950 and 70 or something like that. And yet, a lot of people already knew already in the 20s that smoking does all sort of weird things to your throat. So the common sense take got to the right answer much faster than scientists.

Likewise with screens. Common sense tells us that 1) we FEEL the distractions and the addictions, common sense says that children will too, 2) we KNOW that the companies building these products have an interested in distracting us, common sense says that they will act on it.

But then we have takes like "akshually if you read the papers".

- Homer Simpson

I don't think screen free kids won't miss anything by not watching Bluey for 20 mins, OTOH not so great parents will keep pushing those 20 mins further and further with worse and worse content, so I guess it's just easier to say any screen time is bad since the border between reasonable/good screen time and bad screen time is very small.

I’m moderately disciplined and yet - my level of athleticism is directly related to how far away the trail is from my house. When it was 15 minutes away, I had to drive so my run was 45 minutes. Now I don’t so my run is 1:14. Same discipline, better athleticism.

30 years ago both a good and bad parent could kick their kids out of the house and they’d go get in a bike with the neighborhood kids and explore. Now. It’s soooo much more work to get your kid focused on an activity that’s not a screen, because if you kick them out of the house changes are they’ll just got find a screen (if it’s even legal or socially legitimate to do so anymore). The idea that you can “educate your kids” to ignore all those incentives is bananas. Part of educating your kids should be finding a way to put them in environments to learn themselves, and those ways are increasingly gone. Parents don’t understand the new world as well as their kids. It’s probably illogical for most kids to listen to their parents too much anyways. Which also ignores the fact that kids are inclined to do the opposite of what their parents say. I have no idea what my parent do could have done to keep me from smoking. Educate me on the dangers? They did.

To say that all parents got worse in the age of social media and YouTube, and ignoring that the environment fundamentally changed to put so much more ownus on the parents to constantly fight incentives.

I don’t know what the solution is, but to call it bad parenting is, I dunno.

I find German public tv (I live in Germany) actually has relatively high quality programming for kids. I rather have my kids watch TV than streaming (when they’re allowed screen time), we bought a TV after almost 20 years of not having one.