A few weeks ago I was a boyfriend brought along to a dinner with a bunch of young lady doctors and the urban millenial men that love them. We're all at the age where kids are starting to arrive and the topic of childhood screentime came up.
I'm pretty sure I am the most conservative person in the group, so I was expecting to be the lone voice making a tentative case against unrestricted access. Then the pregnant child psychiatrist came off the top rope with their plan of zero screen time; not even FaceTime with the grandparents that live ~6 hours away. Her progressive social worker husband was nodding along. This wasn't a we hate grandma and grandpa thing either. They were quick to say they would have to do more road trips to visit and figure out how to make phone calls meaningful.
I think there has to be something to the concerns about phone usage and iPad kids when the smartest people from all parts of the political spectrum are aligned on them being a problem.
I read Bowling Alone last year; one thing that struck me reading it is TV emerged in a world that still had a lot of social ties and togetherness that blunted the immediate impact. Unfortunately, like a satellite on a parabolic trajectory, we are reaching the point where the gravity well of those social ties are weakening such that we are approaching escape velocity and will be flung into cold vacuum of Infinite Content(TM).
To play devil's advocate, excessive book reading while young probably has a negative impact on a kid's mind too. The classic "touch grass" adage applies most to children, who need to develop an instinctual grasp of their senses and social nuance.
It's not as bad as YouTube slop, but I have a kid who would read twelve hours a day if he could (not a humblebrag). He's largely oblivious to clear social cues and has an overpowering inner monologue that drowns out the reality around him. Could be plain old genetics too.
I was that kid too and I do think being forced to do more activities/outdoor time might have benefitted me. I would hole up in my room and read all day, every day.
We let our kid look at screens some of the time but his computer had to go in the shop a few weeks ago and he was forced to ride his bike around the neighborhood, watch cartoons and read. This seemed like a positive development so now he is no-screens a few days out of the week. It's not so much that we worry that youtube is going to ruin his brain (it won't) but that almost anything else is better.
Youtube itself isn't all terrible, I don't mind if he is watching tutorials or acquainting himself with the oeuvre of Felix Colgrave. Playing video games is okay too. Watching videos about *other* people playing video games is where I draw the line.=p
So far we haven't let him use social stuff, not so much because we are worried about psycho perverts but because we don't want him dealing with (or becoming) trolls, who are much more common.
What makes you think these previous generations were "out of touch" and wrong?? I think they were right. Trashy novels, and TV, and now Tik Tok DO rot your brain and make you a worse, weaker, more self-centered person. Each generation is worse than the last one!
The irony here is that the only reason this isn't super obvious is bc technology and material abundance has covered all your weaknesses for you. The second you didn't have them though, a still physically healthy Boomer would kick the ass of a Gen Xer, who would definitely kick the ass of a millennial, who would kick the ass of a Zoomer, and idk maybe a Zoomer would kick the ass of a Gen Alpha but they are such wimps already it's hard to imagine. Btw when I say "kick the ass of" I simply mean in things like work ethic, lack of narcissism, lack of helplessness and complaining, etc. Do you really
See my gd airplane wifi went out and cut off my comment, I am helpless without the technology others provide and maintain for me. 😂
Anyway, I was going to say, do you really think that you yourself might not be just a tad better without all the TV and media in your own youth?? I'm not saying NONE, but...I think I would in fact be a physically healthier, more caring, possibly richer, less selfish person with more friends if I had not spent most of free time imbibing media in my youth. Not that I'm making excuses or trying to place blame elsewhere for my faults for anything, bc I am still pretty good on those metrics, but I would've been EVEN BETTER, I bet.
There's always the possibility that every generation complaining about the youth has been right and it's been one long downhill slide to mediocrity. Or maybe this is only true since the War. Certainly it doesn't make sense to extend it back infinitely far into history, and people have been complaining about the irreverence and new fashions of the young for thousands of years, for as long as we have recorded history.
