Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago.
Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive.
But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine.
I was an avid "gamer" growing up. I wasn't always the most responsible with it. Probably overdid it a lot. But I can see with my own child, this is a different ball-game altogether.
Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines.
Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use.
The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of boring by design. Regulations force us to make them boring. (And that is a good thing, I will not work on this industry otherwise).
The future of on-line games and mobile games is regulation. Micro-payments, push-notifications, etc. cannot be used without limits. People have right to their mental health more than companies have to higher profits.
I'm also curious about want Candy Crush does that a slot machine can't by regulation? Is it a level of interactivity?
Is that a state-by-state regulation? A federal regulation? And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines?
Thanks in advance for satisfying my curiosity.
Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't get to see very often.
Conversely, I have ZERO tolerance for advertising. I am increasingly convinced that marketing is the source of a majority of modern society's ills and I don't want it anywhere near his brain until he's able to properly comprehend its purpose.
I'm not a gamer so I don't know much about Zelda, but the sort of hypnotic hold some Youtube/Insta personalities have on kids is astonishing. They will parrot their talking points, talk about them relentlessly with friends and buy whatever they're shilling, be it makeup, game guides, phone skins, what have you.
TV, movies, and games are forms of entertainment. Advertising is a form of manipulation.
Sure, the lines can be blurred, so we do our best to filter out the bad intentions.
Modern advertising seems to become more effective as well. I never anticipated a defense of ads, but I've actually been criticized by visiting relatives for keeping commercials out of reach of our family. We're "out of the loop" now, unable to relate to a joke or situation delivered by commercial. And around holidays and birthdays, we get asked "How do your kids even know what they want without commercials?"
I think modern games absolutely do harm, I don’t think they should really be called games either, because they are build for addiction to make you play their built in slot machines.
My children never had smart devices because nobody under 15 should ever touch a smart device. They grew up much healthier than their peers and I think it was the strict rules on technology that did most of the work.
I’m not against technology or smart devices by any means, but it’s hard to use both in a healthy manner and children are really bad at making the right decision.
I mean, you wouldn’t give your kid free reign in the candy store, so why would you do it on their smartphone?
I'm noticing this among my cousins, at least among social health. I've got one cousin who just entered 7th grade this year, and might be the only person in her class without a phone. One of her best friends just got one at the beginning of the year. Those two are among the only two who actually know how to talk and have a conversation; other kids have no clue how to read tone of voice to tell jokes, or have any clue how to read facial expressions, etc. They honestly say what they want, when they want, without regards to people and then can't interpret that someone is upset.
I've noticed it especially in regards to my 11 year old cousin, who's now had his phone for 3 years. He doesn't pick up on tone in jokes, and so unless the joke has an obvious punch line, he doesn't really get it. He has a lot of one-word conversations, often in a brusque tone, because he just wants to watch Minecraft videos. Often, the first thing he'll do when he gets to my grandmother's from school is go to her bedroom, lock the door, and just watch videos. No interaction whatsoever, and good luck trying to get him to talk.
I also see it to a much more dangerous degree among my high school students. The lengths they will go to to be on their phones during class (and not even to chat; merely to be on them) is, quite frankly, alarming. I fear for our future, and am looking at dumb phones for myself now (I'll keep my dual sim smartphone for when I travel outside the country and exercise because music)
Or just not letting kids get into those games. At some point my wife pointed out that I had a problem disengaging from certain types of games (for me it was MOBAs specifically). They are super-addictive.
It never really got in the way of anything and if I had anything else to do I would go do that, so it wouldn't really qualify as "addiction" in a DSM sense. But the issue is what it does when you don't have anything to do. They have a way of swallowing up basically ALL of your free time. And I didn't feel happier or better off for having spent my time that way, it felt more like compulsion than desire. I see a lot of young people on the internet being enslaved by compulsion like this, engaging in somewhat problematic consumption of video-games, porn, or social media.
I decided to just uninstall and stop playing those sorts of games, but I was also a grown-up with life experiences, hobbies, social connections, and responsibilities before I ever started. I knew what I was missing with "real life" by letting myself sink into that so it was easy enough for me to stop, I had other, more edifying sources of dopamine to go after. Kids, often times, either don't have enough freedom of movement to go do those things or just plain don't know what else there is out there. It's the same reason drug and gambling addiction tends to take hold among people with depression.
It robs a child’s body and brain from developing social and motor skills in a 3D world. Time spent in the trance state is habit forming and is in general stolen from time spent exploring the world, and letting the brain learn from full bandwidth experiences.
So yes, It is the screen.
Children’s real life unstructured full-bandwidth play is learning on steroids. All systems engaged, constant observation, endless questions, simulations etc. think social simulations, physical and motor skills challenges, puzzles. It takes life to prepare human brains for life.
In 'old school' game you receive reward after period of effort. You have to perform better and push yourself. Game is designed to be fun but selling the game once is where the money is. Good game is measured by the short peak experiences, not by the average feeling.
Another (more advanced but evil) way to design addictive game is when it the difficulty and reward frequencies are optimized to keep you playing for as long as possible. You are offered cheats or the difficulty automatically adjusts to optimize the time you spend with the game. The goal of the game is stretch the interest over time just above the threshold where you would quit. In the end the game just removes lows from the boring moments.
I have no doubt video game addiction will at some point become an actual diagnosis, just like gambling addiction.
You can still find the oldschool-style. I.e. I just played CHUCHEL adventure game alongside my 4 year old, and it is a simple ~4 hour long adventure game, costs ~10$, no micro-transactions funny business.
Reminds me of my time at my grandma's house playing Neverhood :D
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe still works on modern machines.
Shovel knight, Tooth and Tail, Guacamele, Into The Breach, Shadowrun, Reigns, Abzu, Magicka, Undertale ... and many more. Of course, not many FPS/high-budget rpgs?
I actually am strongly considering to be the first in my family to buy an actual gaming console, once my daughter is a tiny bit older. Nintendo with its Switch lineup seems to be quite in line with the old-school mentality of "Pay once, get the game, have fun" :-)
Right... the game is designed to hook you in, that's games, they've all done that since the year dot. You're invested. Except now, in order to continue getting the same high, you need to spend money. They're purposely engineered this way. Just like drugs.
