If your parents had eliminated screens when you were very young (including theirs) save maybe one publicly-placed crappy terminal for wikipedia or looking up business hours or maps or learning you some programming or whatever, but loosened the reigns on hang-outs and travel, do you think you'd have still felt isolated because all your friends were still online most of the time?
Asking as a parent with three young kids who's seeing practically no benefit to ubiquitous screens at this point, and lots of bad things about them, and trying to figure out how to navigate this brave new world while screwing these kids up as little as possible.
My parents didn't really limit me going out. In fact, they encouraged it. But I found the internet to be way more fascinating compared to my friends. I did have friends and a 'normal' life, but I was an introvert by any measure. I had people to hang out with at school and places to hang out with friends after, but I never wanted to go out and goof off. I want to say it isn't so black and white.
That said, I do find kids' exposure to electronics reaching an alarming point these days. Parents I feel just tend to plop an iPad infront of them all day which keeps them entertained to no end. They are extremely hyperactive since those games require them to be but teaching nothing of value. I can't say that's definitely bad, but it is scary. Maybe that's what a generation before me thought about me, so who am I to say?
If I may give advice, I would suggest you limit access to games and especially ads. Ads definitely have an effect on kids and is the very first media they see that is designed to manipulate them.
Next, maybe download some fun but informative videos from YouTube? (Don't ever give them free access to youtube, trust me. Really). YouTube Kids from what I've seen is trash and has nothing better than subpar cartoons. There are interesting things I feel could keep them entertained but also benefit them.
When you take away access to something, make sure they have something to do that they find interesting. Not just you. A big mistake I think parents make. Encyclopedias aren't so fascinating in comparison to the entirety of the internet, and we just feel robbed of fun. Talk to them.
I have a 3 year old. The ads absolutely get to him. And many are inappropriate.
Any game that he likes, I remove the ads. It's usually a dollar or two. I also consider it a tip to the developers for entertaining my kid.
I usually play together when I can. And he also enjoys watching me play. I actually can't wait for the day when he beats me at street fighter.
But I think the key is finding things he enjoys just as much as playing video games or watching tv. It's hard, but they exist. And exercise should be one of them. Solving puzzles another. Going outside on the scooter is another. Cooking is another. They aren't hard to find.
If he loves something too much, I'd limit it with a reward system. That's how the world works anyway.
It's not just that some of ads are inappropriate, but young children are extremely impressionable and I believe those years shape who they are for the rest of their lives. So I'd consider any ads, by design, inappropriate.
>But I think the key is finding things he enjoys just as much as playing video games or watching tv. It's hard, but they exist.
I agree.
I don't know what makes good parenting. I know no one is prepared to be a parent, but you sound like a great one :)
"But I think the key is finding things he enjoys just as much as playing video games or watching tv."
LEGOs are real expensive these days, and you really have to kind of. . .tailor the experience for them until they're 6 or so, so that they use them safely and so that they aren't presented with too much complexity and once. That said, for both my 5 yo nephew and myself growing, they're a great toy because they can be a group or solo activity, and because they help respond to creativity ("I want to build X!") without removing all the imagination - video games tend to offer a more "complete" experience (i.e. leave fewer "gaps" for the child to fill), and less modular toys can feel limiting in what kind of play can be accomplished.
22 here. I agree with everything except the ads part.
Me and my friends are so used to identifying and quickly ignoring ads from a young age, that they have become largely uneffective on us.
Comparatively my not-so-techie friends and family, that haven't grown up so used to ads, tend to be more influenced by them and purchase more stuff (my dad clicks facebook ads more regularly than me and my friends).
This is a common misconception. Advertising does not need to be hidden to "work". Advertising is not just facebook ads (which you admit to clicking, although not as regularly as your dad), but also involves creating positive sentiment for a brand or product over time through techniques like mere exposure.
I Wwnt to preface that I do understand where you are coming from, and spent many years agreeing with the sentiment that you pose, but over time came to realize that I was mistaken and had an oversimplified view of what makes the advertising industry tick.
In the interest of discussion: do you think that most people are too lazy/ignorant to ignore ads like you and your friends do?