From what I can tell the blessings of new media tech are a mixed bag and always have been. The elders worried that the written word would ruin people's memories, and they were partly right. But it's undeniable to my mind that we're much more sophisticated and worldly than we used to be, as a direct result of media exposure. Would you really wish otherwise for yourself?
I think one interesting problem with this round of introduction of new media tech is that to an uprecedented degree, we have a society with a very high expectation of equality and social mobility*, and making a chunk of people basically dumber has major impacts on that. In a more classist system, a bunch of proles becoming dumber isn't a problem since screw them they're proles anyway. But we don't live in that society right now, or at least we don't admit it.
*whether that's true or not, different question. I feel like very subtly we're moving back to an aristocracy in function if not name, or at least a world of extremely limited social mobility.
“ Why shouldn’t they get used to the realities of that world when they’re kids?‘\”
Sigh…. Because that world has no “reality”. The young mind has no experiential scaffolding upon which to evaluate the “reality” of their online world. In short, their minds assume that what they experience is a valid representation of the world/society and the importance of the events they see/experience. Nothing is further from the truth.
To compare a smart phone and social media app’s to 1960’s TV is a leap. What I viewed on TV was a one way process. Content was created by adults experienced in such matters and tightly controlled through regulation, albeit this broke down with time and cable options.
My choice was to turn the channel or the TV off. Today, the content is created by oneself and other users—none of which is vetted for such ability nor influence. The distortion of reality is greater than ever before.
Wise parents, e.g., my Millennial children do not even allow TV to the grandchildren. The reasons are simple. One, distortion, mentioned above. Another, time spent in unproductive activity—which results in or adds to, childhood obesity and distraction from assigned schoolwork. The grandchildren are not bored, they read. Youngest was reading to me at “four years old”!
WRT communication with parents, there is now a class of “dumb” cell phones that can be programmed with phone numbers by parents and these the children have so they can communication verbally and through video with only selected individuals. There is no need for more.
Finally, if children are “addicted” to smartphones or tablets, it is the fault of inept and weak parents. Such children affected (infected?) would be better off if their parents simply “drugged” them into somnambulism for few hours of relief from parenting. :-(
I spend ten hours a day on screens working and playing, and I very much doubt there will be less screen time in humanity's future absent total social collapse. I don't think people denying their kinds screens up to certain ages are stunting their development, that would be silly. Rather, they may be simply postponing the inevitable for no good reason. My own thoughts are somewhere in the middle, as I spelled out in the final paragraphs of this essay.
My argument is that there *are* many good reasons to deny—or strictly regulate—such access, and it’s not even confined to young children. Such is a case by case judgement to be sure. It is only now, 20 years after cell/smart phones that the information is building that such “unlimited/uncontrolled” access affects the development of young (and old) brains. TV had such an analogy as well in its first 20 years, but never to the ubiquitous effect of smart phones, or TV on demand, we experience today.
Here’s an example, and pardon me for no citations, but I’m sure a quick query from any good AI will produce them, “attention span”. To read and comprehend adequately requires much effort and concentration. The social media world has produced “dopamine junkies” who no longer concentrate and put in effort to obtain information. Vast swaths of children today have never completed reading a novel cover to cover in HS. In my early education, we were assigned plays by Shakespeare and stories by Chaucer. These are tough reads and require great patience. Similarly, such training was “essential” at university.
Today I even find myself, at advanced age, having the attention span of a goldfish—having “trained” myself on the Internet to hop from one thing/topic to another. When I bump into a classic book, it literally takes a hour or more to get back into a comprehensive reading and concentration mode. I don’t need a scientific publication to tell me why this is—I’ve trained myself poorly and gotten “out of shape”. Not totally different from weight training.