I grew up as the public internet took it's first breaths. When you had to figure out just how to get an internet service provider before you could even get started. In the era of IRC and Newsgroups and that was about all. Nobody even understood what websites were.
Google didn't hit its stride until 3 or 4 years after I started using it. Things were different back then.
These days everything is designed to hook you and keep you coming back and when those hooks are no longer enough to keep your eyes on it, it hooks you to pay something to get more of a high.
My kids have just come off a two week iPad ban yesterday, and already one of them has fallen off the rails and was unable to get out of bed for school this morning. Their behaviour was significantly improved by the time they came off their ban than it was the day the were banned.
I'm seriously considering removing iPad use on a more permanent basis.
But yes, I agree with your point in the general sense!
Buy older computers (1980s/early 1990s) that don't provide access to those games or the internet.
I don't know if modern laptops can do this (modern ultra-portables can't because everything is soldered in), but I recently took the wifi card out of my (ancient) T61, it required only taking out screws[0] and disconnecting the daughter board, so that I would have a machine without always-on-internet. Haven't had much use of it, but sitting in front of it, I have caught myself starting up chrome...
[0] sadly I failed to keep track of which goes where, but that is also the only issue.
Quake and diablo 2 / 3 - no loot boxes.
Screen time modifies your behavior. That modification is compounded as the quantity of access time increases. This change is determinate and quantifiable.
You can quickly validate this with a simple experiment. Take any child and take away access to screens. Look at what they do to fill their time and how they respond to people in the first 30 minutes after screen loss and against after 2 hours. Also notice the longer term modifications to behavior after screens are removed for a week.
Part of this is a component of addiction, missing social stimulus, and lack of physical activity.
Being involved changes a lot, making agreements, talk about feelings and evaluating. So like you would with any activity.
Let they play but add mandatory walks i.e., or mix up with physical actvities. I mean, kids don't have THAT much time at hand to spend after school.
I'm now playing Crossout, where you can build your own car, and my son also loves building his own cars and fighting with them.
I don't think you have to look at it so negative, kids actually enjoy creating stuff in games, and I think that's a good thing.
Source: I have 6 kids between the ages of 9 and 16
There's a increase of 'frequency' at the expense of depth.
In the old days, the focus was on playability. Games were fun. But a new genre has emerged particularly in mobile gaming that does something strange: it compels play even when it isn't fun anymore. In the old days when a game stopped being fun, you would stop playing. But these games, when they stop being fun, you make an in-game purchase...
That's the power of positive and negative reinforcement. They want to shape the behavior of players. They want players logging into the game multiple times a day, every single day.
So they rate limit the player's game with "stamina" or whatever euphemism for a timer they come up with. Player was having fun playing the RPG with friends, only to run out of "stamina"! The choice is to stop and wait for the timer to reset or pay money to reset it. Then the player starts waking up at 3 in the morning because that's when the timer resets.
The simple timer reinforces a schedule and creates the behavior the game developer wants players to have.
But I've seen so many similar games where the game itself wasn't fun at all, even though the rewards were still enticing. The Simpsons Tapped Out comes to mind. And in those cases I realized the game play itself wasn't interesting or fun and quickly quit. Basically, any game that has timers in it will fall into this category because the timers are there solely to make sure you keep coming back and have a compelling reason to do it often.
People said the same thing about WoW and Everquest and pretty much every video game. Go back far enough people said the same thing about nintendo and gameboy. Every generation thinks they are unique. You aren't unique. Your father thought the exact same thing as you are thinking right now. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
> Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
How about being a parent rather than blaming games. It's always human nature to blame others for one's own failings.
Now it's social media and smartphone games. Before that it was people were blaming video games, simpsons, south park, mtv, etc for violence, dumbing down kids, etc. In 10 years, it'll be something else. Maybe virtual reality or sex dolls. Who knows. The same complaints, different products.
>"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand."
A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.
This larger issue of screen time and tech addiction will only continue to grow. At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. But because it's the brain and not the lungs it will play out differently.
People approach mental and physical health differently. Similarly dopamine addiction and chemical dependence are also treated differently in people's minds. One is often viewed as a moral failing the other as more "uncontrollable".
As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact. It's not "just a tool" and never will be.
Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.
I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction.
We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction.
The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors to actively limit dopamine uptake in your brain.
Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath.
This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling.
The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.
Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.
Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.
I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology.
The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television.
Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web.
One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient.
I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.
By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful.
As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.
- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.
- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood).
The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book).
There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away.
But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions.
It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium.
But the medium can also be the message.
Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.
Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.
If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.
Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."
I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.
Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.
But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.
I’ve felt withdrawal symptoms for caffeine, and I can only imagine it is worse for stronger drugs. Maybe this addiction is of the same sort but the withdrawal is so slight that I don’t notice?
My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products.
If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else.
Take it easy.
Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.
If I understand you correctly, it’s the phone fault people are addicted to bad content? The phone is just too easy to use, too high quality that unwitting victims are just defenseless? If we are talking kids, that’s a parent problem, but if we are talking adults, then it’s a problem of self-responsibility. Grocery stores have plenty of ice cream for sale: it’s up to you to not buy and eat it all the time. Grown ups ought to act like it instead of blaming shiny objects of their own obsessions. Adults aren’t victims of their phones.
Also both those phones have e-ink displays.
1: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/distracted-dri...
To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]).
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...
A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.
What a glib statement.
Although, a meme here on Hacker News, it doesn't take a data scientist to make addictive games and video content.
This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.
No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.
> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact
Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.
The notion that human behavior can be manipulated and shaped by careful modulation of input is not remotely new, and it's developed considerably over many decades.
If you don't agree with or understand this, and would like sources, please say so and I'll gladly offer them when I'm at a keyboard.
Nobody fell down the stairs and discovered that the tumble accidentally linked their KPIs to engagement metrics.
Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued.
Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi have not been adversarily tuned to fire off the reward centers of our brains just enough to keep us returning for more. Whereas on the same exact screen, firefox/chromium are gateways to madness.