I ignore ads on the web completely. I think I got like that thanks to games. I can focus on the thing I came here for and ignore nearly all unassociated often animated crap. Things that get me are disgusting ads. Not sure why but I don't filter them out automatically. Same for overtly sexual ads. Rest is just background. People were praising adblock but I never bothered because it didn't do much for me.
On the other hand my non-gamer gf can't understand how I can read or play a flash game when it's surrounded by few animated banners.
And my mom starts to read each page from top left corner as if it was a letter she got from IRS or sth.
Limiting exposure to ads is mainly advice for young children as they lack the cognitive ability to understand the intent of advertising until, IIRC, around the age of 7 or 8.
Both the sibling comments to me are right. Kids are impressionable, and you being smart doesn't mean everyone else is. Also the people making ads are definitely smarter than you and me.
Someone put it this way regarding the recent machine learning researcher craze. It went something like - PhDs are currently being paid millions to study where to place the pixels on your screen to influence you.
This is probably one of the most important questions possible: How should I teach my kids?
I was denied access to computers, and I don't think it did me any good. I'm 27, so a bit old for this topic, but my house was specially up to date bc of my dad's job. The internet was dangerous and diabolic in my mom's mind though, and my access to computers was extremely limited.
This, I feel, made me want computers even more. I realised early the magical powers of the internet. I wanted nothing more than a computer for myself. Even now, I easily get hooked (wouldn't say addicted) with videogames, porn, or just browsing.
Observing my friends, those who had more freedom in this regard are the ones that cares less about any of this; those of us still playing too much videogames are the ones who had very stingy restrictions there.
I'm under the impression that what my parents would have been better advised to do is give me more freedom. All of my younger siblings had more leeway in that sense, and I'm by far the most introverted of the bunch. All of my peers were very obviously more socially apt than me; they had been going out for years by the time I was allowed. Feeling at a constant disadvantage in social situations stifled me.
Of course, anecdata. Also, raising a child might be one of the most difficult and terrible things you can do. And at the same time, kids are more resilient that we give them credit for, as long as they're loved (!) and fed.
(I feel my parents did a fantastic job, even though I could point out a dozen things I think were very wrong. I'm sure if I had children of my own my opinion on my parents' job would increase dramatically.)
Raising children with technology is certainly a challenge. I have 5 kids, oldest 8 years old, youngest 15 months, living in a condo in LA because...you know......f'ing real estate prices, single family homes with 1200 square feet are 1.3 million in our district. So how do you let kids be free if they can't even go outside really?...and multiple kids in a condo without some kind of T.V. or tablet is utter insanity.
It's been very tough, but we don't have a T.V., we do let our kids use the tablet, with restricted apps and time. Our neighbors below us hate us and are moving....because you know....five kids stomping around above them, but I guess this is the new reality. The best thing we did was smooth coat all the walls with plaster and then make 2 large chalkboard walls. I am constantly surprised by how well this worked out. I think the tactility of the chalk has been an important factor, one that I overlooked, as I always used dry erase markers. I'm a convert to chalk now and my kids only use the best, Hagaromo full-touch. Working on math homework is a dream now as I can easily sketch out geometric concepts and have them trace over it with their fingers. Sure you could do it on paper, but something about standing in front of the chalkboard makes it more compelling. Aside from that setting up a folding table on the balcony and buying them a bunch of mid-grade chemistry stuff has also worked out surprisingly well. A couple days ago they created a catalytic reaction that actually gave off quite a good bit of heat. Could they have injured themselves? Probably. I'd rather have them experiment and explore.
4 of my kids are girls, and this raises special challenges. We fought a war with both sets of grandparents about not buying them dresses or pink gender defining toys. I was shocked how much resistance we got on this, but I strongly advise parents of girls to consider what the value of gender neutrality is, and whether or not it makes sense for them to try and abide by it when buying toys or clothes. If you do, be prepared to meet with a lot of resistance, both from your parents and public school. Just my two cents.
I love that you had five kids. Kids are wonderful and our population is declining. You’re doing the best thing for yourself – and the best thing for society.
The worst thing you can do for the environment isn't flying; it is having a child. Having multiple, is, well.. X times worse.
