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The problem is that parents are using screen time as a nanny, and are training their kids to rely on them as such.

IMO, kids need to be taught self-control and have the ability to entertain themselves before screens are introduced.

Toddler age is definitely too early, I am in the opinion that as little as necessary until it starts to be required in school.

My 2nd grader knows that screens are useful and has seen limited use, wikipedia, video calls, but he is always accompanied by me. And he has no reliance on them.

The automated nanny of the past was other kids in the neighbourhood, but due to laws and a culture of helicopter parenting that developed during the 80s/90s, kids are basically forbidden from playing by themselves with local kids unless they are literally next door.

Parenting is more work today than it used to be. In the past you sent out your kids to the local neighborhood all day, they came back to fix boo-boos and food and then you tucked them in to sleep. Sometimes you had family game nights or similar or everyone would watch TV / listen to the radio together.

Now they must have adult eyes on them 24/7 lest you get CPS called on you.

This 1000 times. About half the time we consciously choose to let our 8-year-old just open a car door or walk across a parking lot independently, some adult scurries over and "Hey! Your kid just carefully walked behind this parked car! Lucky I found his."

This 1000 times. About half the time we consciously choose to let our 8-year-old just open a car door or walk across a parking lot independently, some adult scurries over and "Hey! Your kid just carefully walked behind this parked car! Lucky I found him."

+1 to this. I saw a fellow parent dump their kid on an iPad whenever he fussed, regularly, for months. Seemed like he learned that he could whine to get what he wanted (the iPad) rather than learning how to play/interact elsewhere. All parents are guilty of something like this, but I remain firmly in the camp of not handing over the device just because my kid wants or whines for it.

My oldest (7) is logged into my Google account for Youtube.

He subscribes to Minecraft and Fortnite Youtubers all the time.

Periodically I will unsubscribe him to *most of those video game channels. And in turn, subscribe him to a few Science channels. He's recently gotten into soccer, so I subscribed him to a couple of beginner-howto soccer channels as well.

His Youtube recommendations are now more science oriented and he seems to enjoy them. He doesn't seem to notice, yet.

You can manage your channel subscriptions here:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels

that's a neat idea. Let me try that.

Kudos for currating their videos. My nephew who was initially very bright and interested in so many things ended up being captured by minecraft youtube videos for years. He eventually stopped but that time was completely wasted. I used to play chess with him but a soon as he got into youtubing he lost interest into everything else

Is chess better than Minecraft?

Chess is a game based on simple rules that yields complexity but i can't say it is “better” than Minecraft, it’s just something else. Minecraft is not a bad thing, what is bad is sinking countless hours only in this game! What do you come out of it with?

Chess is a game that has a defined purpose. It has a beginning, a middle game and an endgame. One can learn openings, strategies, concentration etc. That translates to some interesting thinking tools that could be used outside of chess.

Minecraft players usually wonder around and kick blocks and collect trinkets without a specific aim. Sure, some users build stuff which I find as cool. And leisurely playing isn't a bad thing.

I have a problem with sinking too much time into just computer games or even more specifically with only one game and even worse, not playing the game but passively watch others play on youtube or twitch. Kids learn things all the time but if they're stuck in a virtual reality that starts to have diminishing returns fast.

What do you come out of chess with?

I've spent a lot of time playing computer games, they sparked a love of history, geography, technology, new kinds of music, they've informed my taste and sense of humor, and helped me be more circumspect when it comes to life "strategy". Without the love of history, I never would have gotten into chess, either, but it is something I enjoy. At any given time, it would have looked an awful lot like sinking countless hours into one game.

Currently, jumping on a Discord call and playing with friends is an excellent substitution for social visit.

Everyone has hobbies, and personally, I don't think the specific hobby matters as much as pursuing something with the possibility of intellectual growth.

I suspect that chess will hone your ability to analyze, categorize and prioritize the cases occurring in a complex situation that has many possibilities. Poor case analysis in chess leads to easy defeat.

I think you missed the point here. It is not about the benefits of chess or minecraft, but the fact that he started sinking all of his available time into it, and hence didn’t participate in other activities anymore (such as playing chess). Games and videos are notoriously addictive.

