Tech execs who raise their kids tech-free or limit their screen time (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Tech execs who raise their kids tech-free or limit their screen time (2020)

businessinsider.com

156 pointsevo_9170 comments

> In Steve Jobs' household, dinnertime was reserved for face-to-face conversation with his children — meaning no iPads or iPhones in sight.

I mean, not having phones at the diner table seems to be the norm. I'm sure there are some families who read their phones at the diner table but its certainly not the norm around my friend group.

> "I have times when I take away all my kids' phones, especially if we're on a family vacation, because I want people to interact with each other," said Wojcick. "So, I take away their phones and say: 'We're all going to focus on being present today.'"

Again, this seems to be by far the norm in my friend group. If you are spending a fortune to take your family on vacation, then we expect our kids to be present and enjoy the vacation. Play in the ocean, or the splash pads or rides at amusement parks.

These don't seem to be all that extreme and just normal parenting.

I know of several families (the parents on both my side and my wife's side) where reading the newspaper over breakfast is normal. Only these days the newspaper is often a digital subscription on a tablet or phone.

It's another small step to browse social media (after all, that's how a lot of people get their news) in the same way, or over different meals than breakfast.

All in all, I share your observations, but I'm also not surprised if other people have to make that decision consciously.

Reading the newspaper at breakfast is an old TV trope. If TV is any indication it's socially acceptable to read things during the first meal of the day but not the latter ones.

It's not just a trope, because generally, in the 20th century, newspapers were delivered in the mornings. So reading while eating breakfast and seeing what is happening in the world before you started your day is what many people actually did.

This comment confuses me. The newspaper arrives early in the morning, before or around the time most people wake. It is traditionally read at the earliest opportunity, which is usually breakfast, as it can often inform the reader before they go about their day. For example, weather, or local or global events of note that may be socially relevant.

None of this is really true for other mediums. You can look at your phone wherever. It's not a shared resource for the household.

Where I grew up, the working class paper was delivered later in the day, and was traditionally read at/after dinner. On the other hand the prim bourgeoisie newspaper was delivered early in the morning and was traditionally read at breakfast. I thought that's how the blue collar / white collar divide was everywhere.

> I take away their phones and say: 'We're all going to focus on being present today.

Thats all it takes?

That and some follow through. Kids learn their parents' weak spots quickly.

Phones are newfangled. My parents used to tease my dinner-time book-reading by making comparisons to Evelyn Waugh's Edward Ryder. (thus demonstrating they were not above a nip of the old hotmetal themselves?)

I’ve preferred to read while I eat for almost 40 years, now. When I was a kid, I would even read the cereal box, I just needed to read something.

Yes, same. I was a bookworm as a kid, never found sports or video games very interesting but I loved to read. I do somewhat regret that my parents didn't push me out of my comfort zone esp. with sports because that became a big social limitation as I got older. But at the same time, I remember I really wanted nothing to do with it as a young child, so it might not have worked even if they tried.

You're in a particular socioeconomic bubble. Not a bad thing, but it does mean that your circle's norm is not necessarily the norm amongst the population at large.

An example of how the other half lives (so to speak) is provided by people in restaurants who let their kid stay glued to a tablet watching YouTube or playing the Angry Birds du jour, often at blaring volume without headphones, while everybody else eats. Like TV, these tech toys provide easy, cheap babysitting.

Screen time is only part of it. As a Digital Vegan I'm nore focused on screen quality.

The newest command line user in our family is 7. I gave her a Raspberry Pi last Christmas and loaded one thing; a python shell "PlayOS" that I wrote to make everything a three or four letter command. The idea is to improve her reading and writing/typing by putting everything she wants a few keystrokes away on the command line.

So far we have:

  music - plays a random tune from her music collection

  music abba - selects something more specific

  see - shows something visual, for example;

  see me - random photos from the holiday album

  see octonauts - an undersea cartoon plays

  read - stories and rhymes

  say - make the computer speak (festival - which she calls robot
  voice)

Basically, each time she expresses an interest I add a python tuple which is a parsing template like alias + exec. After that she memorises the command. By 9 I expect her to have mastered a computer by typing, including sending emails to mom and dad etc. When she's had enough she knows the poweroff command - which it's own kind of fun.

Most of her friends drag their fingers over images on tablets. They get into a tantrum if it's taken away from them. They are addicts before they are 10.

Hopefully I'm helping build a life-long skill, but I dread the day her friends, pawing at screen like retarded monkeys, tell her that phones are better :)

Yes, there are physiological reasons to limit screen time too. But that's not my threat model at present. Time to boredom on PlayOS is always less than 1 hour.

I really like the idea ( and it is likely not a bad way to introduce the kid to command line eventually ). Consider adding it on github ( or similar ). I am relatively certain you will get an audience for it.

amazing, can you write a full blog post about this.I want to do something similar.

Love this idea. Could you just expand a little on PlayOS? It's this running an underlying OS which then boots into a bash console running your repl?

Just curious, would love to do something similar (or use yours if it was available!)

Sure.

My first response to "let's do computers daddy" was to install a kids KDE Linux with some things like TuXPaint and whatever. But I noticed she really wanted to be doing what I was doing - typing. Also I had to launch everything. And it seemed inevitable that within minutes alone with the machine she'd accidentally get into desktop configuration and hide the task bar or something.

So then I thought, what about just Bash?

That didn't work so well either, and I ended up aliasing so many commands to simpler things - but it was a step in the right direction.

So now I just launch into a "kiosk mode shell" made in python that dispatches the commands we talk about together. We say... wouldn't it be cool if a computer could do this or that, and then I think about how to make that a single three letter command with a few options. I'd love it if she'd get into bash or programming properly as another commenter's kid did, but I won't push it, this is foundation work. There's every possibility she'll say "I'm bored with computers dad" and I'll just have to try not to be broken-hearted :) Perhaps the main aim is to cultivate a respect and healthy attitude for real computers, so tablets and phones seem like the toys they are.

I think this is great! I'm curious, though; how much time does she spend on `see octonauts`? I've seen the way kids get absolutely glued to the current crop of CGI kid shows (ye gods the pacing is frenetic) and I guess I'd expect most kids to just mash the button like a rat in a Skinner box, so I'm pleasantly surprised to hear you say she spends less than an hour at a time.

That sounds like good fun! My four-year-old daughter likes to play on an old net book that we have.

She pretends she's working like she's seen Mam and Dad do around the house due to the pandemic.

I've only shown her the text editor where she'll type her name and other words. Stealthily teaching spelling and typing through play.

Would say it's usually about 20 minutes to boredom at the moment!

I applaud your purposeful-ness with your daughter but:

I would strongly recommend that calling her friends “retarded monkeys” is a mentality that will do far far more damage in the long run than any screen time.

Being right and being self righteous are too very different things. Be purposeful there too. I say this as someone who struggles with passing on the same problematic mentalities to my children.

Edit: parent removed the statement.

What's odd and maybe telling of this person's mentality is that calling them monkeys would have been sufficient since he said "pawing at".

Monkeys don't even have paws.

