The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts. I don't believe they have any idea what they're talking about and don't think they're capable of converting their research into practical advice that does good.
I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice."
Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works.
It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest.
I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet.
So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.
You seem to have a serious grudge about breast feeding vs. formula. I am sorry that was so traumatic for you. But it seems to me that this is much more to do with “new (yuppie) parent culture” than with the medical establishment or research community.
Having spent a bunch of time around new parents, my observation is that most of them are way too hyped up about trivial threats. If a breast-feeding mother drinks a glass of wine once every few days the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs. If the baby plays with many types of toys marked “ages 3+” while the parents are sitting watching, the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby climbs up on a play structure marked “ages 4–7” while the parents are standing watching, the risk of permanent injury is trivial. If a 2-year-old walks around barefoot on the sidewalk, the risks are trivial. Etc.
The same kind of tendencies bring us the anti-vax movement, a rush to sanitize all surfaces in the home, excessive fears about kidnapping, theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk, and so on.
New parents’ (and people’s in our society more generally) risk assessment and concept of hygiene is excessively black–and–white.
There are similar issues with the “back to sleep” campaign - the risk of SIDS apparently is indeed Slightly lower for babies sleeping on their back, but it is only very slightly lower, and some babies will not sleep on their back unless they are exhausted which causes other non trivial issues. If you actually look into the “back to sleep” study data, it is much, much weaker than proponents imply it is.
And yet, every nurse in the hospital kept telling us with religious fervor to not even think of letting the baby fall asleep on their stomach. I was so impressed that I was sure the evidence was overwhelming. But after a week with a hardly sleeping newborn (relatively speaking), I decided to look into it myself. You should to, rather than trust the “experts”. (Or a random internet post like mine, for that matter)
Those kind of overreactions and bulldozer parenting are in large part the result of 24/7 news, which made unusual events seem common and created an environment of neverending fear.
Additionally, as the world became safer and sanitized, we became more distanced from injury and it seems more traumatic. Parents are more afraid and focused on the downsides. As well as the fact that we have fewer kids than in the past. The potential consequences are greater.
It's also worth noting that the body and brain are anti-fragile. That is, they become stronger and more robust when challenged. Weaker in the absence of it. The end result of all this sanitization, safetyism and overprotection is a fragile human. One that is less able to cope with the challenges and messiness and nuance of the real world.
The grudge against the breast is best is legitimate and valid. My son was just born in a baby friendly hospital 6 weeks premature. Mom was pumped full of fluids for days before the delivery and they built up in her lungs. The day after delivery, she woke up to the cardio and respiratory alarms going off at 6am and she was talking nonsense to the nurse, presumably because she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. That day, the nurses kept coming into her room and the top priority was to get her to pump. The top priority. I finally had to go talk to the charge nurse and demand they look at her lungs because she obviously couldn’t breathe.
So yes. The hyper focus on breast feeding is a problem. Baby friendly is often hostile to the mother. The medical community is to blame while in the hospital prioritizing pumping over breathing.
I think you might be underestimating how hard breastfeeding is pushed in US hospitals. Our second night in the hospital with my son, my wife's milk hadn't come in yet.
Our son was screaming because he was hungry. The nurse kept saying this was good, that it would encourage breast milk production. It took several tries to convince her that, while it might be good in the long run, we needed some food for this baby.
This was a consistent experience with all nurses we dealt with. Interestingly, breastfeeding specialists tended to be more understanding.
Our hospital had a 50 year old lactation consultant that called formula poison when she heard our pediatrician recommended us to supplement breastfeeding with formula.
We decided not to even try with our twins, because it took an hour of pumping to produce half an ounce, every doctor we saw still pushed breastfeeding on us.
There's immense peer pressure surrounding it too. People love feeling superior to each other.
More directly to the topic of this discussion: the problem with screens is that they are a very easy tool for making children shut up and stop bothering the adults, and a much more difficult tool to make into a challenging and thoughtful experience. As a result many adults lean on using screens to distract their children much more than they absolutely need, and end up reliant on them. And the kids end up using screens in a way that is wasting a ton of time and not helping their development.
The material on screen is very often (from what I can observe just walking around town and seeing kids looking at them) grossly inappropriate for the child’s current level – either too simple and repetitive or too advanced and incomprehensible – but the sounds, colors, and especially movement are so exciting as pure distraction that kids will sit entranced, whether or not they are learning anything. The overstimulation from the screen is addictive enough for the kids that the kids will start to fuss and cry when the screen is removed, and when given the choice the screen will crowd out other toys and activities.