Bonus fear: AI will make cell phone decline in intellect even worse. No one will attempt to master any aspect of inquiry when they can just ask ChatGPT for the answer. The typical intellect will decline such that there is no longer even a basis for questioning what your AI tells you is “true”. The mediocre will appear to be brighter than they are with the resulting decline in ability to decern truth.
I’ll end here as this missive is waay too long for our new generation to manage in a sitting. ;-)
One can relate to futuristic Marty McFly Sr. walking in on futuristic Marty McFly Jr. and commenting with approval "Hey, son. Watchin' a little TV for a change?"
I'm an elder Zoomer, and my dad saw this all coming from a mile away. My grandpa got me a first gen iTouch, and upon receipt internet was cut from the entire house lol. He was willing to live the monastic life himself if it meant keeping his 11 year old offline. Not to mention TV, game, social media and other restrictions.
So lots of reading, as a parent would hope. I felt kind of resentful, but not in a relationship-destroying way. And looking back I certainly wouldn't have it any other way.
Granted, I was lucky to live around the corner from my best friend. Which both alleviated the radio-silent second-class-citizen problem (which is definitely very real), as well as providing me access to all his games and wifi to hook my iTouch to, lol.
So idk, maybe some sort of communal living with dedicated internet spots is the best compromise? I know I'm going to make my best go at homesteading and homeschooling when it comes time. This feels like a collective action problem which you can't really solve as an individual, need like-minded immediate community.
I'm an elder millennial / late gen Xer, which means I was the only generation to grow up with computers but without the internet. Lots of reading, but also lots of video and computer games. And lots of TV.
There's a huge class divide here from what I've heard. People like me -- middle to upper-middle class parents--limit screen time and media exposure.
My son has never had a tablet but he watches (probably too much) TV on my desktop computer (I don't have a TV since I find the computer works just as well and I like having a little bit of "friction" to turning a show on) and sometimes uses my phone to watch YouTube, maybe twice a week and only on car rides. I think that's reasonable (though I do let him watch too many cartoons, at least it's not an iPad, and i find that he often loses interest and walks a way to play with toys while the show plays in the background).
My kids are also young and the approach I've tried to take so far is to make sure screentime is mostly, if not entirely, shared. We watch TV shows and movies together. We play video games together, never alone. My kids aren't old enough yet that friends are wanting to online game, but I'm hoping that never makes it into my house. I just think playing together on the couch, while not the best use of time, is far better than online gaming, even if it's with your friends.
I would also like to channel kids towards computer literacy. I'm a finance guy, don't work in tech, but I still think in the world of the future, there will be value in understanding how computing devices work rather than being a pure consumer.
I have a Gen Alpha cousin that's a hardcore gamer and social outcast but who is functionally computer illiterate. Games are his entire existence, and he doesn't even know how to pirate them -- and not out of ethical concerns. Totally unagentic. Makes me sad.
As Millennials, computer skills were the one thing we gamer dweebs all had going for us. We were pirating games with abandon, cracking them, burning CD-Rs, and soldering mod chips onto our consoles. Highly agentic! Ethical concerns noted.
To be sure, I want my kids to be more balanced and less into games than I was. But if you're going to be into tech, at least be agentic about it.
When I was younger I had the view that games were better than passive screen time like TV. Now I'm not so sure -- I see bright young men dumping their youth down the drain speed running the games I grew up playing.
“After all, the simplest argument for not worrying about giving kids screens is very straightforward and relatively persuasive: they’re going to live in a world where these devices exist and they’ll own one themselves as adults.”
I think this would be more persuasive if we lived in a world where adults worry about children’s screen time but not their own. Instead, we live in the reverse: it’s a trend that first started among adults nearly 15 years ago now.
Sometimes it is illustrating to move the issue to another comparable analogy, alcohol consumption. All children in the USA will enter a world/society in which people consume alcohol. Why not allow them to do so when they so desire? Of course, that’s silly. Even post Vietnam and the drop in age of consent, we had to reverse such rather quickly. Similarly, we—as a society—are coming to the same conclusion wrt smart phone and social media use. The decision at this point resides with the parents. Perhaps that will not always be the case. If smart phone usage in cars can be controlled….
