Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests | Hacker News Reader

Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests

theguardian.com

93 pointsBrajeshwar38 comments

The article title claims causality. The article body says the researchers didn't claim causality:

  The review, conducted by researchers from four UK universities known as the Action on Digital Device Immersive Conditions Team, did not establish causal links between screen use and specific developmental conditions.

That's a problem because "using a screen as a babysitter" likely correlates with overworked poorer parents and thus a whole host of other developmental problems

Even for upper middle class parents, "using a screen as a babysitter" just means you're more stressed and have less hands around. My kiddo has not seen a screen at the age of 2, but that's just because he has two parents at home at 5pm everyday.

I made the error of wasting my time (ahem... it was fun while it lasted, at least) not having a kid until I turned 49... which meant our parents were too elderly (or dead) to help (my mom had me at 35) in any significant capacity, and the rest of my relatives (as it just so happened) already had plans to move away to FL before he was conceived.

This has resulted in so much stress (especially in the 3's and 4's, because he still doesn't sleep through the night in his own goddamn bed) that I arguably lost a job from it... 50+ year old bodies are simply not well-capable of handling toddlers for the more-than-fulltime-weekly hours that they require

I'm sure there are fringe benefits though but damn

I don't think child rearing is supposed to be as difficult as modern society makes it.

As you pointed out, you don't have a lot of help in raising your kid. You're expected to do it mostly with your partner (or god forbid alone).

They've done some studies of hunter gather tribes to determine who handled babies the most. Turns out the kids' actual parents only handled the kids for about half the time (I think even a little less)! The term for it is "alloparenting".

Evolution did not prime us for this level of child care. Good luck to you!

Even without going that far back, I imagine it was easier when parents kicked the kids out of the house and told them not to come back until dinner time.

> Even without going that far back, I imagine it was easier when parents kicked the kids out of the house and told them not to come back until dinner time.

Did people ever do that with under-twos? Or under-fives?

The big difference in more recent times was community and extended family help, and at least one parent having more time at home.

Evidently there was quite a bit of handwringing in the 1950s that the "nuclear family" was bad for children and would lead to more divorce, since there were no longer grandparents and aunts and uncles around to help with childrearing.

Interesting. If so, they were right.

They were not wrong.

I'm EXTREMELY jealous of my partner's older cousins who are now grandparents and specifically stipulate that their kids drop their grandkids off at their house every other weekend (!!!!) so that they can devote it to themselves.

If that's not a good-marriage hack, then I don't know what is! And their parents KNEW it! Because when that's NOT happening, the weekends are almost 100% kid-focused. It is absolutely overwhelming, even with breaks here and there.

I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900

The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.

I'm of an age to have grown up like that, and one of the real drags was having to take my 3-5 year-old sibling along on whatever activity the rest of us were up to. ("But mom, we're building a fort - do I have to?") The other kids with younger siblings did the same. As I recall, at five I wasn't to leave the yard by myself, but as a mixed-age group of ~3-11 year-olds, yeah: we ran around all over the place together. The older kids took on responsibility for the younger ones.

So, yeah, that's eighties suburbia, and my sister wasn't less than two. On the other hand, if there'd been a larger age difference (and, maybe if I'd been a girl? My mum was more progressive about gender roles than most of her contemporaries, but still) I expect she'd have been entrusted to me earlier. Starting at the age of ~4 I'd been left alone with my sister for up to an hour while she napped, with the instruction to run next door to get my mother if she woke up.

By the way, I think all of that was fine.

It was not like that in the London suburb I grew up in in the 80s. I think it was more common in smaller and poorer towns - maybe because people had less space at home. I agree the age gap probably affects it a lot. Keeping an eye on a younger child at home with help near by is very different from going out.

Kids spending a lot of time in front of the TV was already a concern in the 80s so screen time was definitely a problem back then. IIRC the average amount of time children spent watching TV a day was about five hours a day in the UK.

Of course. Regions and cultures and families varied all over the place - and still do today. I wasn't trying to make any kind of universal claim, just explaining how our social group handled the "but what do you do about younger kids?" question the GP asked.