They definitely can be called that, even if not technically correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw

Urgh, now I'm one of those "actually, language is how people use it" types. Literally.

Paw is sometimes an informal/humorous word for 'hand'.

"paw" means "hand without functional fingers". Monkeys can type.

And as HN shows, being able to type doesn't make someone smarter than someone who can manipulate visual objects.

Does Thread OP "paw" at a Rubik's cube or LEGO?

They said "pawed at", which is a phrase for an inelegant bumbling interaction with something. It is not literal. And they also said "like retarded monkeys", not that they are retarded monkeys.

Yes and she's 7, so 1) her friends have probably already told her that phones are better, and 2) she's probably aware of her dad's attitude and therefore isn't fully open with him about what she's interested in and what she does at friends' houses.

And FYI the statement has not been removed, or it's been added back in.

Totally agreed. My parents were always weirdly mean about my friends and often, their appearances. All it ever achieved was discouraging me from telling them anything at all about my friends and never bringing them around the house because I didn't trust them to be kind to the people I cared about.

Content was never removed. I stand by it. Of course I never call her friends that, which would be destructive, inappropriate and alienating for the all the reasons you wisely relay.

I stand by it because I'm talking about their behaviour, not what they are. They're bright kids ( or they wouldn't be her mates ). But what I often see them do, which looks a lot like randomly bashing at a screen to "make shit happen", isn't the pinnacle of technology I want my kids to experience. Not until 15, wasted with her mates and playing the 2032 version of DOOM or whatever.

Interestingly, if there's any friction or danger it comes from not biting my lip in criticising other parenting styles. That's actually where the weird stuff is, in the relations between the grown-ups. Most parents are naturally touchy about even implied criticism. And many do feel guilt about using phones and tablets as pacifiers.

As I say in the book, I learned that a long time ago and am a practising but not preaching digital vegan.

Do you think your mentality of using that language bleeds into other negative influences? You might benefit from learning from the criticism of your post and rethinking things.

It's just a word. Certain circles take it much more seriously than others. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and remember that using that language with ones peers on HN is different from using it in a professional or social setting.

If he'd said "silly monkeys" I don't think anyone would have even commented.

In my opinion, the "it's just a word" mentality can often be harmful. There's a reason we use words and language, it s how we communicate our thoughts to others and hence our choice of language is very important.

As it turns out, some words have connotations which are bad, and by using them you're communicating something that isn't an example of what you want to reinforce in a child, or anyone at all really.

So I am not suggesting that GP should be ostracised over saying 'retarded' but I think it's important to atleast question why they are using language which hurts a specific group of people that have done nothing to deserve it.

Here's a quote from a website[0] that explains why using 'retarded' in the way GP did here is harmful:

“It hurts and scares me when I am the only person with intellectual disabilities on the bus and young people start making “retard” jokes or references. Please put yourself on that bus and fill the bus with people who are different from you. Imagine that they start making jokes using a term that describes you. It hurts and it is scary.” – John Franklin Stephens, Special Olympics Virginia athlete and Global Messenger

Hopefully that quote helps to see why no one would question the usage of 'silly'.

[1]: https://www.spreadtheword.global/resource-archive/r-word-eff...

When you use the word idiot, it's also at their expense. The capacity to use these words in a derogatory sense is owing to their meaning, and it has not changed. The reflective attitude that similar terms are comparatively cleaner as they exist in a sort of bubble as "pure insults with no meaning" is a fantasy.

It's not good to be an idiot, and it never will be. Take your r-word, there's no shortage of others that mean the same thing. It's possible to love and show compassion to those with intellectual disabilities, not insult them to their face, and still accept that these conditions are not a positive, to the extent that in broader society people will show disdain for irrational behavior by invoking any one of these words, at the expense of those who don't know any better.

I don't think calling someone an idiot necessitates that the mentally disabled are harmed for it. Btw, Stephens is coached.

>The reflective attitude that similar terms are comparatively cleaner as they exist in a sort of bubble as "pure insults with no meaning" is a fantasy.

You do raise a very fair point. I did want to argue that idiot and other such words are 'different' from the r word but admittedly, I do not have a rebuttal.

It does make me question though, where did society choose to draw the line and why is the line drawn there. There definitely is a lot of talk about how the r word is harmful but I think it's fair to say that isn't the case for idiot and stupid for example.

Thanks for giving me some food for thought, cheers and have a happy new year :)

>It does make me question though, where did society choose to draw the line and why is the line drawn there.

The line moves, as and when someone in society gets up in arms at exactly that and is sufficiently powerful to move it. See "mentally handicapped", "special needs", etcetera. A new word gets generated that's less "bad", but it doesn't resolve the issue that the concept it describes is fundamentally bad.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

"That language" isn't the issue. Americans seem to have an odd prudishness over a few words, and retarded is one of them. GP is from GB where it's not so much of an issue.

A change of language wouldn't modify the negative connatations of the GPs statement, so the fact you think this critism has learning, maybe means there's some learning in this for you.

Thanks. I find your writing interesting (and the focus of other commenters on specific words weird) and I just bought your book. Looking foward to reading it!

I'm pretty sure this person is trolling..

No, ycombinator attracts many of these ultra controlling engineers who also see everyone as inferior who doesn’t follow their strict guidelines of technical superiority. It’s very very common in the Eng field in my experience.

"I try to limit my child's exposure to addictive, soul-sucking tools"

Yeah, sounds like a real troll to me!

That's an interesting approach though I'd avoid comparing her friends to retarded monkeys. I can tell you from experience she might actually enjoy hanging around some of the 'retarded monkeys' and the knowledge that mum or dad feels that way about them is an unnecessary source of tension.

"retarded monkeys"

Yikes

I had a friend raised like this in a millennial context. Strict diet of restricted TV and computers, 1 hour a day for each. Cable TV was banned, network television only. Books were all him and his sibling were allowed to interact with. He was homeschooled for a bit.

In high school he discovered World of Warcraft, through chance. He started playing at school. Then sneaking over to friends houses to play. Then did everything in his power at home to play WoW. He became hopelessly addicted. For 2 years all he could do was play WoW. It had a huge effect on his grades and his friends. While I don't know all that happened, I think he was just unprepared to deal with modern digital consumption appetites that the rest of us grew up with.

I'm not sure any of us have figured it out. I grew up with the internet and video games. I was hopelessly addicted to Counterstrike for 15 years. I don't think kids should have complete (unsupervised) control over their own entertainment, but it's clear that strict limits aren't sufficient.

I think people have been looking at it from the wrong perspective and you hit the nail on the head. He was unprepared, yes, but... How exactly are we preparing our kids for the internet and video games? This is something we aren't talking or thinking about. Putting limits isn't enough. It's like forcing abstinence on kids without trying to teach them safe sex or about healthy relationships or character values.

I think there should be some limits, but there also needs to be an effort to cultivate interests/skills/experiences outside of gaming as well as a stronger focus on personal values/responsibility and philosophy in general.