I was born the last year of the Boomers. I grew up with three channels but soon another two were added that showed reruns of old shows. I grew up with television limits. I turned the tv on in the evening only. I had a few shows I enjoyed watching by myself. Mom and dad watched the news usually at supper time. That tv was located in the den. They had a small tv in their bedroom. The tv in the den was my only choice if my parents were not using it. We did not necessarily watch tv together.
In the summer, I spent a lot of my day outside. I rode my bike most days. I walked, ran, and roller skated. The neighborhood pool was just one house down and at the end of our street. A park could be seen from my front yard. It was a great neighborhood to grow up in. However, there were few kids my age on my long block street.
Only in the summer mother took me to the public library.
I was a kid that entertained myself. I am still introverted and a bit of a loner and independent.
My mother used to complain that her mother had the tv on all day. From the time she woke up and until she went to bed the tv was on. She hated to be alone. She hated the quiet. She never learned to drive a car. Her husband worked two jobs. So, sitting at home alone was too much. That grandmother was born in 1906. Television for her was a wonder.
Television, Internet, social media is different things for different people. I feel that sometimes it is a fidgety habit. For others it is a source of entertainment as humans like to be entertained. It can also be a way for people who do not like to be alone and who do not like to be in their own thoughts a way of feeling as if "someone is there."
I have friends and relatives who do not have a car, who have health problems that keep them at home. Social media is their only means of reaching out to and being with people.
One difference between the current—let's call it "scepticism" —about screen time and the "moral panic" about "penny dreadfuls" is that the former is backed by a noticeable (and apparently, non-artifactual) increase in neuroticism in teenagers and has been studied by Jon Haidt and others and the penny dreadful thing seems to have been a theme of sensationalist and not altogether reliable reporting. (Note there are no names given in the newspaper piece, there was no coroner's report, the kid was 14 and working long hours—we'd think he should have been at school and playing sports.)
No, this isn't a moral panic as such. There are reasons to be concerned about the mental health of young adults and teenagers. This is, as Haidt often says, but is frequently misrepresented as not saying, clearly down to multiple factors. Even without social media, schools seem to encourage more introspection ("Might I be mad?" "What if I have ADHD or schizophrenia?" "Perhaps I'm actually really unhappy, I was sad yesterday?") which doesn't seem conducive to well-being, and the future isn't as bright for young people as it was in the 1980s, so a certain glumness is only to be expected.
Great engagement bait. We don't have a TV, but we have a Plex server with some shows and movies and we only watch them together, on a phone, for certain "movie nights." I have a Nintendo, and I allow my kids to play it, but they generally don't have the patience for games. Otherwise they mostly play with toys/play outside with other kids/draw/paint. We read books before bed. The only "unsupervised" media consumption they have is that sometimes we'll put one of our audiobooks on the phone (locked) if they want to listen to something and we don't have the energy to read it ourselves.
I definitely feel the loss of a "social canon" (like Friends or Game of Thrones). My friends and I all read/watch/play different things, but they're very rarely the same things. Reading someone else's favorite book or watching their favorite show is definitely an investment in one person, rather than an investment in the whole group. On the other hand, I remember watching GoT and Marvel movies for "watercooler conversation" and most of the time the conversation was little more than "wow, the Red Wedding? Crazy!"
I think the solution involves trying to find little "microcanons," books or movies that most people in your friend group or your kids' friend group will like and reference but are not what the entire Internet declares to be important.
A few weeks ago I was a boyfriend brought along to a dinner with a bunch of young lady doctors and the urban millenial men that love them. We're all at the age where kids are starting to arrive and the topic of childhood screentime came up.