Indeed, some of those could desperately use a little polish to stop firing off the pain centers of our brains. :\
In this instance, the medium is not the message. Books, movies, etc. don't suddenly become more addictive just because they're on glowing rectangles. The glowing rectangles enable additional, potentially-addictive experiences that weren't possible without them—but you as a parent have complete ability to disable these experiences. A glowing rectangle that can "only" function as a library, encyclopedia, movie theatre, radio, and (if you like) chatroom, is still a useful possession, but likely not an addictive one.
I feel like dumping a kid into the deep end of linux box with access some so-so games installed and letting them figure out how to make things work is extremely valuable learning experience. It's the "passive" screen behaviors that are harmful IMO.
At the high level, I think we will see a more divergence / degeneralization of devices [0]. Your "phone" should be a separate item from your social media procrasturbation device. We all want some form of the latter, just not buzzing in our pocket.
In the middle? That's the (zero) million dollar question.
(I hope the next wave will be via repurposing older hardware with a Free and surveillance-resistant operating environment, but my fingers are crossed!)
The good screen is the one at a desk that you sit at to do work with conscious intention.
I have two adult sons. They were online as early as ages 2 and 5. I beg to differ and all that.
If kids are being ignored and not getting their needs adequately met, etc, then what happens online can have a huge adverse impact on them. But I don't think this is a problem we solve by trying to "fix software." This is a problem we solve by trying to fix social fabric.
Now we're dealing with websites/apps that have been explicitly designed to addict mature adults, playing people as pawns against one another. I'm familiar with the idea of "Rat Park" [0], but I think even if we can be absolutely sure kids' needs are being met it would be naive to rely on it.
I don't think FOSS is even necessary for what I'm talking about (although it seems to be sufficient). Non-networked binary distribution of yore was also (mostly) aligned with the interests of its users.
Oh my god, what hyperbole. This is like the cringey hyperbole equating rock 'n roll with devil music back in the 50s.
Things will be fine. Every older generation thinks the newer generation is "mad". It's not the end of the world.
Is hacker news mostly grandparents now? Just worried about every new technology? So many comments here feel like my grandparents talking.
It's so sad how old and scared HN has gotten. HN isn't supposed to be like it.
I don’t think all of HN is like this, it’s more about who was attracted to the headline.
I'm actually commenting based on my own experience and perception, not some abstract panic about "the children". I'm obviously typing this from a web browser, with both of us using this site that is not user hostile yet still creates a dopamine procrastination loop. HN specifically has had a noprocrast feature forever, for a quite real reason.
There certainly does appear to be a recent media panic, but unfortunately societal feedback suffers from heavy hysteresis. Is it sensible to dismiss the fallout from Snowden based on the prevailing wisdom of 2010 that most everybody is fine with surveillance? People who actually care say "about time" rather than "no news here".
As technologists, we see through the technicals rather than abstracting them as magic. There has been a very real social change in the past decade whereby computers aren't functioning as people's agents but rather remote agents of companies with their own diverging interests. Ignoring the implications and symptoms of this setup, especially as a trite "every generation has concerns", is just basic ignorance.
Go read a book or some studies about attention. It's not mindless fear-mongering.
I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make games myself.
I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me cringe. They look designed to be addictive - not in the way that playing C&C was addictive, but that they're designed to form real addictive behaviors.
So I don't know what I'll do. It's a hard problem. Banning all screens doesn't seem like the answer. I don't know what is.
I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue.
99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.
This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.
Having said that, I do think there's a big, big difference between playing games of that sort and... Candy Crush.
Now she's older and retired, and whenever I visit to see what she's doing with her leisure time, she spends most of it on her laptop playing a fish aquarium game or Farmville on Facebook.
And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot.
I remember my internet was so bad I had to add wait;wait;wait between issuing commands to the server or they would be dropped -- have been dealing with latency ever since :)
So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design.
The notion of "nations" or "civilizations" as discrete, immutable, and clearly defined categories is actually straight up wrong. The idea of history as the story of competition between these civilizational entities is likewise wrong. But tons of people of our generation think of history this way. They think of technological advancement like a "tech tree" as if all of human progress can be charted on a map with no consideration for alternative ways the world could have shaken out. Monotheism MUST be invented after polytheism, you MUST have invented the wheel in order to invent agriculture, and so on. Overall you're being fed the idea that the world as it is is the only way the world could have been, which is just not the case.
We were being acculturated into a specific (and imperialistic) worldview about what history is and how culture works. But because nobody ever took video games seriously, they never bothered to understand and unpack their influence as pedagogical tools. It's not like a novel or a movie where the morals and themes of the narrative are there to make an intentional point. With games the logic of needing to have a game to play and goals and objectives to meet winds up transmitting themes and morals that people either don't intend or don't bother thinking very hard about.
> At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments. I feel that I had a capacity for better things; but, under the ascendancy of this idle habit, it sunk into a fatal lethargy, from which neither shame nor ambition could awaken it. The drunkard, in the intervals of sobriety, feels most keenly the evils of intoxication, and, if self love allowed him to be candid, could a tale unfold of disease, of mental and bodily suffering, that would do more for the cause of temperance than all the societies in the world have ever accomplished. The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.
Reading novels will make your brains pour out your ears, kid.
Any new form of entertainment will meet resistance.
I think video games are beautiful. I just finished Detroit: Become Human, and I've been playing games since Wolf3d came out. I suspect that the digital story telling in many video games is every bit as much "literature" as any novel, poem, or play.
I also personally saw more people drop out of college because of WoW than drugs.
Just an anecdote.
But I don't feel that video games are any better or worse than smoking cannabis or drinking alcohol, and I don't mind feeling a little grated when folks marketed them to my kids in ways that directly attempt to increase their addictive potential.
I'd say it's important to avoid Skinner box style games, but otherwise they can be fun and mentally productive. If I had a kid I'd introduce them to games like Kerbal Space Program, racing games (e.g. Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo) [1], and maybe some RTS games as they got older. I think it's important to choose what games children. The examples listed above reward learning, discipline, and skill. Not luck or pure time commitment.