I would recommend reading “Indistractible” by Nir Eyql if you are looking for more tools for this

+1 for this. "Nir Eyal" btw. From excerpts, it's a very good guide with plenty of common sense psychology and practical advice.

Read a few pages and this looks useful, thanks.

i really hope we reach a point where more parents play video games with their children, especially as a teammate rather than a hoverer. it seems like in most homes vidya is usually tolerated as a necessary carrot or a babysitter rather than something that is shared. kids learn from the people around them, this is why sportsmanship gets such heavy emphasis in junior sports leagues. we recognize that it is not enough for them to learn how to hit the ball, they need to learn how to be gracious competitors as well. imo this is equally true of games. if kids aren't given an example of what good habits & moderation look like, then why are we shocked if they emulate the grinders and the nolifers?

I knew about a dozen college kids in the millennial context who grew up with no restrictions on video game use, and it was fine for them because their parents handled every aspect of their life. Fine for them until college, when they were now responsible for themselves and couldn't tear themselves away from the screen because video games were all they knew. They lost their scholarships and flunked out.

As for myself, I felt shameful if I spent more than an hour playing a game because long video game binges is something I never became accustomed to in the first place. The habits kids learn as kids will follow them at least into young adulthood.

Video game use was also a privilege that my parents used to teach responsibility and priorities. If I wanted to be allowed to play games, I had to get all As in school, complete all chores, and participate in athletics. They didn't police my gaming time, so I learned to regulate it myself to meet those conditions.

I think what you describe is closer to my own experience than to unregulated screentime. You say they didn't police your screen time, but it sounds like they did forbid you from playing games if you weren't keeping up with your other obligations. In my case, my permitted screen time was moderately increased if I got good grades and severely decreased if I got bad grades. I think a scheme like this, or the one you describe, is a good way to do it.

No regulation of screen time at all, no conditions about behavior/grades, is dangerous territory. It teaches harmful habits which some kids will have a very hard time shaking. Have a bad time in school? Come home and numb the pain by spending 12 hours playing games late into the night. Go to school the next day without enough sleep, the cycle repeats but the whole thing doesn't collapse because you're still forced to go to school. That is, until you hit college and now have the option of skipping class to continue playing video games. Then they flunk out after a year or two of wasted tuition money. Many of the friends I made in freshman year at college flunked out due to this vicious cycle of video game binging. All of them were long-time gamers by that point, expressing great incredulity when I told them I came from a household were I was limited to an hour a day. They said I had been abused, while they were flunking out due to their own lack of self control.

Or they could make school more fun and also start later.

But nooo, force the kids to suffer and then act surprised when they rebel.

Oh for sure, making school start later in the day would be a huge benefit to teenagers particularly. But this is the way it was in college, most of us scheduled most of our classes for the afternoon and the gaming addicts still skipped class anyway. Both are problems, but I don't think addressing one will address the other.

As for school being fun.. if you're doing well and the course material is interesting, then school is generally fun I think. School becomes particularly unfun when you're struggling with difficult/uninteresting material combined with the stress that comes from knowing that good performance is important to your future. That struggle+stress can be very hard on some people and lead them to self-medicate by binging alcohol or video games. Booze and game binging make people feel better in the immediate sense but harms them in the long run. I don't think you can address this problem by making school more fun, except insofar as you can shift students into subjects they care about and can do well in. But stress avoidance has its limits, even if school is an absolute pleasure, everybody will encounter stress eventually in life and knowing alternatives to escapism is important.

I am a little like that. When growing up we had very little allowed TV time (admittedly this was common in the 80s, due to limited selection) and I get distracted by TVs very easily. Compared to friends who grew up with TVs running constantly in the house and who have no problem having a conversation with a TV in the background, I can't help to watch the TV. I therefore hate most modern pubs, which have TVs running everywhere and try to always sit so not to have a TV in my fov (which is often difficult).

You've described me.

I've gotten better at eye-fixation control, and also careful selection of seats. If I can get a seat facing away from the TV I do much better, and I even catch those around me gazing at the TVs from time to time.

It is exhausting trying to exert that amount of self control, though. The quick bright movements naturally catch my eye and I often can't help myself. I'd like to chalk this up to innate hunter instincts, but... ;)

My experience is that these kind of people (grew up in houses with tv on the background 24/7) have difficulty doing meaningful in depth work. They can "block it out", but only for doing simple tasks, like chatting to someone. When it comes to sitting doing and doing some nuanced analysis, and thinking thru edge cases, they can't do it.

On a tangent, I knew a girl in high school who had their love life completely owned by their parents since she became a teenager. Her mother was a chaperone on her dates, her dad was closely monitoring her phone for 'sexting', no bedroom door, etc.. It's safe to assume she didn't have much success with boys. Come college time, she broke up a marriage, did some porn, is now a single mother who moved back with her parents. Not saying her parents are to blame, but I can say she grew up with a very unhealthy view of romantic relationships.

It's also possible that the woman you know is, for predominantly genetic or personality reasons, highly sexed and sociosexually unrestricted, and her parents' efforts at best delayed some matters. There's a line of thinking, articulated in Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and elsewhere, that a large component of personality is innate and parents spend way too much time trying to micro-shape their kids.

There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found herself doing work she hated in a factory at 19, and escaped it via nude camming and then sex work (both of which she likes a lot, relative to alternatives). She's tweeted about how her mom appears to LOVE the trad Christian life, and how Aella and some of her siblings hate it. Who is "right?" Maybe no one: people's personal propensities and desires vary in many ways that appear to be genetic in origin, even if their expressions may change across cultures, and this may also include in matters of sex.

There are lots of pseudo-Freudian theories about how the way one is raised affects one's adolescent and adult sex life but I'm not sure any of those theories are true.

Kinda surprise her parents still let her in. So I guess they are not that bad after all.

Another anecdote... People think my dad was nuts for letting me drink a beer here or there growing up.

It was always in moderation. Typically only one drink, maybe two spread out over lots of time if we were fishing. He talked openly about keeping drinking in check. He even addressed alcoholism in our family history, admitting to keeping a close eye on his consumption due to those predispositions; stressing that I'd have to watch it too. Since I was a young kid who felt privileged sippin' on a Highlife I listened closely taking a lot away from those conversations.

Fast forward to HS/college... never drank in HS because it was primarily only losers who would drink at the time... and in college I was always the party nurse or DD because I wouldn't drink to get drunk - I just didn't see the point. Dad had took all of the novelty out of it for me.

---

Kids who come from overly strict or controlling parents often have behavior and moderation issues once leaving the nest. Your #1 goal as a parent is to engage them and teach them how to navigate life in careful and healthy ways vs. trying to outright control their behavior. Hard truth is you're not always going to be there - my dad died when I was 14. Being an authoritarian doesn't give your kid a healthy mental framework to help them through life's complexities, you're only teaching them to be afraid of punishment and consequences.

Some great notes here! Moderating is hard, but it's crucial in development. Too much or too little of anything has absurd longterm impacts.

Moderation mixed with education has tremendous positive impacts. Going with the alcohol example, you grow up knowing what it tastes like and what it does, rather than growing up completely unaware of it other than your college friends say it's cool to get hammered.