I'm pretty sure I am the most conservative person in the group, so I was expecting to be the lone voice making a tentative case against unrestricted access. Then the pregnant child psychiatrist came off the top rope with their plan of zero screen time; not even FaceTime with the grandparents that live ~6 hours away. Her progressive social worker husband was nodding along. This wasn't a we hate grandma and grandpa thing either. They were quick to say they would have to do more road trips to visit and figure out how to make phone calls meaningful.
I think there has to be something to the concerns about phone usage and iPad kids when the smartest people from all parts of the political spectrum are aligned on them being a problem.
I read Bowling Alone last year; one thing that struck me reading it is TV emerged in a world that still had a lot of social ties and togetherness that blunted the immediate impact. Unfortunately, like a satellite on a parabolic trajectory, we are reaching the point where the gravity well of those social ties are weakening such that we are approaching escape velocity and will be flung into cold vacuum of Infinite Content(TM).
Agree
To play devil's advocate, excessive book reading while young probably has a negative impact on a kid's mind too. The classic "touch grass" adage applies most to children, who need to develop an instinctual grasp of their senses and social nuance.
It's not as bad as YouTube slop, but I have a kid who would read twelve hours a day if he could (not a humblebrag). He's largely oblivious to clear social cues and has an overpowering inner monologue that drowns out the reality around him. Could be plain old genetics too.
I was that kid too and I do think being forced to do more activities/outdoor time might have benefitted me. I would hole up in my room and read all day, every day.
We let our kid look at screens some of the time but his computer had to go in the shop a few weeks ago and he was forced to ride his bike around the neighborhood, watch cartoons and read. This seemed like a positive development so now he is no-screens a few days out of the week. It's not so much that we worry that youtube is going to ruin his brain (it won't) but that almost anything else is better.
Youtube itself isn't all terrible, I don't mind if he is watching tutorials or acquainting himself with the oeuvre of Felix Colgrave. Playing video games is okay too. Watching videos about *other* people playing video games is where I draw the line.=p
So far we haven't let him use social stuff, not so much because we are worried about psycho perverts but because we don't want him dealing with (or becoming) trolls, who are much more common.
What makes you think these previous generations were "out of touch" and wrong?? I think they were right. Trashy novels, and TV, and now Tik Tok DO rot your brain and make you a worse, weaker, more self-centered person. Each generation is worse than the last one!
The irony here is that the only reason this isn't super obvious is bc technology and material abundance has covered all your weaknesses for you. The second you didn't have them though, a still physically healthy Boomer would kick the ass of a Gen Xer, who would definitely kick the ass of a millennial, who would kick the ass of a Zoomer, and idk maybe a Zoomer would kick the ass of a Gen Alpha but they are such wimps already it's hard to imagine. Btw when I say "kick the ass of" I simply mean in things like work ethic, lack of narcissism, lack of helplessness and complaining, etc. Do you really
See my gd airplane wifi went out and cut off my comment, I am helpless without the technology others provide and maintain for me. 😂
Anyway, I was going to say, do you really think that you yourself might not be just a tad better without all the TV and media in your own youth?? I'm not saying NONE, but...I think I would in fact be a physically healthier, more caring, possibly richer, less selfish person with more friends if I had not spent most of free time imbibing media in my youth. Not that I'm making excuses or trying to place blame elsewhere for my faults for anything, bc I am still pretty good on those metrics, but I would've been EVEN BETTER, I bet.
There's always the possibility that every generation complaining about the youth has been right and it's been one long downhill slide to mediocrity. Or maybe this is only true since the War. Certainly it doesn't make sense to extend it back infinitely far into history, and people have been complaining about the irreverence and new fashions of the young for thousands of years, for as long as we have recorded history.
From what I can tell the blessings of new media tech are a mixed bag and always have been. The elders worried that the written word would ruin people's memories, and they were partly right. But it's undeniable to my mind that we're much more sophisticated and worldly than we used to be, as a direct result of media exposure. Would you really wish otherwise for yourself?