And some games really can be educational, or develop thinking skills, etc. I wonder what game critics would say about a child spending hours a day playing Chess.
But all chess and no soccer is not a good mix. All Fortnite and no chess is not a good mix. In fact, I seriously question the value of any Fortnite or Minecraft. As entertainment, a little bit isn't worse than many other entertainments. But too much is too much.
And as far as entertainment goes, I'm tired of yet another Marvel movie where we can blow up as many things as possible in the most spectacular ways and never even think about consequences. I know it's goofy to worry about real life when we are talking about mythological characters and aliens. But I do think that we spend a huge amount of time and money to train youth to disconnect from real life. If somebody dies on the other side of town, it isn't real so it doesn't matter. If you have to kill 100 opponents to get to the princess, it's all part of the game.
But many years ago we played cops and robbers and killed each other, too. Or cowboys and Indians. And we argued about whether somebody should be dead or not because of how many times they'd been shot. And we graduated from pointing fingers to rubberbands to add some realism. Then paintballs.
So I suppose the human brain is capable of sorting it all out.
But I think it is healthy to feed the brain some balance. Put down the controller and join a service project now and then. Adopt a highway, or visit a care center. Connect with real people and remind your brain that video games aren't real. And stealing cars isn't the only way to win the game. In fact, it's just wrong.
I think the problem is not screens or technology, it is, as with so many things, greed and the 'marketing' tactics that it breeds.
I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early.
Help them find good content. Have days where no tech is allowed on the weekends, but don't keep them away from it completely. Give them time to unwind with tech and choose stuff themselves, just as you probably do. Teach them about privacy and the problems that can come up with tech so they know how to deal with it themselves. Teach them that too much tech isn't good for you and you need to do other things too.
Monitor what they're watching and make sure you talk to them when things get out of hand. Expect to have some occasional issues, and treat them like you would an adult: are they sad? Is something going on at school? Is the tech affecting their ability to do other things at the time?
Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
And how are you supposed to teach kids about privacy when most consumer technology from the get-go is privacy harming? If you buy a child their first smartphone, do you tell them to not use SMS because it's plaintext, to not use any of the popular communications apps because they're owned by FB or whoever else, or to not use their phone at all because of cellular location tracking? How to you explain to them they can't watch Netflix on the TV, because the TV isn't allowed to connect to the internet to prevent it phoning home? No, convenience trumps all, and we all know the current state of things is that even if people are made aware of privacy issues, they'll disregard them if even slightly inconvenient.
There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology, at least not the way you mention. I mean, how exactly is the generalization "too much tech isn't good" relevant to technology? This is just common sense, it applies to everything. If kids are staying up late reading comic books and subsequently performing poorly in school, this is no different than the habit of staying up late on your phone. And, I reiterate, the latter has nothing to do with technology but with consumption. You either foster a (ever-growing) dependency in them, or you don't. And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology.
Your kid is eventually going to have a communication device. You have to embrace the dangers of that and teach them about the issues they'll face and the compromises they'll have to make when using it. That doesn't mean you disable Netflix, but that does mean you can teach them about how the internet works, how companies make money off advertising and data, and that there are still ways to protect themselves to reduce risks. Your 2nd paragraph is all things I cover with my kids.
"No, convenience trumps all"
No, this is not what we should teach our kids. Compromises may be acceptable, but that doesn't mean convenience trumps all. One other avenue to explore is how our government can and should do more to make it harder for companies to abuse people in the name of convenience. That's not something that they do a good job of now, but hey, better education for people is part of the point we're discussing. Luddites don't even know the right questions to ask.
"There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology"
I disagree, but also don't think we have a choice. Either you learn better ways to teach your kids about tech, or you'll continue to have a system that abuses tech.
"This is just common sense, it applies to everything."
Tech risks are not common sense though outside Silicon Valley. I agree some of the tech problems are more about consumerism, in general, but there are plenty of issues that aren't just that. Avoiding tech won't stop those particular issues.
"And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology."
There will always be risks and compromises with interacting with tech. Going back to my sex-ed analogy, there are also risks with sex, but we learn to wear condoms and practice safe sex to minimize those risks. This idea that we can't teach safer risk mitigation strategies for tech also is silly: ad blockers, privacy blockers, better password and identity management, how and when to share personal information, government and legal interventions. All of these are things that affect tech use and should be taught.
Yet you sneer at it, calling it Luddism.
You missed the point. It's not that there's FUD around tech. It's that the people who understand tech the most (see the headline) are restricting children's access to it more than you (the general reader) might realize.
We have a pretty standard schedule:
- Tech off at 6pm every night and during dinners
- After school till 6 is basically free for all time if they don't have other obligations, which I count as decompression from the day. They hang out with neighbors too.
- Weekends we allow tech, but only if it's educational programming or they're creating something (arts, crafts, stop motion, game programming), so it's a bit more strict.
YMMV, of course.
it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen
How about driving technology? Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16.
There's plenty of precedent for young children being unable to safely & responsibly handle certain things.
Was it Luddism that I wasn't allowed to operate a table saw when I was eleven?
Nonsense. It is commonplace for children to be introduced to driving gradually, from a young age. They are made familiar with it in an observer capacity from approximately the time they are born. Children typically learn to manage unpowered vehicles like tricycles and bicycles within the first few years of their lives—often as soon as they're physically capable of riding them. There exist low-powered electric (toy) vehicles specifically designed for use by young children; for those a few years older, bumper cars and go-karts are popular amusements. There are even places where one can go (with parental consent and supervision) to practice driving real vehicles on private property.
The one thing they aren't permitted before age 15 or 16 is legal permission to drive proper vehicles on public roads. However, adults who haven't passed the driving exams are subject to exactly the same restrictions. Those restrictions are in place not because it is felt that driving is harmful for children but rather because their lack of experience would pose a safety risk for other users of the roads.
We know there are problems with ads, privacy, and subtle ways our "free" apps try to gain our attention. Kids are more capable than you may realize of understanding those issues too, and the sooner you work WITH them to learn those issues and how to counter them, the better.
Having said that, if a parent doesn't have a healthy relationship with tech themselves, they're going to have a hard time teaching their children.