It is probably possible to make a screen a meaningful learning experience for young kids, but few parents (especially the ones who are using the screen to get a break from childcare) have the time to research and personally vet material to figure that out.
If a kid watches 30m of Mr. Rogers every day, they’re going to be fine. But the kids watching 2 hours of YouTube low-budget animated nursery rhymes on loop, or watching endless unboxing videos, or playing a too-easy iPad game, when they could otherwise be playing with and learning about the physical world, are really missing out.
This is not to say that kids shouldn’t regularly spend some time entertaining themselves while the parents do something else. But if they can learn to do so with a wimmelbook or some crayons or some blocks or a cardboard box.... they’re usually going to be learning more than if stuck in front of a TV.
> theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk
I'm with you completely except for this one. Cigarette smoke feels like it sucks the air out of a nonsmoker's lungs from quite a wide radius. A nonsmoker can smell an outdoor cigarette from a block away, and it doesn't smell good even at that distance. Up close it makes people involuntarily gag. Not recognizing that seems pretty blind.
> If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs.
Yep, this is just as obvious as you want it to be.
And yet there's a massive government advertising campaign taking out billboards with the message "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother and your baby will die". Check out the posters in the BART system sometime.
I find this incredibly disgusting. Nothing can justify this official message. But there it is out there anyway. The government, spending your money to hurt you.
Nope. Medical staff effectively saying you must feed your baby now or it will die three hours after it was born and after a 24 hour labour tends to focus your mind and scare the crap out of you.
There is just as much unsubstantiated fear generated by medical staff when it comes to kids as everywhere else in the community.
Seems that just having been a child qualifies somebody to comment on how you choose to raise your children.
Too much attention and you are a helicopter parent, not enough and you are neglectful. God forbid you let them play in the park without you being there.
He is commenting on the depressingly short 1/2 life of recommendations from the medical fraternity, and he is spot on about breast feeding recommendations having changed recently. I'm guessing the abandoned recommendations got their start when Nestlé dressed up their sales women in WHO uniforms and instructed them to tell African woman "formula is best", and the medical fraternity understandably went basaltic, but they also went too far. Now that has come back to bite them.
> Today, the half-life of medical knowledge is currently about 18-24 months, and it is projected that in about four years that half-life will be only 73 days.
That's from a mob trying to flog education so it's going to be an exaggeration, but it's still short no matter who measures it. By comparison Engineering knowledge 1/2 life is till measured in decades, although I expect they conveniently leave software engineering out of that.
Overall I agree with him, the doctors are far too eager to hard sell the latest advice in some paper. I guessing that's because selling advice is how they make their money. That behaviour has its downsides.
It seems like in developing nations were getting into the realm of diminishing returns around health risks (obviously not everything, but a lot of things).
Go back 50 years and the things like nutrition, vaccination, etc had huge benefit in risk reduction.
Now that we’ve tackled those, we go after the next set. Now it’s breast feeding, screen time, etc. we put a similar focus on those but the returns are much smaller and sometimes questionable.
Is breast feeding better? Sure. Is your child going not going to reach their full potential if you use formula? No. Not worth getting stressed over.
A lot of medicine is basically cargo-culting or at least it feels that way because Doctor's rarely talk about the curve of how doing something will affect an outcome down the road. Are we talking about 50% chance of bad thing happening or 1% chance in 30 years? The former is serious, but the latter is probably one of those things most people would be very happy gambling on if it means to prevent that one percent they're gonna need to take a bunch of medications with all kinds of fun possible side-effects and interactions.
Right with you. I’ve watched them manipulate my wife and guilt her into so much stress over such things. (I’m a bit to much of an asshole (with classical statistics training at the level of grad school econometrics) to be anything other than bemused at best by their bald faced claims)
No amount of deconstructing the studies and deconstructing the health care we receive can mitigate the doctor who tells her our son needs x and not y.
Not to say that scientific medicine isn’t amazing. Just saying sometimes it gets ahead of itself.
Yeah, I found actual medical professionals (even the lactation consultants I dealt with) to be pretty chill about breastfeeding and formula. Online mommy culture is a scourge though, and is ridiculous about the benefits (real, imagined, and wildly overstated) of breastfeeding.
>The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts.
That's a valid sentiment. We should be suspicious of experts in non-hard sciences (in hard sciences a proof is a proof). They often get things wrong, they are often paid by industry, and they often follow ideological or other fashions.
But the suspicion should also be cautious, and you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".