You have to be teaching your kids about life, it seems like so many forget this trying to create the ultimate curated experience for them.

14. Shit that made me cry. I hope you always manage to steer clear of alcoholism if your old man thought you might inherit a disposition. And your dad sounds very courageous and wise to talk straight to you.

"The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest."

Sadly this approach doesn't always work, but this is the only way to at least to give an idea on how it tastes and feels. Works great for spirits for up to 12-14 years, though, kids don't like the bitterness at all.

> because it was primarily only losers who would drink at the time

What was the dynamic like at your high school where the losers would party with alcohol and the cool kids stayed sober?

To readers of the comment above, keep in mind that this approach likely works best with such a wise and calm man, and perhaps it helps having a son of much the same disposition.

In aggregate, it's shown that children who drink in general have more drinking problems as adults.

> Then did everything in his power at home to play WoW. He became hopelessly addicted.

I was like this and spent a shit load of that time on a computer. Everyone around me said it was a waste of time until I realized I wanted to work in software. Then I realized they were all full of shit and it was actually a very profitable use of time

On my recent workshop regarding kids' psychology, there was said that social media and online world in general is the only drug that you have to learn kids to get used to gradually.

There's no point in restricting them screen time completely, because phones and computers are just everywhere, you cannot shield kids forever and sooner or later they will find a way how to get connected, so better they are prepared and know what's going on and what to be aware of.

I remember a book talking about Robert Morris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer), who didn't allow his kids to watch television (something about the low quality of TV programs made for children was the main reason).

He found out that his kids, including son, Robert T Morris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris - later Internet email worm author, were having trouble socializing with other kids at school since the other kids would talk about the TV shows that they had watched (like Sesame Street) but Morris's kids were clueless.

So his kids were allowed to watch PBS so they didn't become social outcasts.

I find it strange how you’re so proud that you’re teaching them a very niche - and outside system administration and programming obsolete - way of interacting with computers. There are excellent GUIs to learn that will make them more productive with computers and also make them feel like they have some skills that may actually impress other kids instead of making them look weird.

These kinds of projects read to me like using the kid as an excuse to build something that the parent thinks is cool. And then it starts to make sense, because you obviously think that the command line is cool and look down on the kids which use touch screens. The bad news for you is that the child’s social circle decides what’s cool, not the parent.

Parents teach their own niche skills to their children all the time. Which is why for most of history, children entered the field their parents worked in. Cobblers begat cobblers, potters begat potters, etc.

Is cool what really matters?

His child being confident in the terminal is a good skill to have, her typing skills will transfer over to her writing for the many essays of highschool, so she'll be productive faster than other kids.

> you’re teaching them a very niche - and outside system administration and programming obsolete - way of interacting with computers.

Most people are scared of the command line, but she has an edge knowing it.

It will open the door to countless productivity benefits in the future, she could automate a lot of her future work in her own creative way that modern guis don't allow.

Small cli scripts go a long way in practically any job. Sadly most people still waste hours on spreadsheets and the like when they could spend minutes in many cases.

> These kinds of projects read to me like using the kid as an excuse to build something that the parent thinks is cool.

It is, and that's actually very healthy and okay. It's called co-construction. I'd urge you to read educational theorists like Friere - building motivation through shared interests etc.

You're possibly mistaking what I'm doing from actually trying to teach bash and python etc. That would be insane. Those, and the whole vocation of coding, may well be dead by the time she's a teenager. It's about engaged parenting.

Yikes. With all due respect, in my view, the self-righteousness of this comment dismisses the point it's trying to make. The 'retarded monkeys' comment really sells it...

> Most of her friends drag their fingers over images on tablets

I guess there's value in thinking your kids are better than other kids. I wonder if you have the same level of transparency involving animal kingdom references with your friends about how their kids use their devices.

But anyway, I don't believe the UX is the problem here. The idea is to 'limit' screen time and subsequently information consumption at the ready. Not sure how a command line interface is a solution better than say parental controls with app time limits, over an already existent UX that everyone is familiar with.

PS: Your book was on my reading list. Was.

> PS: Your book was on my reading list. Was.

You absolutely dodged a bullet there. If you don't like strongly opinionated writing save your time and money. Now, where else could you get such up-front pre-views than HN. Gotta love this place eh?

The more I reread this the less it makes sense.

> each time she expresses an interest I add a python tuple

Did you get into computers by intentionally expressing an interest and then having tidbits fed to you by someone? Or did you discover it organically through full access to libraries and the internet and video games and magazines? When she expresses an interest in something you aren't familiar with, will you let her explore it herself or will everything be filtered through you?

> By 9 I expect her to have mastered a computer by typing, including sending emails to mom and dad etc.

You think she'll be better at typing than kids that are constantly texting and Googling Roblox mods and arguing in YouTube comments?

> retarded monkeys

This has been addressed enough in other comments. But just to give you an example, I was raised without cable TV because my parents didn't have it. But they didn't call my friends retarded, and they didn't care if I watched some with friends or relatives. As a result, I still didn't watch much TV, but I didn't feel guilty when I did and I didn't feel like I had to hide anything from my parents.

I turned out great, and my friends who had a TV in their own bedroom with 1000 channels also turned out great. Access or lack of access to TV has had no discernible impact on anyone I know.

The 'retarded monkeys' characterization was coarse, but I do think there's something special (and especially dangerous) about mobile devices.

1) They're always with you

2) Input capabilities are limited so they tend to encourage consumption over creation

3) They run robust software stacks which enable addictive experiences

A general computer sitting on a desk isn't going to be used as often, and when it does get used, it'll be easier to write on. Writing's good for the brain.

A television has really limited input capabilities, it's not healthy to watch TV and the "TV rots your brain" concern predates the Internet. But it isn't as addictive as a mobile device.

A phone or tablet is the worst of both worlds. I've put a fair bit of effort into reducing my time with those devices in recent years, and I think I'm happier and more productive as a result. If I had a kid I think I would do the same with them.

But Thread OP specifically created a command-line consumption environment for his kid.

> 2) Input capabilities are limited so they tend to encourage consumption over creation

This is an interesting point that I haven't really thought about before. I absolutely hate the trend of moving away from laptops/desktops and towards phones, partly because I much prefer a keyboard and mouse to tapping away at a screen. It'd be hard to quantify but your statement rings true at least from my experience.

This is worth replying to because you ask important questions;

> Did you get into computers by intentionally expressing an interest and then having tidbits fed to you by someone? Or did you discover it organically

As a kid in the 70s I discovered it as "monkey see monkey do". Other adults (airforce buddies of my dad) were doing clever shit with them, which obviously impressed and engaged my dad, so I was drawn in.

> interest in something you aren't familiar with, will you let her explore it herself or will everything be filtered through you?

I am a student of Paulo Friere [1] and fan of John Taylor Gatto [2] so I'd find over-controlling pedagogy quite abhorrent. The trick of "Liberation pedagogy" is to open doors to the earliest self-sufficient (auto-didactic) exploration. Unfortunately the unfiltered internet is not a fit place for a 7 year old. At some point I intend to curate a "mini-net", probably a downloaded Wikipedia on localhost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

> Unfortunately the unfiltered internet is not a fit place for a 7 year old.