Here is the report on Technology Addiction: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addicti...
Here is our other research reports covering a wide range of media/technology topics effecting children, families and teachers: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1
Since I work from home on a computer all day, it seemed wrong to send mixed messages about screen usage. One trick we use is to set Alexa timers when starting screen time with our preschool and kindergarteners. You can argue with mom and dad, but Alexa is implacable. Also, the play room must be cleaned up and homework done, which seems to provide the “privilege, not a right” context we are looking for. It helps we have far better behaved kids in general that I have any right to expect. I blame my wife.
Your website helped me get control over what my wife and parents were exposing my four year old daughter to, by establishing a neutral source of extremely valuable information. It became very easy to set guidelines thanks to your rating system and the wide range of titles reviewed.
The new 3D animation style and cutesy animal characters are dangerously subversive. My mom thought I was being a grinch until I made her read a review from CSM of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie she wanted to show my daughter:
"There was a scene where the male Air Marshall (who was following them), woke up in a drunken haze (yes, there was a scene where shots and drinks were involved) with 2 new tattoos and in the bedroom or hotel room with another man (and all that that implied)."
There is just no way this stuff is age appropriate. I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.
The Illumination Studios pictures are particularly insidious. I believe their content is generally inappropriate for young children, deleterious to moral character, culturally degenerate, etc. The character design aesthetics are offensive and stupefying. I wasn't surprised to find the same creative oversight involved in the duff Chipmunks pictures.
Case in point is Sing, which when I looked it up, it turns out the movie is notorious for culturally stereotyped presentation of Japanese people, and animal singers who shake their butts around. There's no way young children can appropriately contextualize either of these things.
This appears to be a PG rated movie. This is nothing new. Let's take a step back nearly 25 years and check out things that happen in 'The Nightmare Before Christmas', a movie with the same rating:
Finkelstein makes himself a female doll. A detached leg is used to seduce a villain, whom promptly begins to engage in foot play. There is a torture chamber crossed with a casino, where the casino games determine the level of torture inflicted. There's a skinned head, various detached body parts, brains, etc.
Let's go back farther! Watership Down - 40 years ago.
Doe rabbits fancied by one of the villains are offered up in compensation for his efforts. References to the needs of doe rabbits to sustain the warren Various bits of violence/gore with the rabbits, including a rabbit choking on a snare and coughing up blood Mild profanity - use of 'Damn' and 'Piss', with Fuck replaced with 'Frisk' in several instances.
>There is just no way this stuff is age appropriate. I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.
PG as a rating is specifically not any sort of indication to age appropriateness. Emotional development of children in the ages in question is going to vary drastically, and the whole point is that it is then suggested that the parents, knowing best what content their children will be able to handle, make the decision. The maturity level of content in PG movies has, if anything, dropped over the years.
Note that I am not questioning your choices on what you find appropriate for your children, just your interpretation of what PG means and whether or not the Overton window has shifted.
For a four year old? Sure, the MPAA PG rating fairly firmly indicates that the film contains material likely not appropriate for young children.
> I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.
The content allowed for any given MPAA rating has generally gotten less extreme over time, rather than shifting the other way.
(And, to parents here who aren't familiar with their movie reviews and other resources, check them out: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ )
Movie and TV reviews have gotten so hung up on performance, star power and visuals that they give us parents very little idea about content. They’re useless in many cases.
I feel like common sense media is an amazing tool for those of us that are concerned with the content in media and helps parents make better decisions.
The article doesn't say there has been any peer-reviewed research to show a little screen time is harmful. It just says, oh, check it out, here is a grab bag of assholes, we picked out of a population of like 1 Million engineers, and THEY DONT LET THEIR KIDS USE SCREENS.
Well guess what. I was a video game engineer for 10 years. Now I work in a different area of tech. My wife works for a giant tech company too. We let our 2 year old watch cartoons on Netflix on Sunday mornings. She loves it. We think its cute, because we used to watch Sunday morning cartoons as kids ourselves. She's one of the most advanced kids in her daycare. She can recite the alphabet, count to ten, and speaks full sentences, and tells stories in class. The teachers say she is doing really well.
Whoopity doooo. So what if she knows how to use an iPad.
Please. Stop treating Facebook engineers like they are special snowflakes that know about everything because they wrote some javascript and html that runs a social networking website.
You can't go from complaining about lack of research and then using your single data point, incorrectly.
Anyway, the article may not say it but there is research in the field, and it concludes that screen time is harmful at young ages. I don't believe any research has followed kids for say 20 years (and i mean, we haven't had tiny addictive screens and apps that long anyway) to see if they "recover" or catch up or even surpass their peers when they get older.
Lastly, if you literally only allow her to use the screen once/week for a couple of hours, you are not near the realm where they are finding screens to be harmful. I'm sure you've been out at literally any restaurant and half the toddlers are glued to the screen, as a first resort.
This is a valid complaint about the article, but not a good reason to declare that screens are perfectly healthy.
And thank you for your anecdotal data; we let our kid watch some screen time too, and anecdotally have noticed some negative correlations - after watching more than an hour of TV, she gets more cranky, less patient, a lot more demanding and in general behaves worse.
> The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising.
A lot of parents lack sophistication when it comes to "screen time".
I have multiple in-laws who seem to not understand that it's what is on the screen that matters. As you predicted, those same people are also prone to magical thinking about other things: vaccination, fluoride, radio waves, GMOs, etc.
This has multiple effects. First, they tend to over-limit access to useful aspects of computers. Second, they tend to allow toxic uses of the screen-time (allowing an hour of pocket slot machine time each day, which is IMO super excessive).
A stretched analogy: it's similar to a parent who doesn't understand the difference between alcohol and water, and therefore limits their children's access to liquid to a few times a day. However, during those few hours, the kids get to drink whatever they want out of the liquor cabinet. Obviously, the cabinet should be off-limits 24/7 but the water faucet should be freely available.
Similarly, kids should not be allowed to play pocket slot machines or watch youtube with zero restriction/oversight. But there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time for other uses, because it's not the screen itself that's the problem.