>I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure.
What "harm" was that, and who said they are wrong? For one, there are several 100s of millennia of evolution backing beyond breast feeding, and feeding a baby is at the very core of evolutionary processes, so if anything one should began being suspicious of any novel industrial formulas made for profit...
Not sure why screens wouldn't be bad for "young brains". Evolutionary speaking almost everything that's not part of 1000000s of years of evolutionary history and takes such a huge time each day and such huge changes in lifestyle (from eyesight/brain used outdoors to eyesight/attention devoted to a backlit screen for hours each day), will be bad in one way or another -- unless it actively corrects for another bad thing (like how housing corrects for exposure to raw weather elements).
The problems with science as it is practised now are well-known on HN. The system is broken in ways that are designed to produce erroneous newsworthy blanket statements like the one in this article.
This article was not produced in order to help parents. The "science" behind it was not produced in order to help parents. The article was written to get clicks. The "science" was done to get citations/funding/tenure.
It is entirely appropriate as a parent to tell these "experts" to go and stand in the corner and think deeply about what they've done, and only come out again when they're ready to actually do something useful for society.
> you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".
I don't think that's a very generous interpretation, and your paraphrasing feels like you decided early on that you could safely dismiss everything that person wrote.
> constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet
I don't have kids but I was 8 when my sister was 0 so I like to think of myself as having seen how things go.
Kids are very resilient. They'll raise themselves if they have to. Just keep them fed and sheltered and you're fine. The more you leave them to their own devices, the more confident and self-sufficient adults they'll become.
Our great grandparents raised their kids by letting them run around in the fields "helping" while everyone else was working and everyone turned out just fine. You do not have to optimize every little second of their lives.
It's okay for kids to struggle a little in a nurturing environment. You are not their butler.
My kids are high school and college age now. The impression I formed of "parenting" advice is that anything works if you're unusually organized and self disciplined, otherwise it will fail and you'll find yourself being blamed.
One thing I learned: Any advice that starts with "just" should be ignored. Smile and nod.
I have seen parents bring their kids to a nice holiday, sit them down on the table with a tablet.
This boy actually missed the dance performance from the native people. Where do you draw your line?
When does it become just normal vs. neglecting your child? And i'm not talking about neglect in a directly hurtful way, i mean it in a way that the potential this kid could have had in the future is between university vs. non university.
Whats <kid> up to? He watches tv. Oh so why does he not play games? Or with others? Or why does he not have any interesests etc.?
"So !@#$ you Parentology." there are people out who smoke in the same room as their kids. People who do not take any precautions and have a dead kid because the shelf collapsed. You think they do the articles? Those are click bait articles.
Surprised this rant is the top comment, seeming to put the feelings and convenience of the parents in prime position. You may think that is ok, but it is not the basis of proper argument.
It’s really quite simple - have we have proven that formula is non-inferior to breast milk over the life time of the child? No. Is there some evidence that it is inferior? Yes. What is the size of the difference? Not clear, but probably depends on the child. Who decides what goes into formula? A for-profit company.
For the health system to encouraging breast feeding seems eminently reasonable under these conditions.
If the benefits were large they’d be much easier to measure. From my research, it seems to amount to 1-2 fewer colds as a baby, if that.
Contrast that with what pregnant women are told from doctors and lactation consultants: that breastfeeding helps with bonding, dental structure, allergies, weight gain in babies, weight loss for mothers, etc. They’re pushed to websites like KellyMom that cherry-pick studies supporting these outcomes, and shamed for choosing alternatives. They’re told that just one bottle in the first month can ruin their chances of breastfeeding successfully.
Many hospitals belong to an initiative that pushes breastfeeding on new mothers to the extent that they have to get a prescription to give formula. You can’t put your baby in a nursery anymore because the baby needs access to the breast round the clock. But heaven forbid the mother fall asleep holding her baby! Babies go home from the hospital to mothers who are exhausted from birth and trying to feed round the clock. Their milk supply hasn’t come in yet and their babies leave the hospital having lost 5-10% of their birth weight. Some of these babies never get enough milk, and they die while their mothers are still told ‘Breast is Best’. Others feel shame, embarrassment, and inadequate for not nursing their children, from professionals and laypeople who have internalized this message.
All this to prevent a couple of colds in a baby. It’s insane.
Anecdote is not data and data is not annecdote. But you have one experience and I have the opposite:
I am 100% pro tech, showing the kids how to use smartphones constructively, etx. We were controlling what our kids watch to avoid in particular all the modern crap pumper onto YouTube or various American TV channels - and yet our four year old developed serious attention issues.