I wholeheartedly agree. 6 and 9-y-old here. Apps and websites are approve-only, and no YouTube/YTkids.

Something bad happened a few years ago which gave us a big scare.

Don't let your kids loan their devices to other kids, especially if the devices (and the other kids?!) are not restricted as you mentioned!

I gave my 5 year old a pc running linux when she learned to read. She became interested in the command line when she saw me using it to help her find a file she had misplaced. I gave her a list of simple commands and let her explore. By the time she was 7 she had full mastery of the command line and was writing her own bash scripts to provide herself with functionality similar to your "PlayOS".

The other one never got into it, he prefers to use the gui with the touch screen and mostly consumes minecraft or youtube videos about minecraft. If he needs tech support he asks his sister. I'm fine with all of it. He builds some amazing things in minecraft.

I love that your kids are on the "opposite" ends of the tech stack. One is achieving mastery of relatively low level software and file manipulation and the other is achieving mastery of high level visual programming.

Maybe you could introduce your other one to command blocks and logic gates in redstone. Not that they have to enjoy computing in that way, but it was a big reason I became interested in the field when I was younger.

people are dogging on you and clutching pearls, but this is really cool and cute. I strongly agree that quality of screen time is an important, oft-neglected consideration.

I feel bad for your daughter being raised with someone who thinks they are so much better than other people.

You may not be calling them retarded monkeys in front of your daughter but I’m sure your sense of superiority comes through.

I hope your daughter doesn’t pick it up

That’s great. You could try her out on BASIC too, she can write out games from the old magazines and then play them and modify the code. That’ll really get her going without providing her with access to the internet etc

Thank-you for your many comments here. I'd like them to use computers early, but to make the operation of them have some meaningful friction. The CLI is ideal.

Absent television, the older is

  * Somewhat dedicated to collecting coins.
  * Partitioning space with rectangles and
    building (tabletop) "dungeons."
  * Scrawling random numbers on 
    construction paper we have cut into
    bill-sized rectangles.
  * Taping coupons onto popsicle sticks.
  * Other crafts-related stuff.

I try to insert learning moments, like decomposition of problems, making lists and tables, and just try to sneak CS ideas in there.

I'd like him to know as much as me before high school, so college can be about applied math/physics and business. Make him a graycat or sysadmin, but with the knowhow to be an owner.

Equipping him thus is how I imagine a better future could be. I could be wrong. I can only do what I know. It's the longest project I have undertaken.

Once he can read, the world opens up: the library, my vast trove of Humble Bundle ebooks, the Great Books, textbooks, etc.

> Hopefully I'm helping build a life-long skill

A low value skill. What you're teaching is how to use a keyboard, not how to use a computer. Best case scenario by college she will have graduated to become a code monkey.

Can you please share your code?

> pawing at screen like retarded monkeys, tell her that phones are better :)

Well, my relatives in their 40s keep telling me that each time I suggest they get a real PC.

Honestly the hardest thing to do as a parent comes down to setting a good example. If we want our kids to do more than scroll mindlessly for hours and hours, it's incredibly impactful for us to model that behavior. (I'm nowhere near as good about this as I'd like to be.)

With our first kid we were pretty adamant about screen time restriction at a young age. By kid three, the restrictions had loosened significantly. There was also a pandemic in there — but in addition to having a lot more on our hands as parents, we established things like family games at night etc.

We watched Avatar the Last Airbender as a family and it was a great thing to do together. I introduced the kids to Sim City Classic and Scratch programming.

It's all about balance but ultimately, as parents we gotta "walk the walk" and model the behavior we want to see in our kids.

One of the best things I've done is locked my phone in my office and only model reading around them. Funny enough, they pick up their books and try to read (mostly looking at pictures cause they're young).

Modeling good habits is really important.

Just an observation, I'm a parent of two toddlers and try to limit screen time as much as possible. But if we ever go to my in laws or relatives places they always have a TV blaring in the background. I try not to make a fuss about limiting TV or screen time when we're visiting but they do know my views on screen time.

They are completely fine giving iPads and allowing kids to watch YouTube for hours. I have no idea what it's effects are long term but their kids seem to be doing ok in school so far.

I'm not a professionnal, but i've worked with kids for years before going into CS and development, and i have a surpising advice:

Screen are OK.

What you want is your kid to experiment. Constantly, with different things. Even doing nothing for some time can be stimulating, if you're with them. TV, radio, music on the background is a good idea (maybe mixing the medias a bit). Having stuff to look at (animated images!) is nice.

The danger is cutting off social relationships and contact, and as long as you're present, this won't happen.

And consider youth summer camps.

my childhood had computers that had lots of rough edges and required a lot of problem solving in order to just get them to function.

i can't help but wonder if today's tech gadgets that both work consistently, have beautifully polished ux and are geared towards consumption deny kids this kind of skill development opportunity.

that said, the scope and scale of free learning resources available today is really mind boggling.

> i can't help but wonder if today's tech gadgets that both work consistently, have beautifully polished ux and are geared towards consumption deny kids this kind of skill development opportunity.

Certainly the case. Watching inane youtube videos on an ipad won't teach you anything more about technology than being a couch potato in front of a TV. Using a technological artifact is not intrinsically educational.

I've heard plenty of stories about "I was a gamer and that's why I learned how to use computers", but those stories are from a time when getting a game to run required troubleshooting, finding and reading informational resources, etc. The iOS appstore isn't teaching any of this.

although i suppose those who have the opportunity and aptitude these days can get that same sort of experience by fighting with things like python package dependencies.

the problem of access inherent in what seems to be a slow death of microcomputers remains though...

When I grew up screens were still green and Paratroopers was an amazing game. The level of experiential “complexity” was very low compared to what we have today: supercomputers in every pocket capable of displaying hyperrealistic experiences, that are, on top of everything else, carefully optimized to create addictive habits. Kids today don’t have a chance.

I watched tv a lot as a kid and it seems like it was fine? They're gonna need glasses. Otherwise probably fine.

"screen time" limits, as if all screens were exactly the same, is such a bogus concept. Screens are not inherently bad, or good, or anything anymore than a window is bad or good. Or any rectangular slice of field of view...

It's mass hysteria behavior much like prior generation's freak-outs over printed newspapers, radio, or television. If you want to have limits for time spent on youtube do that. The screen isn't the problem.

"Screen time" is just the term that most people use for "use of technology", in this case TV, and other computer tech (tablets, desktops, phones). What they are really talking about is the applications or "services" the kids are addicted to staring at and using by way of the screens.

> Screens are not inherently bad, or good, or anything anymore than a window is bad or good.

Once you understand it's not really the screens as such, but the things the kids are looking at by way of the screens, then the value neutral claim kind of falls apart because the things the kids are looking at by way of the screens are made to be addictive and optimized to an absurd degree for that effect of habit formation. Tech companies have been on a decades long move to remove the concept of "just a screen", an obvious example being TVs which are now all "smart". Seeing as we know that habit formation is easier to bring about in children (their habits and behaviour as children defined by their plastic nature at that age) it's within reason to be worried that an industry and parenting practice is essentially enabling intense habit formation in children for material gain.