I think one interesting problem with this round of introduction of new media tech is that to an uprecedented degree, we have a society with a very high expectation of equality and social mobility*, and making a chunk of people basically dumber has major impacts on that. In a more classist system, a bunch of proles becoming dumber isn't a problem since screw them they're proles anyway. But we don't live in that society right now, or at least we don't admit it.
*whether that's true or not, different question. I feel like very subtly we're moving back to an aristocracy in function if not name, or at least a world of extremely limited social mobility.
“ Why shouldn’t they get used to the realities of that world when they’re kids?‘\”
Sigh…. Because that world has no “reality”. The young mind has no experiential scaffolding upon which to evaluate the “reality” of their online world. In short, their minds assume that what they experience is a valid representation of the world/society and the importance of the events they see/experience. Nothing is further from the truth.
To compare a smart phone and social media app’s to 1960’s TV is a leap. What I viewed on TV was a one way process. Content was created by adults experienced in such matters and tightly controlled through regulation, albeit this broke down with time and cable options.
My choice was to turn the channel or the TV off. Today, the content is created by oneself and other users—none of which is vetted for such ability nor influence. The distortion of reality is greater than ever before.
Wise parents, e.g., my Millennial children do not even allow TV to the grandchildren. The reasons are simple. One, distortion, mentioned above. Another, time spent in unproductive activity—which results in or adds to, childhood obesity and distraction from assigned schoolwork. The grandchildren are not bored, they read. Youngest was reading to me at “four years old”!
WRT communication with parents, there is now a class of “dumb” cell phones that can be programmed with phone numbers by parents and these the children have so they can communication verbally and through video with only selected individuals. There is no need for more.
Finally, if children are “addicted” to smartphones or tablets, it is the fault of inept and weak parents. Such children affected (infected?) would be better off if their parents simply “drugged” them into somnambulism for few hours of relief from parenting. :-(
I spend ten hours a day on screens working and playing, and I very much doubt there will be less screen time in humanity's future absent total social collapse. I don't think people denying their kinds screens up to certain ages are stunting their development, that would be silly. Rather, they may be simply postponing the inevitable for no good reason. My own thoughts are somewhere in the middle, as I spelled out in the final paragraphs of this essay.
Noted.
My argument is that there *are* many good reasons to deny—or strictly regulate—such access, and it’s not even confined to young children. Such is a case by case judgement to be sure. It is only now, 20 years after cell/smart phones that the information is building that such “unlimited/uncontrolled” access affects the development of young (and old) brains. TV had such an analogy as well in its first 20 years, but never to the ubiquitous effect of smart phones, or TV on demand, we experience today.
Here’s an example, and pardon me for no citations, but I’m sure a quick query from any good AI will produce them, “attention span”. To read and comprehend adequately requires much effort and concentration. The social media world has produced “dopamine junkies” who no longer concentrate and put in effort to obtain information. Vast swaths of children today have never completed reading a novel cover to cover in HS. In my early education, we were assigned plays by Shakespeare and stories by Chaucer. These are tough reads and require great patience. Similarly, such training was “essential” at university.
Today I even find myself, at advanced age, having the attention span of a goldfish—having “trained” myself on the Internet to hop from one thing/topic to another. When I bump into a classic book, it literally takes a hour or more to get back into a comprehensive reading and concentration mode. I don’t need a scientific publication to tell me why this is—I’ve trained myself poorly and gotten “out of shape”. Not totally different from weight training.
Bonus fear: AI will make cell phone decline in intellect even worse. No one will attempt to master any aspect of inquiry when they can just ask ChatGPT for the answer. The typical intellect will decline such that there is no longer even a basis for questioning what your AI tells you is “true”. The mediocre will appear to be brighter than they are with the resulting decline in ability to decern truth.