It's not gone but it's MUCH better since the TV is banned to only be on on Friday evenings. Choose your own path forward but I am happy I managed to help my son be a more balanced person, rather than park him in front of the TV just to have my own 'quiet time'. We read more, the parents themselves drop their phones more often - all in all family life is much happier. I just wish my wife would accept to get fully rid of the thing. Spending time with kids is enjoyable, especially when they are not unbearably begging for TV TV TV or can't focus on a thing longer than 20 seconds.
That said - not sure what you're going on about breastfeeding but the evidence that it's good for kids is pretty overwhelming. You shouldn't feel guilty if it doesn't work out for one reason or the other, but breastfeeding is a positive for the child.
> It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media
> who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child
But that's your problem, not science's. You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better. If the fact is "breast feeding is better than formulas" and you can't breast feed just get over it...
Op's comment is about harm done by people who directly interact with new parents:
> they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula
Your response inferred the OP desired scientists to lie - but that's a notion you introduced to the conversation:
> You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better.
The first part of what you're saying sort of aligns with one of the rules in "12 Rules for Life".
Don't let your kids do something that'll make you hate them. Which essentially boils down to take care of yourself so that you can be the best parent to your child when it matters most.
You're obviously right about badly formed science, and of course stuff should be verified before it's shouted about. I also have personal experience (well, personal via my wife!) with the whole breastfeeding thing - you're right, there are some BreastNazis out there and they do need calling out, for sure.
Having said that - people have managed to parent their kids for ever without screens. Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.
It's kind of blindingly obvious to me - even without the evidence of science - that putting a screen in front of your kid falls short in so many ways compared to how it used to be - maybe encouraging them to play, properly, with blocks / Lego, soft toys or books. This is so obviously more likely to enable them to build their spacial awareness or encourage reading than staring mindlessly at YouTube Kids, surely? Not least of all it will give them some understanding of how to interact with the real world around them. Plus - and this is a big one for me - real, quality time with parents actually interacting, properly, with their kids - talking to them, reading to them, playing with them - is lost! You can pretend you're "browsing YouTube together" or whatever but we all know that's b/s - there's no meaningful interaction between you and your kids in doing that.
You want space in the evening to be an adult? Sure - get your kids to bed at 7pm every night so they have a routine and you get to have grown-up time! You don't need a screen to do that shit - you just need to parent with conviction and stick to your guns. It's hard, really hard, but it's never been anything else. Expecting it to be somehow made easy with an iPad is a fools game.
Final thing - we gotta be really careful with the "I don't believe in experts any more" thing. That way ...is Trump.... ;-)
> Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.
Because our lives are different. It was overwhelmingly common for a parent to stay at home a generation or two ago (yes, it was almost always the mother but there’s no reason that would have to be the case today). But plenty of families, my own included, need both parents to be working in order to get by.
Simply put, we’re paid less than people used to be. Housing is more expensive than it used to be. Transport is more expensive than it used to be. So we have to work harder and our personal lives suffer.
Imagine these statements in an engineering context:
"Linked lists are bad."
"Java is bad."
"Databases are bad."
As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great.
The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me?
And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.
I'm advocating against these studies being turned into blanket statement advice that can do real harm.
"IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm.
If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."
How about instead of bitching at experts you bitch at the idiots that pump up and propagandize the results of one study that vaguely adheres to their predetermined outcome?
Kind of thought that this site would attract a slightly more intelligent group of people than that.
Anyway, I just want to point out that the medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo (except surgery (but then there was that study of placebo knee surgery...))
And how can you "do science" to parenting without multi-generational "longitudinal" (I think that's the word) studies with control groups?
Can we compare e.g. Amish children with Sentinelese children with tech-saturated children?
(The people of N. Sentinel Island are likely the closest thing we have to a control group for human society.)
> The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are one of the world's last uncontacted peoples.
> ...the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on the island.
> Some of the kids experienced parents reading often to them, and little screen time. Other kids who’d had lots of screen time (more than one hour per day, the max recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the WHO) throughout early childhood.
If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.
> If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental.
So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.
> It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.
I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs.
My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
I read to my kids every night, until they could start reading to me and then to themselves. They also get plenty of screen time. My kids are doing great in school. This article seems like complete BS to me. At best it compares kids with lots of reading to kids with no reading - we already know this makes a difference. To say that the kids with no reading had lots of screen time and then to blame only the screen time seems disingenuous. This is a boat load of confirmation bias by smug assholes that know better than you.