I wouldn't let imprecise language get in the way of the main issue: is addiction to certain services and technology something we want for our children? The fact that tech execs have decided "no" seems to be ironic considering they have no problem with other children doing it.

I know people who limit heavily usage of the devices (1-2h per day at most), but those kids have Instagram, FB etc., even though kids are way too young to use this kind of tech (<10 years old, so accounts would be locked out if reported).

On the other side of the spectrum I know 11-year olds who spend 6-7h per day on FT calls with their group.

In the end, both behaviours are screen time.

Do you know any people who actually limit screen time, without making a bizarre exception for social media?

There's more to the internet than corporate sites and TV streams.

Even if I accept your premise that there are corporations out there literally intentionally addicting kids (successfully!) in a way that fits the medical definitions of addition, it's still just those corporations. The internet, and in general technology, are so much more. Screen time limits are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe it'd be better to block corporate sites and still let the kids explore all the amazing educational and personal growth potential out there.

It isn't no much "use of technology" as "immersed in media"

And by media I mean this shared dreamland that we are navigating at the moment.

The dreamland has gotten more powerful over time (..text..radio..tv..games..social media..)

It has gone from entertainment and news to an alternate reality that we spend part of our life in.

So ya, living in dreamland... you gotta think about that. The pros and cons and such.

I suspect that the focus on "screen time" originally came about because the genre of low-effort studies that try to squeeze headline-grabbing correlations out of "time spent watching TV" needed to switch to a broader measure because conventional TV has dramatically waned in popularity over the past ~15 years.

As far as I know, the large-scale freakout happened after the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report recommending limits for "screen time" specifically for young children, which grabbed a lot of headlines. They later walked it back and basically changed the recommendation to be against unsupervised media consumption, and that grabbed a lot fewer headlines.

I’m guessing you don’t have kids and haven’t seen what happens if you tell them to put down the phone/iPad cause it’s time to do X, then watched them bargain with you for the device back. It’s like seriously like talking to a drug addict.

This is totally right, but I think the majority of people understand this, and use "screen time" as shorthand for completely passive and solitary use of screens. I know many people really do say it is the screen itself that's the problem, but I don't think that's the most common colloquial use of the term.

It's like noticing that McDonald's execs don't take their kids to eat fast food every day. Too much screen time can be dangerous for anyone.

Would make for about as interesting as article/conversation too.

I generally find the most technically competent people I work with generally are simpletons when it comes to technology. Once you see how the sausage is made the master plan of the technocracy becomes obvious.

I don't think a lot of people dispute that more screen time is harmful. Not in itself, but usually because that screen time is spent on social media or platforms like YouTube. It harms our self image, attention span, spreads conspiracy theories, and who knows what else.

Even being somewhat aware of this parents make the tradeoff.

Imagine if cigarettes didn't have an age limit and while smoking your kids were calm, quiet, and easier to manage. What tradeoffs would parents have made? I'd guess a lot more of us would have respiratory issues.

I wouldn't doubt there's a correlation between screen time and socio-economics. Having more money gives parents a choice. They can provide more enriching activities, hire a nanny, spend time directly with their children, n things that are viable alternatives to an iPad that a family with less may not have access to.

> I don't think a lot of people dispute that more screen time is harmful.

I dispute it. Me and my friends played video games a lot, watched a lot of tv, etc. We all turned out fine. I think most people did the exact same thing and turned out fine too. Screen time = harm is an idea that flies in the face of the common reality lived by everyone born since 1980.

This idea sounds a lot like people who thought novels were dangerous, that comic books were dangerous, that rock and roll was dangerous, etc.

Do you still do those things a lot? Do you have a hard time quitting them?

Turning out fine is not the problem here. It's the addiction that is formed creating habits that are extremely difficult to give up. This only gets worse each generation due to even more time in front of screens. Kids from the 80s spent more time outside than those from the 90s and so on.

https://www.childinthecity.org/2018/01/15/children-spend-hal...

> I don't think a lot of people dispute that more screen time is harmful. Not in itself, but usually because that screen time is spent on social media or platforms like YouTube.

It's both. A poor information diet is harmful of course, but so is screen use in general. Screen use is a sedentary activity which damages your body. At least at work we get compensated for the damage, like a construction worker who gets compensated for wearing out his body with hard labor. The programmer pay is better and the damage more manageable, but it's still not harmless. Too much time in front of a screen will atrophy your muscles and slow your metabolism.

You can offset this damage by getting a gym membership, an active hobby, etc. But kids have trouble finding a healthy balance (not least because so many screen-activities are designed to be addictive) and that's why screen time limits are useful.

Some good points here.

The difference is that smoking is well-known to be net-negative to most people and backed by the department of justice. Our parents used television and video game consoles. We are too early into even seeing the repercussions of this excess screentime. There's only been maybe one generation who had access to constant screentime (millennials).

From the look of some statistics from books like Jonathan Haidt, the CDC, and increasing screentime trends YoY, I would say this isn't looking good.

I recently wrote a book on this talking about all these challenges from the perspective of someone(30 now) who was raised with the over-reliance of a gameboy/TV being my babysitter and the only thing I want more in the world is less time on screens, but it's a hard battle to fight (akin to being a lifelong smoker and trying to quit).

The evidently for the damage of excessive screen time is surprisingly weak. It's a thing everyone expects to be true but studies have been very mixed and don't do a good job controlling for types of content.

As an anecdote, my kids (11 & 14) have no limits on screen time and spend an inordinate amount of time gaming and watching YouTube. So do I. We're all happy and healthy and excelling in school. Social lives are a bit quiet but that's largely due to personality (I was the same pre-internet). Obviously everyone is different but for us, it's fine.

One critical thing to understand is that while you can nudge your children's behavior one way or the other you absolutely can't change their personalities. That's just DNA. I have exactly two parenting rules to live by:

* Marry well, that's 50% of their genes

* Have enough money

Eating vegetables, taking swim lessons, quiet time after dinner. Those are all well and good but will have a negligible impact on their lives long term.

Lately, I don't even have time to watch TV or movies anymore, so we don't even have a TV. We of course have computers, tablets, and smartphones, given the world today. But we never put them in front of our toddler for her to watch. The only time we have her looking at a smartphone is when we do a video call to grandparents.

These days, she's really excited for me to read books to her. She grabs her books off the shelves and brings them to me, and when we're done, she goes and grabs more. Last night, she kept wanting to go back to reading one called Barnyard Dance over and over again. She loves it.

After experiencing life with her not caring about screens, I'm actually quite excited and intrigued. I love that she's excited to read books, demands me to read them to her, and cries when I say it's time to stop and go sleep or go eat or whatever. I've not yet experienced life with her extensively in front of screens, but at this point, I think I enjoy life without screens for the toddler in terms of our family relationship, and I think I'll keep it going for as long as I can. She seems to be full of life without them, why try to fix what's not broken?