Our population isn't declining either, as long as you watch it from Earth's PoV instead of whatever nation you're from.
I don't want to judge a specific person on having a number of children, and being the parent of one child I can't even fathom having five (!!!) but the general notions you made in conclusion to that I disagree with.
Is it best for society, though? The earth is already massively overpopulated. Perhaps it's best if some populations decline. And is it the best for himself if, for instance, the kids grow up to hate OP because of, say, global warming forcing them to fight to survive? Or if he has to live to see them struggle with that?
Perhaps we should all read this, or at least look at it from a different perspective, as I confess I do not study these issues carefully, but I don't think any type of neo-Malthusianism is worthwhile.
What do you think is benefit of fighting that pink?
(Full disclosure: I hate pink and was shocked too over how much of it grandparents and such forced on us and in what way. But I am still curious about your reasons. )
This is a pretty charged topic, and it's difficult to make the case unequivocally. In our family, it got to the point where people were emailing research papers(academics and doctors in the family) back and forth and Christmas was ruined. I don't have time to cite all the papers on both sides of this, but for us(my wife feels even more strongly about this than I do), it came down to the realization that AT BEST all the girl's toys and clothes could do no harm to their psyche. AT WORST, it could possibly instill in them a type of inferiority with respect to boys in terms of technical ability, and a diminished sense of their place in the world with respect to boys. As a scientist, I have to consider all the evidence, and as a parent, I have to make the decisions I think will help make my children stronger. My wife and I basically came to the conclusion that "girl's toys" and "girl's clothes" were bullshit, and an unnecessary risk to their psyche. Unfortunately pink is collateral damage in this war, as it is so ubiquitously used in our culture to demarcate girl from boy. I can in no way say that we are right, not in a scientific sense, I can only say that after spending hours and hours in toy and clothes aisles, I would say as a culture it's time to rethink gender neutrality, and the way we are separating boys and girls with clothes and toys from a very young age.
We struggled quite a bit with this question. I think our initial instinct was to be a bit militant about it, but the reality is there is so much of this in our society that unless you're willing to go full Captain Fantastic they will inevitably be exposed to these types of things growing up. It happens through relatives, well-meaning friends, birthday parties, school, media, etc, it's impossible to try and weed it all out. I guess now we take the approach where if someone gives them something we wouldn't, we don't make a big deal about it, especially not in front of the kids. Kids are very malleable and fickle, and as soon as they forget about it(maybe an hour, a day, whatever), we just throw it away. We do make it clear to our immediate family what we don't find appropriate, but at the same time, we're fully conscious of the culture we are a part of. It's not necessarily an easy line to walk, and there isn't really much guidance out there, but we feel it's important to be strong in our course, without being so inflexible given the realities.
I think it is tapping into the concerns of some, like for instance Alan Kay, that television, apps, screens, media, etc have successfully captured a good portion of the attention span of a very wide swath of our population. It questions whether or not this is a good thing, especially for kids, and whether they would be better served removed from this exposure, or if isolation in itself presents risks..ie social development. I guess I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think people need to go to the extremes. The 'extreme' thing I did was get rid of the T.V., so basically I'm the only person with kids that I know that does not have one in their living room...I guess that's weird enough?
In my experiences growing up, if something was fully restricted, it made me:
a) really want that thing (happened a lot with tech)
b) develop really unnatural aversions to it (a religious upbringing made this rear it's head in a lot of plays)
So my (completely amateur) opinion is to have a policy like you're doing, but only enforce it like 80% of the time. 100% is where you start to get into giving people complexes territory.
Fair enough question I suppose. I am a millennial, and I think many of our generation, and especially the younger generation are afraid of having more than say two or three kids, if they plan on having kids. This is certainly reasonable given the economic challenges we face and most principal among those housing costs. Short answer: We are punks I guess, we didn't want to let any of those economic factors dictate what size family we could have. Our condo is 1400 square ft., and costs exactly half what a 1200 square ft. house costs. In general, people I think way overvalue the quintessential American home. Parks and malls are free and work great, and it's nice to get out of the house more often. We live 1.2 miles from the beach, another great resource made possible for us only because of the decision to live in a condo. For us it made sense and it works great. We wanted a bigger family and we just did it, no regrets.