I was born in 89. Until I turned 9 or 10, one of my parents would read to me every night, and I had over an hour of screen time just about every day too.
That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one.
Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix.
The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children.
Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.
There are many meta-studies demonstrating that repeatedly for the past 20 years. TV is bad for children. Video games are bad. Phones are bad, and tablets, and consoles, and computers. It's bad for their mood, their IQ, their sleep, it gives them obesity, ADHD, it's bad any way you look at it; it's even bad when the parents are watching the phone instead of interacting with their children...
"This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents."
From what I can tell, listening to books read aloud is by far the most effective and efficient way to promote child language development. Listening comprehension is a foundational prerequisite for most kinds of intellectual work.
In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close.
The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc.
Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.
I continue to be surprised by the scope of these studies. Has nobody figured out that the screens are incidental and it is the content difference that matters? Listening to several hours of inane audio books every day is unlikely to be any better for a child's development.
Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights
But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.
Yes of course it's important to note that screens are huge enablers of passive consumption.
But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert?
Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)
Right. The brain is like a muscle, and if it's not being engaged or challenged, then what would you expect?
You could replace these studies with: "Not using the brain is bad for the brain."
The screen itself is basically a red herring. What's on the screen matters. There's a big difference between interacting with a puzzle or strategy game and passively consuming a video, for example.
I seem to have read a number of reports confirming that list.
Challenge - but not overwhelming challenge - is really good for minds. All ages. And a passive screen does not challenge anyone ... without real world interaction...
I think most people (parents) do not in fact distinguish between screen activities. In particular, games are bucketed into the same box as tv regardless of the game.
I'm not aware of any studies indicating learning something from a webpage is any less effective than learning it from a book. I'd be interested to see studies targeting that. Even more so if it had breakdowns by age
Stimulating lights and sounds which distract attention and make it more difficult to focus on a problem or task are actively getting in the way of learning.
You're describing a situation where the screen is a secondary activity in the background. A conversation by adults could be just as distracting and yet you hopefully wouldn't advise that adults conversing is harmful to childhood development
I've certainly not figured it out, but I think I'm allowed to make criticisms of a study and how it's reported. And further to describe what I think is a reasonable guess at the underlying cause. It's likely my guess is incomplete or even wrong. But I think it's even more likely that screens are a bogeyman.
> 5. The abstract reports the study found significant associations between language scores and the ScreenQ, giving the impression that these are robust, whereas the main text notes that these associations are no longer significant when household income was included as a covariate. Since many readers only read the abstract, this is misleading.
I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.
Decades of twin studies, consistently replicated across dozens of large-scale studies, have found that family environment explains effectively 0% of the variance in adult IQ. In contrast, genetic heritability explains well over 50% of the cross-sectional population variance[1].
Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2].
Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children.
When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings.
And as we all know, IQ is a perfect measure of mental capability and the only thing that really matters in the end. Self-confidence, ambition, passion, knowledge - that's just balderdash!
Twin studies on personality factors[1] find that genetic heritability explains 40-50% of the cross-sectional variance in adults, while the impact of family environment is non-significant. All of those factors you listed show a nearly identical genetic pre-disposition as IQ itself.
What if they are video chatting with a relative? Is that bad because it is a screen?
If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time."
Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.
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I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice."
Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works.
It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest.
I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet.
So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.
Having spent a bunch of time around new parents, my observation is that most of them are way too hyped up about trivial threats. If a breast-feeding mother drinks a glass of wine once every few days the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs. If the baby plays with many types of toys marked “ages 3+” while the parents are sitting watching, the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby climbs up on a play structure marked “ages 4–7” while the parents are standing watching, the risk of permanent injury is trivial. If a 2-year-old walks around barefoot on the sidewalk, the risks are trivial. Etc.
The same kind of tendencies bring us the anti-vax movement, a rush to sanitize all surfaces in the home, excessive fears about kidnapping, theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk, and so on.
New parents’ (and people’s in our society more generally) risk assessment and concept of hygiene is excessively black–and–white.
But this is not the fault of “modern medicine”.
There are similar issues with the “back to sleep” campaign - the risk of SIDS apparently is indeed Slightly lower for babies sleeping on their back, but it is only very slightly lower, and some babies will not sleep on their back unless they are exhausted which causes other non trivial issues. If you actually look into the “back to sleep” study data, it is much, much weaker than proponents imply it is.