Eventually though, I wouldn't mind if she became a software engineer, if that's how she's bent, so probably need to introduce screens sometime. But we'll put it off for as long as possible and when screens do come into her life, hopefully, she'll go at them with the same excitement she goes at books and also doesn't lose her love for books.

When word of my XP based grading system got out I had lots of interviews with different TV stations. Most notable RTL which is a German kinda trashy TV station and I had a chat with the producer assigned with my story.

To my amazement he disallowed hits children the TV entirely because he states it was only trash and no good for a developing mind.

I had to try hard not to laugh when his station was a heavy part of the problem in the German speaking world

All of their stations, it's hard to express just how broad of an negative impact the RTL media group has on the quality of modern entertainment in Germany.

Bauer sucht Frau is pretty good, no? :D

I seem to recall other threads about this but other than the following, I can't find them:

Why Gates and Jobs shielded their kids from tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16251875 - Jan 2018 (9 comments)

Anybody?

Edit: there are these:

Silicon Valley’s supposed obsession with tech-free private schools (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30746379 - March 2022 (116 comments)

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340767 - Oct 2018 (22 comments)

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3145080 - Oct 2011 (40 comments)

These Executives are restricting the screen time of their children for a number of reasons. Some executives, like Evan Spiegel and Sundar Pichai, grew up without much access to technology and credit the technology restriction to their success. They may want to replicate this experience for their own children. Other executives, like Steve Jobs, value face-to-face conversation and interaction and believe that technology can be a distraction from these types of interactions. Some executives, like Susan Wojcicki, want their children to learn how to manage technology responsibly and balance screen time with other activities. Others, like Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams, want to limit their daughter's screen time as she gets older to ensure that she doesn't become overly reliant on or addicted to technology.

> Others, like Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams, want to limit their daughter's screen time as she gets older to ensure that she doesn't become overly reliant on or addicted to technology

I had an interesting epiphany when reading this sentence. At first, my reaction was that this was a bit of a different comparison to the others, given that Serena Williams is much more famous than her husband, and she's known not for technology but for being arguably the most dominant athlete of an entire generation (not just in her sport, and not just among women, but like, decades of winning tournaments at the highest level is basically unparalleled). But then I realized that most of these other people mentioned also have another parent alongside them, and the fact that they're not famous doesn't mean that they don't have equally strong opinions about how to raise a child, and ideally most parenting couples will be cooperative and not just "the most famous person's opinions win". I wonder if a lot of these famous executives didn't come up with their parenting strategies on their own, but after discussion and inspiration from their partner as well. Put in that light, it's a lot harder for me to just assume hypocrisy when I know I've grown and changed so much for the better since finding my partner to settle down with for the rest of my life. We don't have any desire for children of our own, but it seems pretty logical that if it were something we wanted, the initial ideas I had when we started discussing parenting would potentially evolve through insights I would gain from my partner, since that's exactly what's happened with all of the discussions we've had about long-term plans that we do have.

For Christmas, I bought my kids a physical set of encylopedias [1], usually $600, but black friday sale for $400. My son wanted to know "What are the top 30 soccer teams in the world cup all time?". Instead of googling it, which would have given him a listacle article with random facts and other clickbait, the encyclopedia had:

* Winners and runners up for the past 15 world cups * a break down of soccer per continent, comparing and contrasting them

He then went and totaled how many wins different countries have gotten....

For a family like mine which can afford $400 for a set of books, this has been an amazing purchase which is a far superior first step to "pull out an ipad and google it".

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0716601214

And for families who can't afford $400, library cards are free.

And for families without access to libraries, torrents are free

Totally agree. I try to take them to the library often, but (for families who can afford it) the convenience is nice because they can research something on their own without a trip to the library - at which point they probably would have lost interest. My goal is to tighten feedback loops for learning and discovery, without using a computer.

Questions they've answered which probably wouldn't have risen to the level of "let's go to the library today/tomorrow":

* what are the signs of the Chinese zodiac? which one am i?

* what is the different between a trademark and a copyright? why does it say "R" vs "TM"? (I gave an answer off the type of my head, but they clearly weren't happy with it.... haha)

> Winners and runners up for the past 15 world cups

The information your son has access to is outdated.

If the 2021 encyclopedia is outdated, so is almost every fact in my head about the broader world.

While I do agree that information in books can/will be out of date, I find the critique in this case funny because he was watched the world cup final game. So he knew who the winner/runner up was and added them to the bottom of his paper.

I credit my entire software engineering career to the my ability to effectively use a search engine and find resources on the internet.

Nowadays Google is filled with ads and fake sites, but maybe a subscription to something like Kagi (https://kagi.com/) would be worthwhile?

Thanks for the recommendation about kagi - I'll check it out. :)

I'm sure my bias is showing, but I think my mom's solution worked pretty well. No such thing as limiting screen time, but I did have limits on the kinds of activities I was allowed to do and when.

No video games on school nights. Sunday is fine but only before dinner and only if my homework was finished. Computer time was limited to half an hour and only if my homework was finished, and I could only run whitelisted "educational" software.

No formal limits on TV watching, but in practice my parents had grown up shows they wanted to watch that I found boring, so my TV time was effectively limited to e.g. when they were busy cooking dinner.

No limits for any activity on weekends as long as homework, chores, and miscellaneous family activities were done. I thought of this as digital pig-out time, and I'm sure my parents thought of it as, "do what we want because the kids are playing video games" time.

All the above activity limits expired when I got into high school. I guess they'd rather me do nerd stuff than getting into trouble with drugs, alcohol, or girls. And indeed, I spent this time teaching myself C so I guess it worked.

No children of our own yet, but we plan to adopt a similar system, with modern internet-connected screens like phones and/or tablets lumped into the "computer time" category.

I'm guessing you're in your 30s, maybe late 20s, this is how most of us grew up. It's not the same anymore.

"Nerd stuff" these days is watching Disney movies and playing games. We taught ourselves nerd stuff because we had to dig to get to the candy inside. These days you don't have to dig, one click install and done, the digging is grinding for loot boxes or whatever. A person can use these machines hours a day every day of the week for years and not learn a single thing about actually operating them, they're kiosks for consumption to most people. To learn real nerd stuff requires deliberate effort now.

Hit the nail on the head. I'm in my mid-30s.

To learn anything on your own has always required effort. I've been driving almost every day for 20 years, and I still don't really know anything about cars. My mother-in-law has been using a computer every day since 1985, and she knows less about computers than I do about cars. "Needing to dig" is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning.

I feel like the lack of a need to dig is a double-edged sword if anything. I knew I wanted to program the computer, but I had to scour the card catalog at the library for anything related to computers to find anything at all, and most of what I found was about BASIC. Now? It's a click away. On the other hand, I know where to look for information, how to read the docs, etc.