That is an absolutely fascinating and perspective-altering idea, thanks for sharing the link.
The inability to get a quiet room alone is my personal vision of hell, but I suppose that if I literally never had the experience of a quiet room to myself, I wouldn't miss it. I wonder if this is like language learning... much easier if you're immersed in it from birth, than trying to adapt later in life.
I credit my parents restricting my internet access for my career, in a very weird and roundabout way.
My family got our first computer in 1998, when I was 13 years old. Nobody in my family was very computer literate at the time but they knew they could "ground" me from the computer by changing the Windows password.
Somewhere along the line (in a gaming magazine, probably) I stumbled an article about Slackware and Linux and later BeOS. I was determined to have access to the computer when I was grounded and my parents weren't home so I figured out how to download Slackware and BeOS floppies from friend's computers and get them working on our home PC.
Without all of this dedication to mischief and getting around the rules, I might still consider a computer just a terminal for sports news, games and email.
Breaking these rules and discovering Linux and the fact that I could write software without "doing crazy math problems" changed my life.
You will screw up your kids just like your parents screwed you up.... You just don't know how yet. But it isn't really screwed up... It is called parenting.
Then when u become a grandparent it begins to totally make sense....we all screw up our kids...teaching thwm how to recover is the real deal
Yeah, I get that, but there's screwed up and there's screwed up, ya know? Sure you can be in the top 50% of parents by just not actively trying to screw them up, but I'd like to do better than that, within reason, and tech/screens/Web seem to me like pretty big things worthy of a little attention and care, especially as they get older. Finding something like a least-harm/most-benefit way to fit that into our home lives is probably worth spending some thought on.
My kid tells us we did her/him a big disservice by just who were were: an in love couple with a good marriage.
She/he tells us ahe/he was so unprepared for relationships and the knowledge that others' sid not come from our style home (happy marriage filled with love, imo)
Now how does one predict that??? Introduce my kids to broken marriages?
Offtopic: are we now so gender neutral we even cannot address our own kid as he or she? Or did you do this on purpose to hide the gender of your kid as part of your privacy?
No flame intended. Honest question. Never thought about the gender of my kids being a privacy thing.
Ontopic:
As a parent I (we) try not to restrain things like screen use. Instead we actively promote all other forms of spending time we prefer more. This means I usually enter the room before my kids get up and put the devices away and put other toys in sight. My wife is a montessori (method) teacher which makes her quite skilled at knowing which kind of toys/lessons our kids like at what time in their life. Meaning each couple of weeks the things we prepare change. Result is they usually first pick a bit of everything in plain sight and only after, at the end of day, ask for a device. We didn’t tell them not to, it is just they really like their puzzles, painting, and what have you. In real life preparing means putting things in sight instead of in a closet and one of us being downstairs before the kids is normal as well. Not much effort there.
Disclaimer: my oldest is only 3 right now. Older kids may be entirely different though I believe promoting better options has a better effect than restraining the negative ones.
Thanks for clarfying. What, if you don’t mind me asking, makes you feel their gender in this context is worth censuring?
You made me think about it and it is quite interesting. From reading your post I was surprised. Thinking about it makes it interesting. I work in the Healthcare sector and gender definitly is part of privacy information (as is age for that matter). However, I would have not thought about it twice sharing it here. Now I’m in between.
I sprinkle all my online posts with random lies and inconsistencies... Gender. Location. Age.. Job.. Not many but enough to make me believe it would be harder to find out who i am
Nothing is wrong with gender neutrality. However, referring to one’s child in gender neutral form is not (that) common.
Gender neutrality is there to avoid distinguishing roles according to people's sex or gender, in order to avoid discrimination arising from the impression that there are social roles for which one gender is more suited than another [0]. That is hardly the case when referring to one’s own child. Hence my follow-up assumption in the same comment that it might be for privacy reasons.
The first statement in that comment on gender neutrality was led by the media taking the whole gender neutrality thing a bit too far nowadays. Some sources just follow the hype instead of looking at the argument for using it as stated above. That is my own opinion though and might be a deluded view on media articles i came across that went into the “did you just assume my gender” mode for stories where gender was totally irrelevant.