And yet, every nurse in the hospital kept telling us with religious fervor to not even think of letting the baby fall asleep on their stomach. I was so impressed that I was sure the evidence was overwhelming. But after a week with a hardly sleeping newborn (relatively speaking), I decided to look into it myself. You should to, rather than trust the “experts”. (Or a random internet post like mine, for that matter)
Additionally, as the world became safer and sanitized, we became more distanced from injury and it seems more traumatic. Parents are more afraid and focused on the downsides. As well as the fact that we have fewer kids than in the past. The potential consequences are greater.
It's also worth noting that the body and brain are anti-fragile. That is, they become stronger and more robust when challenged. Weaker in the absence of it. The end result of all this sanitization, safetyism and overprotection is a fragile human. One that is less able to cope with the challenges and messiness and nuance of the real world.
That negative feedback loop has led to quite a mess. The Coddling of the American Mind does an excellent deep dive on all this: https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
So yes. The hyper focus on breast feeding is a problem. Baby friendly is often hostile to the mother. The medical community is to blame while in the hospital prioritizing pumping over breathing.
Our son was screaming because he was hungry. The nurse kept saying this was good, that it would encourage breast milk production. It took several tries to convince her that, while it might be good in the long run, we needed some food for this baby.
This was a consistent experience with all nurses we dealt with. Interestingly, breastfeeding specialists tended to be more understanding.
We decided not to even try with our twins, because it took an hour of pumping to produce half an ounce, every doctor we saw still pushed breastfeeding on us.
There's immense peer pressure surrounding it too. People love feeling superior to each other.
The material on screen is very often (from what I can observe just walking around town and seeing kids looking at them) grossly inappropriate for the child’s current level – either too simple and repetitive or too advanced and incomprehensible – but the sounds, colors, and especially movement are so exciting as pure distraction that kids will sit entranced, whether or not they are learning anything. The overstimulation from the screen is addictive enough for the kids that the kids will start to fuss and cry when the screen is removed, and when given the choice the screen will crowd out other toys and activities.
It is probably possible to make a screen a meaningful learning experience for young kids, but few parents (especially the ones who are using the screen to get a break from childcare) have the time to research and personally vet material to figure that out.
If a kid watches 30m of Mr. Rogers every day, they’re going to be fine. But the kids watching 2 hours of YouTube low-budget animated nursery rhymes on loop, or watching endless unboxing videos, or playing a too-easy iPad game, when they could otherwise be playing with and learning about the physical world, are really missing out.
This is not to say that kids shouldn’t regularly spend some time entertaining themselves while the parents do something else. But if they can learn to do so with a wimmelbook or some crayons or some blocks or a cardboard box.... they’re usually going to be learning more than if stuck in front of a TV.
I'm with you completely except for this one. Cigarette smoke feels like it sucks the air out of a nonsmoker's lungs from quite a wide radius. A nonsmoker can smell an outdoor cigarette from a block away, and it doesn't smell good even at that distance. Up close it makes people involuntarily gag. Not recognizing that seems pretty blind.
Yep, this is just as obvious as you want it to be.
And yet there's a massive government advertising campaign taking out billboards with the message "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother and your baby will die". Check out the posters in the BART system sometime.
I find this incredibly disgusting. Nothing can justify this official message. But there it is out there anyway. The government, spending your money to hurt you.
There is just as much unsubstantiated fear generated by medical staff when it comes to kids as everywhere else in the community.
Seems that just having been a child qualifies somebody to comment on how you choose to raise your children.
Too much attention and you are a helicopter parent, not enough and you are neglectful. God forbid you let them play in the park without you being there.
Medicine is not unique in it's "accepted dogma" having a 1/2 life of course, all sciences do. But it's horribly short. From https://hms.harvard.edu/news/medicine-changing-world :
> Today, the half-life of medical knowledge is currently about 18-24 months, and it is projected that in about four years that half-life will be only 73 days.
That's from a mob trying to flog education so it's going to be an exaggeration, but it's still short no matter who measures it. By comparison Engineering knowledge 1/2 life is till measured in decades, although I expect they conveniently leave software engineering out of that.
Overall I agree with him, the doctors are far too eager to hard sell the latest advice in some paper. I guessing that's because selling advice is how they make their money. That behaviour has its downsides.
We are disgusted because the poison in cigarette smoke is extremely harmful to young lungs.
Smokers should have to go into designated areas they should have no right to pollute the air of those around them.
and really, this is the worst for kids
Go back 50 years and the things like nutrition, vaccination, etc had huge benefit in risk reduction.