I’ll end here as this missive is waay too long for our new generation to manage in a sitting. ;-)
One can relate to futuristic Marty McFly Sr. walking in on futuristic Marty McFly Jr. and commenting with approval "Hey, son. Watchin' a little TV for a change?"
I'm an elder Zoomer, and my dad saw this all coming from a mile away. My grandpa got me a first gen iTouch, and upon receipt internet was cut from the entire house lol. He was willing to live the monastic life himself if it meant keeping his 11 year old offline. Not to mention TV, game, social media and other restrictions.
So lots of reading, as a parent would hope. I felt kind of resentful, but not in a relationship-destroying way. And looking back I certainly wouldn't have it any other way.
Granted, I was lucky to live around the corner from my best friend. Which both alleviated the radio-silent second-class-citizen problem (which is definitely very real), as well as providing me access to all his games and wifi to hook my iTouch to, lol.
So idk, maybe some sort of communal living with dedicated internet spots is the best compromise? I know I'm going to make my best go at homesteading and homeschooling when it comes time. This feels like a collective action problem which you can't really solve as an individual, need like-minded immediate community.
I'm an elder millennial / late gen Xer, which means I was the only generation to grow up with computers but without the internet. Lots of reading, but also lots of video and computer games. And lots of TV.
Having the internet as a location at The Family Computer is great. Plus those big desks with the fat alabaster monitors were always cozy.
There's a huge class divide here from what I've heard. People like me -- middle to upper-middle class parents--limit screen time and media exposure.
My son has never had a tablet but he watches (probably too much) TV on my desktop computer (I don't have a TV since I find the computer works just as well and I like having a little bit of "friction" to turning a show on) and sometimes uses my phone to watch YouTube, maybe twice a week and only on car rides. I think that's reasonable (though I do let him watch too many cartoons, at least it's not an iPad, and i find that he often loses interest and walks a way to play with toys while the show plays in the background).
My kids are also young and the approach I've tried to take so far is to make sure screentime is mostly, if not entirely, shared. We watch TV shows and movies together. We play video games together, never alone. My kids aren't old enough yet that friends are wanting to online game, but I'm hoping that never makes it into my house. I just think playing together on the couch, while not the best use of time, is far better than online gaming, even if it's with your friends.
I would also like to channel kids towards computer literacy. I'm a finance guy, don't work in tech, but I still think in the world of the future, there will be value in understanding how computing devices work rather than being a pure consumer.
I have a Gen Alpha cousin that's a hardcore gamer and social outcast but who is functionally computer illiterate. Games are his entire existence, and he doesn't even know how to pirate them -- and not out of ethical concerns. Totally unagentic. Makes me sad.
As Millennials, computer skills were the one thing we gamer dweebs all had going for us. We were pirating games with abandon, cracking them, burning CD-Rs, and soldering mod chips onto our consoles. Highly agentic! Ethical concerns noted.
To be sure, I want my kids to be more balanced and less into games than I was. But if you're going to be into tech, at least be agentic about it.
When I was younger I had the view that games were better than passive screen time like TV. Now I'm not so sure -- I see bright young men dumping their youth down the drain speed running the games I grew up playing.
“After all, the simplest argument for not worrying about giving kids screens is very straightforward and relatively persuasive: they’re going to live in a world where these devices exist and they’ll own one themselves as adults.”
I think this would be more persuasive if we lived in a world where adults worry about children’s screen time but not their own. Instead, we live in the reverse: it’s a trend that first started among adults nearly 15 years ago now.
Sometimes it is illustrating to move the issue to another comparable analogy, alcohol consumption. All children in the USA will enter a world/society in which people consume alcohol. Why not allow them to do so when they so desire? Of course, that’s silly. Even post Vietnam and the drop in age of consent, we had to reverse such rather quickly. Similarly, we—as a society—are coming to the same conclusion wrt smart phone and social media use. The decision at this point resides with the parents. Perhaps that will not always be the case. If smart phone usage in cars can be controlled….
