A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Group A is tech parents with screen time control ( uses parental controls)
Group B non tech parents with physical screen time ( takes phones away)
Group C parents that let the child decide ( kids have full control over own devices)
And without a doubt one can notice developmental diviations in the children av group c. They are not very active, hard to socialize etc.
Group bs children are usually way more phydicsl about things.
But bottom line is that tech is negatively impacting children if left unsupervised.
And i honestly think much of that comes down to design patterns in apps. We make stupid apps be addictive to adults to optimize engagement and these same physiological hooks work on children except way more potent.
Similarly, he kept on being sent home from school early for misbehaviour. The school introduced this system where the teachers give him "thumbs up" for being behaved and "thumbs down" for not. We told him that he has to come home every school day with at least five thumbs up and no thumbs down to get his computer, and we demonstrated to him that we meant it. And since then, every day he gets at least five thumbs up and no thumbs down. (We have to ask the staff when we pick him up, because we know otherwise he'll just claim to get five thumbs up even if he didn't.)
It definitely is much better the the kid who misbehaves regardless of whether someone is looking or not.
Because this way, swimming lesson continue and they can enjoy swimming. School goes on and they don't have to sit and wait till teacher deals with this one kid.
For everyone else, there has never been a better time for children of any income level or location in the world to access high-quality education and content for free (Khan Academy Kids, PBS Kids, etc.)
That's the real power of tech: the great equalizer of access to information. Now we have it and apparently some people want to go back to what, buying expensive sets of encyclopedias?
Like anything else, there is some responsibility involved when it comes to what children consume, whether it's food or content. But just shutting it off completely seems pretty ham-fisted to me.
access to information isn't relevant. If you don't believe that ask a few people if they'd rather want the MIT degree without having any of the education or the education without the degree.
Information on its own is useless without any capital or network to turn that information into something tangible, in that way it's like oil. And that's also why the more information dependent our society is the more centralized it is, as a small amount of players can leverage information to create outsized returns on capital.
I think at a glance, the degree without the education seems like you get the degree instantly without having to attend MIT, which sounds great. But a more nuanced comparison would be between being completing an MIT education with MIT having no record that you attended, versus paying for and doing all the work to earn an MIT degree, but then instantly forgetting everything related to MIT upon getting your degree. For knowledge workers, I expect a significant proportion would value the education more than the degree, especially since your degree matters less and less as you progress in your career.
Without the diploma, are you locked out of any job that requires it? Are you assuming that a GED is available? Do you realize some jobs that pay incrementally more than minimum wage in fact require you to prove you graduated high school even if it was, like 30 years ago and you've been in the workforce since?
Conversely, does "without a high school education" mean never having gone to high school classes, or does it mean being completely ignorant of everything those classes would have taught?
I think HN should have a rule that any link that is behind a paywall cannot be posted unless a way around the paywall is provided.
The internet isn't built for parental guidance, and parents don't know how to lock their kids devices down. Now, because of Covid I am living in a big joint family again and my 7 year old niece has been caught watching male strip teases on YouTube.
These devices and the content on them (much like television) is designed to be addicting and to appeal to all the immediate gratification systems in our body. Lots of adults are addicted to the internet, and it's not surprising that parents want to take steps to keep their kids from being so too.
But now with stay-at-home and online learning, kids have an excuse to be online all day. On a tablet or some similar system, and most parents have no idea how to track what their kids are doing or block bad websites etc.
Not to mention kids who download video game apps and then charge their parents cards with $100s in microtransactions.
Most people don't want to reckon with how much these devices shape our worldview and the way we live, but when we see it happening to a child, it begins to dawn on us that we've maybe bought in too much on technology.
I don't know the way forward. Devices have been an equalizer. That's true. But it's also true that their purpose is to divert our attention from important things to advertising. Their purpose is to be a mini TV that we carry with us everywhere. And who can blame parents for being unsure which side of that they want to stand on?
Also, kids who read a lot tend to be the ones who also do homework. Yet also, today's kids who engage in reading a lot tend to be the ones who have "screen time" policed.
When kids spend too much time reading, parent do treat that as issue too. There just is no peer pressure currently to read, reading is less addictive and people tend to rage less while reading or post reading.