Now that we’ve tackled those, we go after the next set. Now it’s breast feeding, screen time, etc. we put a similar focus on those but the returns are much smaller and sometimes questionable.
Is breast feeding better? Sure. Is your child going not going to reach their full potential if you use formula? No. Not worth getting stressed over.
That's a valid sentiment. We should be suspicious of experts in non-hard sciences (in hard sciences a proof is a proof). They often get things wrong, they are often paid by industry, and they often follow ideological or other fashions.
But the suspicion should also be cautious, and you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".
>I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure.
What "harm" was that, and who said they are wrong? For one, there are several 100s of millennia of evolution backing beyond breast feeding, and feeding a baby is at the very core of evolutionary processes, so if anything one should began being suspicious of any novel industrial formulas made for profit...
Not sure why screens wouldn't be bad for "young brains". Evolutionary speaking almost everything that's not part of 1000000s of years of evolutionary history and takes such a huge time each day and such huge changes in lifestyle (from eyesight/brain used outdoors to eyesight/attention devoted to a backlit screen for hours each day), will be bad in one way or another -- unless it actively corrects for another bad thing (like how housing corrects for exposure to raw weather elements).
This article was not produced in order to help parents. The "science" behind it was not produced in order to help parents. The article was written to get clicks. The "science" was done to get citations/funding/tenure.
It is entirely appropriate as a parent to tell these "experts" to go and stand in the corner and think deeply about what they've done, and only come out again when they're ready to actually do something useful for society.
I don't think that's a very generous interpretation, and your paraphrasing feels like you decided early on that you could safely dismiss everything that person wrote.
I don't have kids but I was 8 when my sister was 0 so I like to think of myself as having seen how things go.
Kids are very resilient. They'll raise themselves if they have to. Just keep them fed and sheltered and you're fine. The more you leave them to their own devices, the more confident and self-sufficient adults they'll become.
Our great grandparents raised their kids by letting them run around in the fields "helping" while everyone else was working and everyone turned out just fine. You do not have to optimize every little second of their lives.
It's okay for kids to struggle a little in a nurturing environment. You are not their butler.
One thing I learned: Any advice that starts with "just" should be ignored. Smile and nod.
This boy actually missed the dance performance from the native people. Where do you draw your line?
When does it become just normal vs. neglecting your child? And i'm not talking about neglect in a directly hurtful way, i mean it in a way that the potential this kid could have had in the future is between university vs. non university.
Whats <kid> up to? He watches tv. Oh so why does he not play games? Or with others? Or why does he not have any interesests etc.?
"So !@#$ you Parentology." there are people out who smoke in the same room as their kids. People who do not take any precautions and have a dead kid because the shelf collapsed. You think they do the articles? Those are click bait articles.
It’s really quite simple - have we have proven that formula is non-inferior to breast milk over the life time of the child? No. Is there some evidence that it is inferior? Yes. What is the size of the difference? Not clear, but probably depends on the child. Who decides what goes into formula? A for-profit company.
For the health system to encouraging breast feeding seems eminently reasonable under these conditions.
Contrast that with what pregnant women are told from doctors and lactation consultants: that breastfeeding helps with bonding, dental structure, allergies, weight gain in babies, weight loss for mothers, etc. They’re pushed to websites like KellyMom that cherry-pick studies supporting these outcomes, and shamed for choosing alternatives. They’re told that just one bottle in the first month can ruin their chances of breastfeeding successfully.
Many hospitals belong to an initiative that pushes breastfeeding on new mothers to the extent that they have to get a prescription to give formula. You can’t put your baby in a nursery anymore because the baby needs access to the breast round the clock. But heaven forbid the mother fall asleep holding her baby! Babies go home from the hospital to mothers who are exhausted from birth and trying to feed round the clock. Their milk supply hasn’t come in yet and their babies leave the hospital having lost 5-10% of their birth weight. Some of these babies never get enough milk, and they die while their mothers are still told ‘Breast is Best’. Others feel shame, embarrassment, and inadequate for not nursing their children, from professionals and laypeople who have internalized this message.
All this to prevent a couple of colds in a baby. It’s insane.
I am 100% pro tech, showing the kids how to use smartphones constructively, etx. We were controlling what our kids watch to avoid in particular all the modern crap pumper onto YouTube or various American TV channels - and yet our four year old developed serious attention issues.
