"Screen viewing" seems very vague. What did they do with their screens? Did they read an encyclopedia, or did they watch entertainment content videos? It's an important distinction.
My point is to distinguish what young children do with their screens: they could be learning things through educational games or videos for example.
Me, I'd hypothesize little if any difference between the rare encyclopedia-reading 4-year-old and the drivel-watching 4-year-old, as my personal unscientific belief is that it's about socialization with family and peers, not content.
But I'd be super interested in science teasing apart those effects.
If your position is just "most parents suck, who needs evidence?", that's valid too, but IMO less interesting than understanding what's really going on.
Me personally, I have immense trouble believing that passively watching entertainment has the same effect on working memory as, say, playing video games. And even within video games there’s probably a distinction between the more story-driven games that are a lot more passive to play, versus puzzle games that require active reasoning, versus games that test reaction time or memorization, etc.
(Full disclosure: I was a child of the 80’s and raised by a Nintendo and my computer. I think I turned out ok but I don’t have any alternative childhood to compare to)
Otoh, story-driven games might be teaching social reasoning skills.
puzzle games cover a lot of ground. Some are as mindless as instagram scrolling.
Certainly would be interesting to test.
I was also in this boat: My siblings and I watched hours and hours of television when we grew up, but we didn't start watching as toddlers. My own anecdata seems similar to yours, which is unable to verify what happens when you watch hours of brain rot from age 1 and up.
Ahoy, Shipmate!!!
Yeah, same boat, same story. I still think there's a larger difference today that makes it "not the same thing at all". Back then you watched what was on, and waited for it to finish. Now kids are seeing 30s shorts with the resultant attention span (that of a flea).
I reckon that a big part is the attention span (average length of scene, amount of dramatic sound effects and blinking), and probably the newer cartoons are more focused on captivating the age group as well.
So yes, definitely more addictive.
But what I'm more concerned about is that their brains are more malleable at age 1. I read some statistic correlating +1 hour of television per day with +7% of risk of autism. Then again, if you're watching tv 3-5 hours a day, maybe it's not the tv but the lack of every social interaction that didn't happen in those 5 hours. It really is brain rot.
Now of course you can feed them free to play trash games on a tablet and who knows about the difference.
> At ages 1 and 1.5 years, which was conducted in a subsample, parents were asked to report the average amount of time that the child spent daily on television (TV) on weekdays and weekends within the past month. This was collected in 2010 to 2011 when TV was the primary source of screen viewing time for 97% of Singaporean families [38]. At ages 2, 3 and 6 years, parents were asked to report the amount of time, in 5-min increments, their child spent using screens on weekdays and weekend days. Three types of devices were considered separately: (1) TV and TV-related games consoles; (2) computers (desktop or laptop); and (3) hand-held devices including tablets, smartphones, and hand-held games consoles. At age 8 years, parents were asked to report on their child’s time spent sitting or lying down while watching screens on the most recent weekday (school days) and on the most recent Saturday and Sunday. Four types of devices/media were considered separately: (1) watching videos on a TV (TV programs, DVDs, Blu-ray); (2) watching videos or playing games on computers; (3) watching videos or playing games on tablets or smartphones; and (4) playing video games on consoles.
And here’s us, an online only school that serves kids that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access education at all or some types of classes at best, left wondering where that might leave us if our state decides to zombie its way into similar policy decisions.
Edit: Downvotes for pointing out that government policies without nuance around what "screen time" means hurts kids who have no alternative education options, apparently?