I do realize the first sentence of my comment was a phrased a bit provoking because of the whole media thing. Sorry if that offended you and provoked you into this question (comment). Hope this answer helps to show I was not here to fight gender neutrality as a whole.
> My kid tells us we did her/him a big disservice by just who were were: an in love couple with a good marriage.
This is just their perception and proposed solution. Ruining your marriage so they will be comfortable in a bad relationship is crazy.
Parents often fail to teach their kids how they got to this point. I have made a point to make sure I don't just take for granted my kids know everything I know.
What to look for? What not to look for? Where does this action come from? Why do I get a funny feeling about this person? What fear causes this anger response. The fact that everyone is nice at some point. On and on the list goes...
Right and wrong, life, is either taught... or learned the hard way.
It takes a great deal of self-awareness to recognize how different your relationship/marriage/household/raising is from the norm and how this may affect your children. What messes kids up sometimes is just that their home is different from that of others so they don't know how to cope with others' expectations. Your kid sounds a little too cynical though. I'd say what he/she has is a blessing, because he/she has the opportunity to not only introduce someone to a good relationship, but also with some work, have a good marriage later on.
That model that you gave them will help them in the future as they figure out how to deal with not ideal people in relationships, and be a good person that attracts the right kind of people.
They just have to learn how to deal with non-ideal people, mostly by dating a bunch, maybe reading a few books so they can better recognize borderline and other personality disorders.
Teach them about the monumental complexity and difficulty (but ultimately rewarding nature) of human relationships. Also, why didn't they have enough direct experience with the home lives of their friends to be familiar with marriages that didn't work out? Why had they never spoken with an adult whose marriage failed and been able to ask what happened and why?
We do not seek to teach our children how to form or maintain human relationships, much less intimate relationships. As a result, they do not spontaneously learn these things, especially in a society that isolates young people to an increasingly radical degree from their community, their peers, and society in general.
We used to think it was awful my kid stayed up late and watched Johnny Carson as a very young kid. Too much tv?? HORRORS! ( now her/his family doesn't even own a tv)
Go with the flow.. Man... Your kid will surprise you
As someone who was actually, legitimately, very seriously screwed up by my parents... I don't agree. "Screwing up your kids" and "parenting" are not at all synonymous.
Can we please treat this topic with the seriousness it deserves? This dismissal attitude makes me feel physically ill.
You're projecting a bifurcation. "Screwing up your kids" isn't a proposition; it is relative. Every single kid gets "screwed up" in some way (some severe, as you claim you are). The lessons they got taught in life during child and teenage years is their manual for getting themselves fixed afterwards, in order to function in society. If they fail to succeed by themselves, professional help can aid them.
See also Dr. Ingeborg Bosch on Past Reality Integration [1] or this Wikipedia article [2] for an introduction.
> This dismissal attitude makes me feel physically ill
That's an extremely fatalistic attitude, and I don't think it is true either. The problem with most parents is that they don't take the time to see the bigger picture, to reflect on their methods and to evaluate their results. Instead, it's mostly a series of ad hoc decisions that are more often than not driven by their own worst impulses. In fact, this is the same way many people handle their own lives, too.
Raising a child should be a seen as sort of project. You need to figure out what they need to learn while they grow, and then you need to figure out ways of teaching it to them. Of course, you will probably have to adjust your plan along the way, and you yourself will have to learn how to do this properly. But if you view things from the end, it is easy to see why "helicopter" parenting is harmful and will likely result adults who are incapable of managing their own lives once the time comes
My opinion (as a parent of two <10yr old boys) is that screens are the new rock music/comic books/video games/bad-thing-du-jour that parents are demonizing as destroying the younger generation. There's always something, and it's never anywhere near as bad or destructive as was feared. It's just the next phase of a natural and inescapable societal progression.
I think media can harm attention spans. I used to spend a lot of time reading books/programming for fun and after spending more time consuming short term content my attention span seems far more fragile.
Abstractly, anything you spend a lot of time doing is going to shape how you think and not necessarily in positive ways.