Concretely, my kids will have unrestricted access to an Apple ][ with an Apple BASIC interpreter and manual. I doubt that will cause any problems that aren't also caused by unlimited access to microscopes or pH strips.
Of course, their access to iPad games and Netflix will be moderated in the same way their access to TV will be moderated.
But a lot of parents -- especially non-tech-literate parents -- lump it all in as "screentime", which causes them to both under-moderate what's going on when the screen is on and over-moderate access to the screen for healthy uses.
She'll be way, way ahead of all those kids whose parents decided to not let them use iPads and screens, that's for sure. That's regardless of what she chooses to pursue in life, but especially if she wants to go into technology.
1. We moderate how much time is spent on screens. Each day he probably spends a total of an hour or less in front of any screen (iPad/iPhone/Projector).
2. He does watch some (highly filtered) educational YouTube content, but we also make sure he's playing educational and interactive games, like building, drawing, and learning Chinese (we're a bilingual household). He also has lots of books and we read to him actively, he participates in sports, we take him outside to playgrounds and parks, do arts and crafts with him, and he helps us with chores around the house (in a fun way), etc.
3. When he is playing a game or watching a video, we're there participating. We're monitoring and filtering the content he's viewing, and we're actively adding to the educational experience by talking about the things he's seeing and doing with him.
Technology is a tool, and how it's used matters. Outright banning it means we're missing out on its potential benefits, and also we miss the opportunity to teach him from an early age how to use it properly. I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.
It was a little bit of a struggle at first, but now when we tell him it's time to turn off the iPad, he usually will do it himself without fuss, and he increasingly will turn it off without even prompting and move on to another activity like reading or drawing.
This is also one of my bigger fears. There is a strange mix of people in my generation (born 1990's), who are non-techies, and are either responsible with their internet use or display worrying signs of unhealthy internet presence. Even though tech has been around for some time now.
Some, I realised, were introduced to technology rather late. A fun example is how some people would be offended if I were to call them "gamers". They don't own PC games, don't own a console, but they spend their entire commutes and more playing mobile games.
It really doesn't if you use the tools available.
For instance Amazon FreeTime (https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-FreeTime-Unlimited-Monthly-Sub...) gives you a curated library that is appropriate for the age range you set.
There's no microtransaction apps or other nonsense like that.
You can even set limits like "30 minutes app time per day", "30 minutes book time", "30 minutes video time", etc.
You can also remove or add specific apps you want your kid to have access to.
Honestly it's wonderful to give a young kid that level of autonomy and access to information. You should still pay attention to what they do. But there's no need to give them access to the open internet or to curate everything yourself.
In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.
Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
It's hard for parents to fight off all these temptations.
Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling.
Youtube kids is also all kinds of messed up. Videos created using algorithms specifically to draw the attention of kids and sometimes contain very disturbing images and themes.
This article is a good overview of how Youtube is not a good choice for kids: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig...
Here is a video on Jake Paul (and many big youtubers) and how he markets HARD to kids while also having videos containing very inappropriate material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c
On top of this, in terms of TV/Youtube vs books, there is a big difference in terms of it's effect on language, communication, and development. Also, TV/Youtube is a passive form of learning, reading books is active:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_1...
Many library cards for <18 year-olds didn’t allow certain adult books to be checked out. Books are mostly not algorithmically/peer generated. Even if you are addicted to some book series you will eventually finish it.
It would be nice if there was a content filter that parents could install that wasn’t curated based on someones opinion but worked more like Waze — routing you around places where everyone was stuck.
and then it drops off into under 10 minutes on various reference apps.
Reading: 13:19
Social: 10:27
Education: 2:02
This is despite trying to cut down my use.
Social media, smartphones, and tablets, are the new smoking.
The truth is, we are afraid of everything these days.
People don’t send our kids to play outside, someone might hurt or abduct them (or another parent might Parent Patty us)
People don’t spend time with their kids because they’re so busy at work (but they hire nanny’s with zero screen contracts to feel good about this)
To me, kids should learn to use screens early and often, and get good at understanding how they can exploit opportunity and personal advancement with them (and also how to manage time wasters).
Kids lacking social cues - is it really screens? Or are kids becoming nerdier and turning more to screens because of it?
We live in an era where comic book movies rule the box office and being a nerd is celebrated. It’s this strange double standard of how juvenile our adult pop culture has become, and yet we are flummoxed and finger pointing as to why our kids are regressing socially?
Active parenting is needed, and it’s tricky to outsource that or blame the glowing rectangle. This article is about a bunch of rich SV parents that outsource their parenting to nannies and have no good framework on how to teach moderation, so they're banning the devices outright. That seems like a niche situation.
Screens are wonderful, powerful tools - the bicycle for the mind, as Jobs would say. The world is also a bigger place than screens. Active parenting is needed to ensure moderation.
Extreme measures may need to be taken in some cases, but the fear is so overblown it reminds me of the things my parents took away from me for my own good: my Slayer and Judas Priest albums, my D&D sets, and also my computer and/or modem for months at a time. Sometimes for the sake of discipline these actions make sense, but more often they’re a reflection of popular fears.
It's clickbait. The author wants to jam some facts into a narrative. Consensuses are always "growing". Evidence is always "mounting".
1. Ban gambling in games. That is, if real money is involved in the transaction, then there should be no element of chance involved. If not that, at least properly enforce gambling laws to games given that gambling is illegal for children anyways.
2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.
Problem is, policy makers are clueless when it comes to games. These policies have no chance of passing anytime soon.
So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating.
Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft.
The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.
The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.
The issues raised here seem to not be related to glowing LCDs, but rather particular apps and behaviors in those apps that lead to addictive and problematic behavior.
"Screens" is even broader than saying things like "the internet is bad". The latter statement already sounds unhelpful because everyone has a better understanding of just how diverse of a platform "the internet" is.
Personally, if I had to select one "easy avenue" to ban or restrict, it would be not screens but internet access. This has the side effect of putting the parent in charge of acquiring new content.
His mom who was previously writing and editing textbooks took a job at a public school in a lower income area of the county. She couldn't stay for even a year as she was so upset and dissapointed with the methodology they were using, heavily relying on screens and allowing kids to get away with everything.