I think that’s a good analogy, complete with people being in a spectrum about how much is too much.
I was born the last year of the Boomers. I grew up with three channels but soon another two were added that showed reruns of old shows. I grew up with television limits. I turned the tv on in the evening only. I had a few shows I enjoyed watching by myself. Mom and dad watched the news usually at supper time. That tv was located in the den. They had a small tv in their bedroom. The tv in the den was my only choice if my parents were not using it. We did not necessarily watch tv together.
In the summer, I spent a lot of my day outside. I rode my bike most days. I walked, ran, and roller skated. The neighborhood pool was just one house down and at the end of our street. A park could be seen from my front yard. It was a great neighborhood to grow up in. However, there were few kids my age on my long block street.
Only in the summer mother took me to the public library.
I was a kid that entertained myself. I am still introverted and a bit of a loner and independent.
My mother used to complain that her mother had the tv on all day. From the time she woke up and until she went to bed the tv was on. She hated to be alone. She hated the quiet. She never learned to drive a car. Her husband worked two jobs. So, sitting at home alone was too much. That grandmother was born in 1906. Television for her was a wonder.
Television, Internet, social media is different things for different people. I feel that sometimes it is a fidgety habit. For others it is a source of entertainment as humans like to be entertained. It can also be a way for people who do not like to be alone and who do not like to be in their own thoughts a way of feeling as if "someone is there."
I have friends and relatives who do not have a car, who have health problems that keep them at home. Social media is their only means of reaching out to and being with people.
My Boomer parents have the TV on all day as well. Half of their kids (my siblings) inherited that, so it's not strictly a generational thing.
Farmer in 18th Century New England: I worry about Elias, he reads too much and neglects his chores. Books will change his brain, and I don't like it.
Farmer's Wife: Oh let him read
At some point I think this will require state intervention.
If you count school district rules this has already started happening
One difference between the current—let's call it "scepticism" —about screen time and the "moral panic" about "penny dreadfuls" is that the former is backed by a noticeable (and apparently, non-artifactual) increase in neuroticism in teenagers and has been studied by Jon Haidt and others and the penny dreadful thing seems to have been a theme of sensationalist and not altogether reliable reporting. (Note there are no names given in the newspaper piece, there was no coroner's report, the kid was 14 and working long hours—we'd think he should have been at school and playing sports.)
No, this isn't a moral panic as such. There are reasons to be concerned about the mental health of young adults and teenagers. This is, as Haidt often says, but is frequently misrepresented as not saying, clearly down to multiple factors. Even without social media, schools seem to encourage more introspection ("Might I be mad?" "What if I have ADHD or schizophrenia?" "Perhaps I'm actually really unhappy, I was sad yesterday?") which doesn't seem conducive to well-being, and the future isn't as bright for young people as it was in the 1980s, so a certain glumness is only to be expected.
Great engagement bait. We don't have a TV, but we have a Plex server with some shows and movies and we only watch them together, on a phone, for certain "movie nights." I have a Nintendo, and I allow my kids to play it, but they generally don't have the patience for games. Otherwise they mostly play with toys/play outside with other kids/draw/paint. We read books before bed. The only "unsupervised" media consumption they have is that sometimes we'll put one of our audiobooks on the phone (locked) if they want to listen to something and we don't have the energy to read it ourselves.
I definitely feel the loss of a "social canon" (like Friends or Game of Thrones). My friends and I all read/watch/play different things, but they're very rarely the same things. Reading someone else's favorite book or watching their favorite show is definitely an investment in one person, rather than an investment in the whole group. On the other hand, I remember watching GoT and Marvel movies for "watercooler conversation" and most of the time the conversation was little more than "wow, the Red Wedding? Crazy!"
I think the solution involves trying to find little "microcanons," books or movies that most people in your friend group or your kids' friend group will like and reference but are not what the entire Internet declares to be important.