I guess you're right. Still, in the 1930s, if you owned a car you knew how to quick repair on the road, so you knew a thing or two about the machine. The workings of things we use do get hidden behind veneers over time as the industries around them mature and they become widely used, there is an element of needing to dig, but I'm probably overstating it. If someone wants to learn how to do the complex stuff you're right, it is easier to do so now, but it's less crucial, and having these tools in your life isn't as synonymous with learning how they work as it used to be.

This shouldn't be surprising. You think McDonald's exec have their kids eating happy meals all the time if at all?

There's that scene in Scarface about "Don't get high on your own supply". Those who are selling the products tend to not be the consumers of them. Tech, Fast Food, Drugs, etc.

Moderation and information diets are especially helpful for those of us who can't afford people to raise our kids for us.

The number of screen types has increased since I was a child in the 90’s. We only had TVs. Now kids are exposed to phones, tablets, games and watches in addition to the tv. So many opportunities and so many more channels as a parent I need to block or watch out for.

On one hand, they're morons, on the other hand, they helped kill the tech industry, so they're right for helping their kids avoid wasting their time using tech (as in actually wasting time, not alluding to addiction bullshit).

Not a fan of this. I think kids should be allowed to do what they want, within reason. Screen time is good for learning , good for keeping busy, entertainment, and so on. Telling someone they cannot do something may lead to resentment,

I don't have kids but am a bit conflicted with the desire to limit their screen time too much (reasonable limits are fine).

Tech is their world, that's how they communicate, how they get their information and entertainment. For people who know how life was without the internet may feel like it is addiction, that it is "untrue", that nothing is better than face to face, that constant stimulation is bad, etc... But what if it is our problem and not theirs, that we have trouble adapting and are simply projecting our trouble to children, when themselves have no problem dealing with the situation.

I mean, late GenX to early millenials lived their childhood in the world of TV, which is worse than what we have today in many ways, and they are fine! I trust children of today, they will make something great, and we will get lost, like the old geezers we are starting to become.

"I don't have kids but am a bit conflicted with the desire to limit their screen time too much"

What you do in moderation your children will do in excess.

Seems completely normal. Don't parents do this generally?

It used to be far more common, waned over the last 2 decades, but now it's coming back into fashion. Generally, phones and tablets are often replacements for baby sitters, or more sadly, interacting with a child. The idea of plopping your kid infront of a TV or tablet for a couple hours "to calm them down" is very common. Some do it because they are tired, other because it is simply easy, among other reasons.

yea I've seen this too. suprising how many people are not interested in being parents but decide to have kids for whatever reason.

Your assumption is that they decided anything.

Back in the 90s, my brothers and I had our screen time limited by egg timers. 30 minutes a day normally, 60 if our grades were good, 0 if our grades were poor. This was for games/TV, computer time spent on school work or other research was not included.

This was not common at the time, most of my friends had unlimited screentime, a few of them had to abide by rules similar to mine. Also, the computer was a big thing in the middle of the living room, not something I could slip into my pocket. So auditing for rule compliance was a lot easier. And the three of us shared one computer for most of that time, so if anybody was cheating the timer and taking more time, the odds of being ratted out were pretty good.

In retrospect I think the rules were worthwhile, because they kept me active outdoors. And because in college I got to see the damage video game addiction can do to some people. It's like alcohol in that most people can enjoy it fine but a substantial minority ruin their lives with it. Parents would be very careless to not place reasonable limits on how much alcohol their children drink each day.

Rich people do not need cheap entertainment. Why to buy a kid debilitating app when you can get best piano or best horse riding teacher in town. The world of the riches is a bit different. I am not talking about middle management rich. I am talking about the richt people like in this article.

I agree. I feel a bit uncomfortable with the premise of this article. It's quasi deifying the tech execs.

"CEO Evan Spiegel grew up without TV, and credits the technology restriction to his success".

Sigh. Only if things were that simple. I'm sure it was one of hundreds of factors that worked in his favors.

Or he was successful despite the restriction! There's really no way to know just from one sample.

Pretty sure a lot of it has to do with this:

> Spiegel was born in Los Angeles, California, to lawyers John W. Spiegel and Melissa Ann Thomas. He grew up in Pacific Palisades, California, where he was raised Episcopalian. He was educated at the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, and attended Stanford University.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Spiegel

It’s basically a financial tabloid. They all do this—pump out worship of the rich and successful that gets eaten up by the masses of temporarily embarrassed millionaires that read it and try to emulate what they do.

> masses of temporarily embarrassed millionaires

The "managerial class" people who actually read this stuff are often literally millionaires if you count their inflated home values and retirement funds. This is a magazine to be read by doctors, lawyer, investment bankers and techies, not people who work outdoors.

The sliced of the economic ladder who are often derided by people slightly up the ladder as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" for not sharing the same views mostly don't care what the billionaires are up to unless one of them tries to buy an election presides over some technological breakthrough or some other highly newsworthy event.

Playing the piano is a different sort of entertainment. The drive to practice has to come from within.

When I was growing up computers were dumb and hard. To be a kid using a computer you not only needed to develop the smarts to be able to USE the damn thing, but to make use of it you needed to spend a lot of time...reading. As I got older things like iCQ and IRC were popular and generally you simply met other like-minded people and could generally get by on anonymity. Communities were far better, there was no such thing and "doing it for the <social media platform>". It was hard to melt your brain on albinoblacksheep or newgrounds because content wasn't released on a millisecond basis. You could realistically binge on these similar to kids today and be stuck waiting weeks to months before the next round of brain melting content came out. Don't get me wrong I played plenty of video games on the computer. However, I had to figure out how to even do that to get started. Moreover, we didn't have always-on internet. You called in and put a stupid phone on a machine. Then modems came out. Good luck binging on anything when your mom needed the phone to gossip with her friends. I suppose this is no different than any technical field. Once things are made easy enough a caveman can do it, the next generation loses the creativity and ingenuity their fore-bearers had.

Now, screen time is implied to be negative. As it should be. Your average kid's screen time is not sitting at a terminal trying to puzzle out how to make a computer work. They are not sitting watching 8 hours of programming videos, or math videos, or Carl Sagan's cosmos. They aren't listening to audiobooks of war and peace. They are, quite literally, melting their brain with the videographic equivalent of cocaine. I am of the opinion parents these days who allow their kids unrestricted time on TikTok/Facebook/Youtube/etc are doing them a major developmental disservice. The entire social media machine is powered by designed-in-a-laboratory techniques to keep you locked in. If an adult, with all their life experience, cannot resist such temptations expecting a child to do the same is non-sensical. It's gotten far too easy to not only use a computer, but to become hopelessly addicted to content farms via the "always-on" new world. Kids just aren't being kids anymore.

Times were different back then. Some people may disagree, but the "nerd" kids 30 years ago were smarter, faster, and better than such kids today. No different than our grandparents having to be the same way back when. They had to be. Now, things are easier. For better or worse. The same technology that could've raised the new generation to be even better than us was instead co-opted by advertisers to hopelessly addict children and adults to what amounts to just a different form of pornography (which, coincidentally was ALSO harder for us to get...I digress). I guess this is more of a thesis on the state of the world than just computers...it's all related.

This is like saying rich people are more cultured cause they travel more...

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