I know that I will definitely do everything I can if I have children to get them into the same school.
That being said, I found this anecdote to be particularly... unsettling.
> “I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
It's tough to explain away the emotional desire for something that was manufactured to be cool and addictive
In the 1980s there was hysteria that video games would turn kids into social pariahs due to the bad effects from violence and gore. But shooting a cluster of pixels in 1984 is trivial compared to running the bloods and guts of realism of a PS4. But not much is said anymore.
I think iPads are bad for kids as they become the subject matter, not that what they're trying to do. This is why iPads in education are bad IMO. Kids need to allow their brains to develop the appropriate cognitive functions but things like instance access to info reduce the ability to think, reduce the ability to memorize, and reduce the attention span of kids. In adults it's different as we're already as under/developed as we'll get.
https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...
More recently, parents used to complain about teenage girls locking themselves in their rooms to talk on the phone with their friends.
Children see a large majority of adults engaged with their screens and think, if they can do it, why can't I? Next time you're on the bus or subway look around and try to find the other person doing the same. Practically everyone is looking down unaware of their surroundings. It's the World we live in today and our children are following our lead. Parents need to do their best to set an example.
As a result I spent time outside, hanging with friends, reading, and building things.
I felt literally repulsive when my sweet kid is part of an army to bump up someone's ad views. I also felt truly ashamed as a parent and as a tech worker.
Unfortunately, the most common rule in my kid's circle is that kid can download any app as long as it's free.
I spent a lot of time growing up watching TV. It has helped me learn english (and the proper use of slangs) as well as teaching me some values and cultural references that I couldn't get from a book. If I was never allowed to watch TV, I don't know how I would have occupied my time. Libraries were a bus ride away, there was no local park for me to go to (even if I did, didn't have any friends to really do anything worthwhile)
So, is it my parent's fault? were they unfit as parents to let me watch whatever TV I could after doing my homework? would I have been a better person (whatever that means) if I would have had other after-school activities?
I'm writing this because I'm so sick and tired of people pointing fingers and speaking as though they have all the answers. If you identified the problem, you have to give me the solution as well. You can't just say "here's the problem, now go solve it yourself".
And for you non-parents, you have no idea the types of peer pressure these kids go through. Don't point fingers and label them as some kind of defects just because they've been exposed to the scary "screen time". Kids are just trying to survive, just like the rest of us.
That said, they're not necessarily wrong. They're just missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn't social media or videos or even video games. It's advertising. The cold calculating hand of the free market will reach out to anyone and everyone for the sake of profit, which is why we see a ton of ads, shitty malware-ridden games and abuses of the system in order to gain a foothold into using children as weapons in the advertising war. Every click and every watch is more money, no matter who it is.
In a way it's similar to the way cigarettes were advertised as being for cool people, resulting in affecting children because it infects them with that message from an early age. Flintstones ads featuring Winstons Cigarettes being a great example.
So how do we stop it? You either prevent them from using it, full-stop or you actually create a walled garden designed to protect them from the exploitative behaviors of certain youtube content creators and lassiez-faire app stores.
4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon after 1,100 reviews.
From the description:
"... by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging."
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/d...
We build 'addictive' products by design. Our children should be protected. I'm in the process of saying 'No' to my kids requests for phones and access to online services.
People talk of a stick being a sword, a cane, a ruler, etc, but let's not forget that a stick can also be broken, bent, and manipulated in ways that one might not be able to with a toy or game that has programmed behavior. A lot of, perhaps most of, the useful learning come from crossing the "obvious" boundaries of some design.
This is one reason so many computer gamers from the 80s became interested in computing -- because it was easier to get "behind the scenes" and poke away at your machine. Everything's so professionalized and hermetic these days it's hard for a kid to explore.
Disclaimer: parent of a 20 year old who was not allowed electronics until he was 10. No calculators, no Star Wars. So I may be biased, but I lived my bias.
One time in the dorm, the coin op broke, and the machine allowed unlimited games for free. I played, and played, and played, and then something broke in me. I totally lost interest in pinball, it bored me silly, and in 40 years that interest never came back.
One of my first jobs was testing video games. That ground to dust any interest I had in that. It revived briefly when Doom came out, but that didn't last long.
I suppose I've dodged a bullet with that.
The solution is to limit kids from using internet devices and put them into environments where it is easy to have rich interactions with nature and with other people. Examples like Boy Scouts, school clubs, and road trips are good.
The problem with blindly saying all screen time is bad is that it actually prevents us talking about what is good and what is bad about it, and therefore actually impedes progress. As a result, we have almost no guidance to either parents or app developers about what constitutes "good" content, which actually results in more "bad" content and more kids being exposed to "bad" content because parents are just operating in a complete blind spot where they let their kids have small amounts of "screen time" during which they can do anything.
It's like saying "I limit my children's tobacco time to 1 hour per day" - which is ludicrous but that is exactly what being promoted currently as "good practise" for parents to follow.
You can disable or control this addiction pattern. Short, repeating patterns with rewards are how you feed addiction.
Turn off most or all push notifications. Don't mindlessly use devices in short, repetitive ways that reward your brain with dopamine (eg checking social media over and over for new posts). For things like social media, HN, and reddit have specific times of the day you use them and that's it.
Short cycle games like Fortnite feed this pattern too. Put time limits in place. This applies to adults too. It's really easy to play one more game.
> “Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’”
If this is you stop. Give your children freedom. You don't need to track them or know what they're doing 24/7. Being a helicopter parent will hurt them far more in the long run than giving them screen time.
I would say that it is better to go the hard route and helping my daughter to learn to live with screens and some semblance of self-control around them, rather than enforce complete prohibition.
But from reading the article, most of the "screen-time" seems to have been un-supervised? That is the thing we are probably trying to avoid the most, with my daughter we are most of the time in the room, and we did agree on a limit (most of the time, one sitting is 3 cartoons she chose beforehand).
But I do wonder what I will do, once she is in school, and there is a cool new game with microtransactions everybody is playing.