Those were generally about culture and morals though, right? Rock and roll, drugs, etc scared parents because it was viewed as depraved & debaucherous, nobody was worried it was a substitute for good parenting and that it would impair your development of social skills.
Concerns about "screens" today seems more analogous to the old "TV-as-parent" issue.
Worse, screens today are about companies directly tapping into brain mechanisms to induce as close to addiction as they can get. Opiate of the masses indeed.
The article drums that line, but the research cited says that screen time is irrelevant. They also didn't measure screen time, they relied on parents self-reporting which may be very high or low (reflecting parental self-image,not actual screen time). And the research didn't look at long-term effects, only short-term. And it waved off that high screen time may be merely correlated to poverty and unengaged parenting, not literally strictly screen time. The research isn't an endorsement to let little kids stare at tablets all day.
Kids approaching 7 and 10 watch some movies/vetted series online, only recently got Kindle tablets which they are literally only allowed to use on long (3 hr+) transits, never at home.
No TV or analog in house.
I am now torn as the older kid is at a prime age to introduce programming...
...but the benefits we see daily from no-screen childhood are to our biased eyes overwhelming.
Our kids spend all their free time engaged in imaginative play much of it collaborative, and manipulating physical objects, and when we can get out, outside.
Their ability to sit in a room with no screen and make a world seems pretty rare, compared to peers who were given ipads or whatever years ago.
But I also worry, how do we also make sure they are literate and savvy.
I fear that as soon if the programming bug bites it will be the End...
Out of curiosity, and as someone who has a newborn and will be going through this at some point, how do you determine what effects your policies have on their potential social ostracization especially as they get older. In my youth I witnessed this social outcasting happen to children based on parental restrictions such as these. I still see it as they become adults. The effect seems to compound on itself from being the one not allowed to do something, to having only the few friends in a similar boat, to being an adult that grew up with fewer friends and fewer at-large interactions. Do you take into account these costs? Is the cost of over-exposure to media greater than the cost of having them be different/segregated to satisfy this?
I have two kids (<10 years old) who have little to no restrictions on screen toys. My router disables the internet on their devices (iPads, kindles, 3dses, Roku in bedroom) at 7pm on school nights, and there is a strict no-screens policy after bedtime at 8pm, but other than that we don't really monitor or restrict.
Quite often spontaneously, and on occasions where we take away screens as a punishment, they engage in the same kind of collaborative/imaginitive play with physical objects together. I'm probably equally biased to you, but I don't feel that having access to screen has in any way impaired or diminished their ability or desire to engage in that kind of play together, while at the same time preparing them for a future in which screens and computer/internet literacy is going to be a supremely important skill to have.
Maybe offline or rarely-online screens would work? An RPi2 (no wifi) stuck in some corner, running Linux? That kind of thing.
I think the Web's far and away the most dangerous part of screens. I grew up mostly with OTA TV, an NES, and an offline DOS computer as my only screens until age 10 or 11 so when we got dial-up, which could only be used sparingly (one phone line) and sitting at a desk. All were kinda fun, but also boring enough that you'd wanna go outside and ride bikes or something after an hour or two. The modern Web is like having a cable subscription with 100 channels of only stuff you love (and most of it the crappy low-value stuff that you, nonetheless, love). It's hard to moderate use as an adult, let alone for kids.
[EDIT] yes of course you can and should just tell them no, as with other decisions they're bad at making, and I have no problem doing that, but what I'm unsure about is whether the benefit of Web-anwhere-in-the-house and Netflix and Youtube and so on are worth even having to enforce rules to begin with—maybe it's better to not have them at all, because they're so low-value compared with less distracting and addictive alternatives.
I’m planning to set up a separate heavily filtered kids vlan/wireless network. I’ll leave some vulnerabilities in it so if they want unfiltered internet access they have to get it themselves.
I'm a father of an autistic 4 year old girl. Removing screens entirely from her has caused her to develop language and sleep better. I can't say why or how but I highly recommend just avoiding screens (including TV's). The hardest thing too I think causing all this is us as parents tend to hover much more than our parents did to us.