I understand that, I just don't think it's a problem. I've spent my life being obsessed with things. Sometimes the obsession lasts a few years, sometimes it lasts a few days, and the sum of being focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else is being a very well-rounded person.

Presumably the nephew is still a child, and presumably he will move on to other things as he gets older.

I'll eat my words if he ends up a 60 year old who regrets spending his life playing Minecraft. Then again, if he is a 60 year old who was productive and happy and spent his free time playing Minecraft without regret, that would also be fine, no?

who knows? maybe it's not ours to say. children are drawn to it and maybe we should trust whatever instinct they're following that minecraft feels stimulating

> One interesting thing I noticed is my kids who have grown up with touchscreens think that everything is a touchscreen

I've talked to teachers who said that they've started seeing young children with picture books doing the zoom in/out pinching motion on pages.

Ouch... that's kind of bleakly sad. Reminds me of the video of a very inebriated old Polish man doing a breathalizer test who mistakenly takes a swig of the device (instead of blowing into it) and then promptly falling over. We are drunk on information.

>Ouch... that's kind of bleakly sad.

Early versions of iOS were rife with skeuomorphism. Is it sad that iBooks displayed your books on a wooden shelf and played page-turn animations that look like paper, or is it just an application of existing skills and knowledge to a different technology?

Paper books are obsolete. Some people think that they aren't obsolete because they're using tiny low-res monitors or don't know how to use a document manager or haven't used an Apple Pencil, but digital text is just better. I don't care whether young people know what to do with a paper book, but I do care that they know how to interact effectively with text. I'm far more perturbed that schools waste countless person-hours teaching cursive handwriting, but most don't teach typing.

Partial damage to a paper book leaves the rest of it functional. Partial damage to a digital book leaves it unable to boot.

Partial damage to a paper book leaves you with a partially damaged book that costs as much time and money as a new one to replace.

Restoring/downloading a new copy of a partial damaged digital book takes less time than it took me to type up this reply.

It's quite hard to back up a paper book.

Best features to paper books are the deep focus that they confer, the durability of the books, ability to scribble on them, make outlines. You can also share paper books with your friends or even sell them. Ebooks aren’t bad at all because of the portability but theres something we loose compared to traditional books.

Despite both achieving roughly the same goals, I would argue that writing on a tangible piece of paper with a pen or a pencil is wholly different from writing on an electronic device with an electronic pen, and I suspect they stimulate different areas of the brain.

I might be biased by growing up with paper, but writing on my iPad with an Apple Pencil makes me feel very different things compared to writing in my notebook. Paper is physical. I can rip paper, I can spread my paper notes on the floor, I can put them away and find them 30 years later etc.

To me comparing writing on paper and writing on an iPad feels like comparing walking to travelling with an electric scooter. Yes, both take you from place A to place B, but they have very different implications and are very different experiences.

I think paper books are not obsolete because I don’t want to live in a future where every copy of a certain piece of information can disappear or be rewritten instantly.

I don't understand why it's sad. Isn't it an attempt at approaching new things with an understanding of previous interactions?

Say you give a child a maraca, and s/he learns that s/he can shake the maraca to make noise. Then you hand a child a block, s/he is going to shake the block to see if it makes noise. The interesting bit and teachable moment is that these things have different features and properties and we interact with them differently, and thus we use them for different things. How does a touchscreen fall outside of that?

I say this as a recent parent who is hesitant to introduce screens and approaching the subject carefully.

Also, that video is hilarious, and it's clearly for the best that he's been pulled over.

This! So many people attribute this "failed attempt" to bad parenting or stunted development and fail to realize it is only the natural progression of development.

Children (and adults) learn from their interactions with items, be it technology or not. Attempting to use "touchscreen behaviors" on something that isn't a touch interface is just another learning moment. They're attempting to use their knowledge and experiences to explore the world around them, as each generation did before us.

We're just more connected than we ever were, so this behavior is now more noticeable due to that connectivity and sharing.

The problem is the prolonged exposure to technology at a young age when they have to learn a myriad of other things. And the danger lies in how addictive these things are - needless to say a lot of things are designed that way. The technology is unevitable, my grandparents wrote on slates in school and our parents used to do caligraphy, etc. Tech changes, thats allright but because of its pace of acceleration some kids fall prey to other’s schemes to make money on their behalf.