I kinda hope I will manage do be the weird dad that persuades her and her friends to organize a lan-party instead of throwing bucks at $COOL_SKIN in $POPULAR_GAME :-)
I have a 5-year-old who goes to kindergarten at a great school. But games like MathTango or Twelve A Dozen are capable of engaging him to a much greater degree than anything else I have found, and they get him engaged in more advanced mathematical concepts than either I or his teachers at school can do alone. When gamification convinces him to just spend a little bit longer solving a few more math problems to get to the next level, it's a good thing.
Stop thinking in terms of "screen time". It's not the screen that's hurting your brain, it's stupid apps that make you stupid. Just don't let your kids use apps that you don't think are good for them.
(The purpose of not giving the kid a monitor would be to deny him access to Linux games with engaging user interfaces.)
My point is that the word "screens" is an imprecise description of the danger. The danger is restricted to certain platforms.
(Yeah, I realize that it is possible that the kid could get access to stuff I wouldn't want him to see via the ability to install from a large repository of Linux packages or via FTP, but as long as I'm occasionally inspecting his Linux installation, the expected benefits would outweigh the expected risks. For example, it is very unlikely that any Linux package or ftp repository has been optimized much for addictiveness.)
That and that online content is made by the producers to be addictive. There is a competition for consumer attention time. Attention time brings in advertising money. One should be aware that when the product are free, the information about us is being sold to advertisers.
Kids should play and learn not be targets for ad revenue by online content made like dopamine slot machine rewards.
I have an issue with video feeds going to the kids which has dark / violent content in them. Kids do not have proper developed reality and what is fiction filters. There is computer programs and there are TV programs.
Its pretty interesting because when my kid was young, my concern was not too much exposure but not enough.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0797ZV1RJ/ref=oh_aui_d_de...
Contrary to what may be popular belief, many administrations set no guidelines around phone use in classrooms, leaving it to teachers to fight the never-ending battle. The lecture becomes hard or boring, and out come the phones.
Getting a kid anything more than a feature phone is pretty much daring the poor thing to walk tightrope across a canyon without a safety net.
The parents quoted in the article talking about how preschool kids with phones are no big deal need to spend some time in a typical high school classroom.
As an analogy, "don't eat that: it's dirty" is not a proposition that's meant to be analyzed on a case by case basis, it's meant to be applied automatically to the entire world excepting a few very clear circumstances. It's a good heuristic.
I don't know what the digital equivalents will be, but would love to hear suggestions.
"Don't follow the likes"
"You're the product"
"Don't post anything unless you want it in the NYT"
"Whose phone is that? (Google's)"
-- edit (spelling)
It's the "Ah, you know what I mean." saying.
No actually, we don't "know" what you mean, and that's the really question that needs answered in the public zeitgeist.
Most here "know" what it means. However, quantifying that into a simple statement or phrase like "screen time" is not so easy.
Are there any recommendations?
I think something along the lines of "screen farmed", seems to fit. A company using your time in their site/app to make money. So that company is "Screen Farming" you.
Thoughts?
Now parents can’t be sure if the kids are working on homework or playing. Or multitasking.
Instead of teachers grading written homework, kids visit clunky websites created by textbook manufacturers, and do their homework online. Takes longer, and can be frustrating, but easier for the teachers. Pearson example: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt842499.aspx
84% of parents with well-behaved children went for a walk instead of allowing a second hour of games. Why don't you press this button, it will give a one minute countdown to all devices in your house.
Your coats are in the hall, apart from Jennifer's who dropped hers in her room.
63% of parent whose children dropped clothes on their bedroom floor have successfully used the phrase "Please hang your clothes up dear, the coat fairy does not visit till next month"
Microtransactions? I don't think the existence of microtransactions is what makes it obviously worse. You could waste your entire childhood in front of screens back then too, and society quickly came to learn you should reduce screen time, despite the temptation of the TV babysitter. Those same lessons apply to the smartphone era of today.
F2P games, like the almost 10 year old farmvillie? That is a bit newer, and I do agree that has a problem. I don't think that is new although.
Let's be real: writing a backend data pipeline doesn't teach you anything about how to raise a child. We all laugh when they talk about kale, or activating their almonds, but we're supposed to think random CEOs, VPs, and engineers became experts in developmental psychology simply by being in proximity to silicon valley.
I remember back in high school when I wanted to play Diablo 2 LoD more than anything else. I had a great time, and don't actually regret it, but I think if I had not been able to break free of that at the proper time, it could have had bad consequences on my life. "All things in moderation" as they say.
Is your kid whining st a restaurant? Or bugging you while you need to make an important phone call. It’s easy to calm them down if you hand them an iPhone with candy crush.
I think many parents are uncomfortable with this use of phones, but reality forces you to use it.
I have no delusions about it being easy, but we're going to try very, very hard to bar interactive screens as long as we can, and keep them to a bare minimum when we can no longer bar them.
As I've mentioned in other threads, watching people watch their phones on public transport, like rats in a dopamine experiment, troubles me, a lot.
All with the usual special pleading about how things were different then.
When you don't want the product anywhere near you but you still want to get paid for manufacturing the product, you might have an unresolved ethical dilemma in your life.
But, when I got married, I could not convince my spouse that a screen free environment would be beneficial for our kids.
I also sometimes think I should get rid of my smart phone.
Do I really need it?
But given that I haven't, it is really hard to do one thing and ask my kids to do another.
It seems the parents are disallowing devices for other reasons than just "it's bad". They are privileged people, are they afraid of being spied by the devices of their kids? Are they afraid that the existence of their privileges are leaked to a greater population?
Tomorrow's society will be connected, and so will be politic, information, and learning. But no parent wants to risk it with their own kids, because of fear of the unknown, or because they don't accept that they will lose control over their kids sooner than ever.
It's their choices to rise their kids as they want, but they are probably from the top richest 1% anyway, their kids future is already privileged and boosted, phone or no phone.
- 2h Netflix time per week
- Offline phone with audiobooks
- Offline PS3 with SingStar
- Occasional music video on parent's smartphone
No free TV usage, no YouTube and no Internet-connected devices. Seems to work well for now!
Are there phones that allow a parent to remotely shut off WiFi and cellular? Because if there aren't there should be.
"They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