I can say this: you aren't alone! I'm in the exact same boat. Ironically, if we can coordinate those of us who "get it" on this issue, maybe we can organize at least some spaces and communities where kids can interact free of screens and have friends etc.
Keep in mind that if the OP is 21, then "when s/he was very young" would've been circa 2000. That was before smartphones or even Wi-Fi, where you pretty much had to be seated at a desk to use a computer, which is very different from the situation now. This is an epidemic that snuck up on us.
We had a laptop with windows 95 on it.
Just because you weren't on the internet, didn't mean you couldn't use a computer...there were actually lots of things that you would do without a connection then.
That's not really what I meant. Of course there were computers then. What I mean is that "ubiquitous screens and connectivity" wasn't yet a thing, and it's a phenomenon that crept up on us, so it's a little unfair to blame parents of a kid born ~1997 for not locking down screen time. We didn't know that was really a problem (at least, a problem distinct from "too much TV") until just a few years ago.
I was born in 83. I'd definitely say I had too much screen time as a kid. I was generally either on a computer or watching tv most of the time that I wasn't playing hockey or at school (or doing homework), I could still play gameboy on the way to the rink. I think I actually have less screen time now and I'm a programmer, and do programming at home on the side after work as well. Mostly I cut out the tv watching, since it seems like such a waste of time.
I don't think it's that screentime itself that's such a problem, but the content, and mindlessness of some stuff. I'm happy to let my 5 year old watch Cosmos with me, Paw Patrol on the other hand makes the kid go crazy.
With two kids, I'd say it depends on the personality. My son (10) is totally absorbed by screens and digital games of any sort. For him, I would have reduced early digital exposure had I known how hooked up he gets. On the other hand, my daughter (7) has as much exposure to screens as he does and she seems to naturally shift her interest between various things, the majority of which do not include smart devices.
Eh, I don't know. The only thing I know we are doing right is having strict limits on screen time.
Keep on going! It can be pretty hard to be screenless although when it's a single child. You are their playmate pretty much 24/7 unless you can schedule other kids, which can be a good amount of work unlike siblings because of today's legal structures.
Just limit to one hour a day unless they’re programming or researching or creating and they’ll be fine.
Was limited to an hour of tv and games a day as a kid and of course craved more, but me and siblings did well in school and socially partially from that.
this IS the biggest parental challenge of the century since it will affect every cognitive, emotional, and social development of our next gen.
My wife and I decided to ban our son (now 5) from all digital consumption as long as possible. we went hard-edged when we noticed his uncontrollable addiction. it was all he asked for daily. nothing else mattered. no interest in the robot cubetto we bought him, reading, playing with toys, or even being very communicative.
sure it was EASY to just hand him the digital pacifier when he was 1,2,3 yrs old. now we see the start of the epidemic before our eyes. its real but we are taking back control and starting on a healthy hands-on path of learning and having fun the good ol way.
and if he ends up being in the minority - so be it. at least he will be a a whole human being with empathy who can create, dance, run for miles, focus, communicate, and think critically miles beyond his zombified peers. Its never too late.
I'm a parent of 14 and 11 year-olds and we're always struggling with this. I'd like to chat with you about this further. Find me on #parents-with-tech on freenode IRC (I've invited one other parent I've found).
I'm a parent of 14 and 11 year-olds and we're always struggling with this. I'd like to chat with you about this further. Find me on #parents-with-tech on freenode IRC (I've invited one other parent I've found).
24. My middle school was dominated by a publicly-placed crappy terminal with an internet timer. My parents said I had to do one sport and play one instrument, but other than that didn't force anything. I could hang out with friends whenever I wanted, but I was a bit socially awkward and introverted until high school.
Eh, you won't be able to give your children the independence they need to develop as a mature adult (society will prevent you from doing that), so might as well let them sink into a screen. The alternative is forbidding literally the only outlet in the entire world that gives them even the barest illusion of autonomy and surveilling and manipulating them continuously while watching them break down into learned helplessness.
Asking as a parent with three young kids who's seeing practically no benefit to ubiquitous screens at this point, and lots of bad things about them, and trying to figure out how to navigate this brave new world while screwing these kids up as little as possible.