Yah. Screen time (and, once I got older, specifically video games) caused a lot of parental angst amongst my peer-group's parents, too. My family didn't have a TV, so I read lots of books. Funnily enough, I (later) ran across Victorian-era think-pieces about how books were damaging to young people for all of the same reasons that people are (now, and back when we were kids) concerned about screens.

By the way, this same subject came up in another thread a few days ago, and I had this to say:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599632

In a lot of old pictures you can see a "big sister" carrying a toddler around. Older kids helped mom and dad.

Now? Good luck getting a teenager to clean out the dishwasher.

That stage does not last very long and kids require a lot less attention as they get older. if you are still at that stage I imagine its tough, but it will get a lot easier pretty soon and it is definitely worth it.

And banning screens for the first several decades of your child's life correlates with being a billionaire.

This happens a lot in mainstream science and journalism. Another famous example is the often misquoted study (from McKinsey?) about DEI improving company results. The authors didn’t claim causality, since the most likely explanation is just that already large companies were more likely to adopt policies that discriminate based on race or gender, simply to keep up with trends. But virtually all news articles and company policies mistakenly referenced the study as if it had established causality.

The ADDICT, nice

I don't like the screen time generalization either. What about watching a tv show with a parent explaining? What about trying a videogame with a controller on an actual game console, experiencing remote controlling something in a screen (Spoiler alert: amazing results, I have a video with my daughter shocked at age 2).

Smartphones used as a babysitter with a f2p game is probably garbage time

the guidance in TFA addresses this

> The article title claims causality.

Maybe they edited the title since you saw it, but currently there's no claims of causation unless you think "can" and "will" are synonyms.

'can damage' means 'sometimes causal'.

If there's no causal link, they should say 'associated with' or 'correlated with'.

"The babies' stress reactions during smartphone use were comparable to those in the 'still-face' situation—that is, intentional ignoring." https://www.pmu.ac.at/aktuelles/detail/wenn-das-smartphone-d...

When you see the following sentence: "She said parents should not be blamed for a problem they did not create."

associated with the deceptive title, you can know for sure that this article has a hidden objective, and that there is a big lobby behind it. Something like "internet, digital, ... is bad, there should be regulation for that".

Because, let's be serious, if the causality was there (it is not the case), the obvious conclusion is that the parents are not doing their job or at most not well educated enough on how to raise a kid. It would not be the fault of anyone else.

I don't think my 18-month-old had any problems from watching a little Miss Rachel and Baby Einstein here and there. However, the few times my mother showed her cute animal videos on Instagram, it was a completely different story. She became obsessed with the phone and would fuss and scream whenever my mother put it away. It was pretty incredible. We banned it pretty quickly.

"Landmark" review by an advocacy group. Not a good review, either.

There’s no reason for kids under 6 to ever look at a screen.

I don't have kids myself, but I understand there is good educational programming on television for small children.

Not in my opinion. Certainly nothing like as good as adult attention or play.

Yeah it seems crazy to me that this is news. Here in France the government officially recommends to avoid screens at all costs for under 3 years omds and as much as possible under 6. There are tons of studies showing it hinders their development.

Facetime calls with family. I've had to do a lot of travelling, and it's been amazing being able to see, talk to, and sing with my kid while I'm gone. He's also really close to his extended family and loves seeing them on video calls.

I know one kid, now 5, who taught himself to read watching Alphablocks.

My own kids haven't done anything that impressive, but they've certainly enjoyed watching a lot of videos and it doesn't seem to have done them any harm. Doesn't get in the way of doing non-screen things either.

I have no regrets watching the World Cup games with my 3 year old and having him narrate me through everything he’s seeing

And how many kids do you have?

I’ve raised 5, doing 6 and 7 right now.

I’m not sure I can exactly explain why, but touchscreens are fundamentally different from a developmental standpoint. Also low res screens don’t seem to have the same effect. High resolution Touchscreens are aggressively addictive and encourage a certain kind of ultrafast loop that is simply not a dynamic on other devices.

I watched Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow and stuff like that as a child. Seemed fine and even good.

What do you think about non-media screen use like Google Maps or typing on a word processor?

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