It's not gone but it's MUCH better since the TV is banned to only be on on Friday evenings. Choose your own path forward but I am happy I managed to help my son be a more balanced person, rather than park him in front of the TV just to have my own 'quiet time'. We read more, the parents themselves drop their phones more often - all in all family life is much happier. I just wish my wife would accept to get fully rid of the thing. Spending time with kids is enjoyable, especially when they are not unbearably begging for TV TV TV or can't focus on a thing longer than 20 seconds.
That said - not sure what you're going on about breastfeeding but the evidence that it's good for kids is pretty overwhelming. You shouldn't feel guilty if it doesn't work out for one reason or the other, but breastfeeding is a positive for the child.
> who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child
But that's your problem, not science's. You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better. If the fact is "breast feeding is better than formulas" and you can't breast feed just get over it...
> they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula
Your response inferred the OP desired scientists to lie - but that's a notion you introduced to the conversation:
> You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better.
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Maybe being exposed to order of magnitudes higher level of culture will make them build an utopia. How could they rule that out?
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https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-f...
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Having said that - people have managed to parent their kids for ever without screens. Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.
It's kind of blindingly obvious to me - even without the evidence of science - that putting a screen in front of your kid falls short in so many ways compared to how it used to be - maybe encouraging them to play, properly, with blocks / Lego, soft toys or books. This is so obviously more likely to enable them to build their spacial awareness or encourage reading than staring mindlessly at YouTube Kids, surely? Not least of all it will give them some understanding of how to interact with the real world around them. Plus - and this is a big one for me - real, quality time with parents actually interacting, properly, with their kids - talking to them, reading to them, playing with them - is lost! You can pretend you're "browsing YouTube together" or whatever but we all know that's b/s - there's no meaningful interaction between you and your kids in doing that.
You want space in the evening to be an adult? Sure - get your kids to bed at 7pm every night so they have a routine and you get to have grown-up time! You don't need a screen to do that shit - you just need to parent with conviction and stick to your guns. It's hard, really hard, but it's never been anything else. Expecting it to be somehow made easy with an iPad is a fools game.
Final thing - we gotta be really careful with the "I don't believe in experts any more" thing. That way ...is Trump.... ;-)
Because our lives are different. It was overwhelmingly common for a parent to stay at home a generation or two ago (yes, it was almost always the mother but there’s no reason that would have to be the case today). But plenty of families, my own included, need both parents to be working in order to get by.
Simply put, we’re paid less than people used to be. Housing is more expensive than it used to be. Transport is more expensive than it used to be. So we have to work harder and our personal lives suffer.
"Linked lists are bad."
"Java is bad."
"Databases are bad."
As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great.
The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me?
And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.
"IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm.
If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."
Kind of thought that this site would attract a slightly more intelligent group of people than that.
Anyway, I just want to point out that the medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo (except surgery (but then there was that study of placebo knee surgery...))
And how can you "do science" to parenting without multi-generational "longitudinal" (I think that's the word) studies with control groups?
Can we compare e.g. Amish children with Sentinelese children with tech-saturated children?
(The people of N. Sentinel Island are likely the closest thing we have to a control group for human society.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
> The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are one of the world's last uncontacted peoples.
> ...the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on the island.
"medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo"
What? Is there anything at all from your side which resembles an argument here?
What beef do you have with 'medical system' that you think that it is as good as just guessing everything?
If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.
> If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental.
So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.
I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs.
My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one.
Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix.
The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children.
Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.
Here's one meta study:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
"This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents."
here's another one:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use...
"Our results indicated a small significant relationship between media use and ADHD-related behaviors."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/295/5564/2468.full
Deferred imitation is a powerful thing. "Brain Rules for Baby" is a great resource for new parents that covers this topic pretty comprehensively.
In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close.
The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc.
Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.
There are so many studies that are wortless because they don't controll for the environment.
Besides there is quite a bit of evidence that games and especially competitive games are good for the brain.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...
Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights
But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.
But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert?
Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)
You could replace these studies with: "Not using the brain is bad for the brain."
The screen itself is basically a red herring. What's on the screen matters. There's a big difference between interacting with a puzzle or strategy game and passively consuming a video, for example.
screen = tv with tons of ads, basic entertainment, simple mobile games with tons of ads etc.
I'm not aware of any studies indicating learning something from a webpage is any less effective than learning it from a book. I'd be interested to see studies targeting that. Even more so if it had breakdowns by age
I can’t agree with this.
Stimulating lights and sounds which distract attention and make it more difficult to focus on a problem or task are actively getting in the way of learning.
I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.
Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2].
Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children.
When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160800... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494....
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If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time."
Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.
1. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification
Related blog posts:
http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification
http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time