Exactly. The counterpart to this is walking up to a touchscreen credit card reader ten years ago and going "uhh..." while looking for physical buttons to push.

ten years ago they all had an obvious stylus that hadn't been ripped off the machine yet

They are just envisioning the future that is ahead of them.

I remember the laugh of a guy in 2008 when I scrolled with my fingers on his blackberry's screen. Now I own a Blackberry KeyOne and it is a reality.

This was even true 15 years ago, when I was CTO for a startup that put displays on restaurant tabletops. Even back then (before the iPhone was even released), we saw that most users tried to touch the screen to control it! People reasonably expect all screens (especially any screen displaying information) to be touchscreens they can interact with. We need the hardware to catch up. Fortunately, newer technology now makes it possible to build large (up to 100 inches or more) touchscreens with no compromise.

lol, I find myself doing this sometimes when looking through pages in regular magazines. It's almost like it's just become hardwired as an instinct.

I read a book I sometimes feel the need to grep it, just to realize that you cannot grep paper. Apparently I grew up on Linux shells instead of smartphones.

> I noticed my kids who have grown up with touchscreens think that everything is a touchscreen.

eh I'm in my 30s and am angry at car dashboards that clearly have GUI buttons on them but can only be used by the corresponding physical button on the side, or in some random other place nearby. Be nice if they did both if use while driving and not looking at that interface is the concern.

I want to sink all of those cars. Like, in the ocean.

Similarly but contrariwise, I want to sink those driving devices which have removed physical buttons and mandated screen taps precisely because they can't be used without taking your eyes off the road.

You can feel physical buttons. If the UI has a consistent menu system and a reset mechanism (e.g. a home button), you can navigate it blind. If it has different input modalities (switches, dials, toggles of different shapes and sizes) for different functions, even better.

The car I have allows both touching the elements on the screen as well as using physical knobs and levers to control the same elements. When it was new, I found myself reaching for the screen, but now that it has some age on it, the physical controls win every time. Which leads me to believe that touch is better for discoverability, but not general use. Which kind of mirrors my experience using computers with physical input devices versus touchscreen tablets/phones.

I feel like a hybrid would be excellent. A big, advanced system built into a touchscreen UI, with a series of physical buttons and knobs around / beneath that can control that UI - with the ability to adjust presets for those physical knobs and buttons to driver-preference

Edit: Of course I think it's been well proven that most car companies tend to write bad UIs so I don't imagine this will work as well as I envision it.

for a while I was traveling quite a bit, which meant a lot of rental cars (I drove so many cars in the fleet that I'd often get duplicates that my phone was already set up in).

the most annoying thing that I ran into was a ford running an early version of Microsoft's car dashboard (I think it was sync?) - when a popup came up in front of the speedometer with an "ok" button to dismiss it. it was on the freeway, and it wasn't until I made it to campus that I was able to get it to go away by powering down and powering up the car (rebooting it). it wasn't a touchscreen, so no idea why anyone thought a dialog box was needed, and it was cut off, so I still don't know what it wanted me to do.

I can’t tell you how many time I think the iMac for signing vendors/guests into the building is a touchscreen even though I know iMac isn’t touch sensitive.

Yeah, I occasionally find myself tapping my MacBook's screen even though I was an adult before I ever encountered a touchscreen. It's just so natural it becomes reflex in no time at all.

> One interesting thing I noticed is my kids who have grown up with touchscreens think that everything is a touchscreen.

I had a cat like that once. he had been playing a cat game on the iPad and managed to get pretty good at it. later, I was doing a project that involved several small touch screens. it became difficult to work on the project when he was around, as he saw images on the screen and started pawing them, trying to get them to move and make sound.

not just kids. cats as well.

A good study would be to compare how these screen-trained toddlers compare with screen-free toddlers (you might have to go rural to find those) in interacting and recognizing things in the real 3D world. My guess is that screenies exhibit a marked bias towards 2D perception and thinking, with weaker 3D.

Related: video gamers are better at performing keyhole surgery.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17309970/

A modern MacBook should have a touch screen though. I can't blame the children that Apple hasn't managed to release a MacBook with a touchscreen in the last 10 years.