Yes friends, the nation's youth are being imperiled. Again.
Children have become such screen addicts they are abandoning their friends and hobbies, a major report warns today.
Researchers found under-fives spend an hour and 16 minutes a day online. Their screen time rises to four hours and 16 minutes when gaming and television are included.
Youngsters aged 12 to 15 average nearly three hours a day on the web – plus two more hours watching TV. The study said YouTube was 'a near permanent feature' of many young lives, and seven in ten of those aged 12 to 15 took smartphones to bed.
It concluded: 'Children were watching people on YouTube pursuing hobbies that they did not do themselves or had recently given up offline.'
I've lived through five of these moral panics now. When I was a baby in the 1950s, it was comic books that were imperiling the nation's youth. When I was a boy in the '60s and 70's, it was television and pinball. Then in the 1980s it was video games. In the 1990s it was video games and internet addiction. In the 2000s it was social media that was going to kill us all. Now the buzzword is "screentime".
No matter what new thing comes along, there's going to be some bunch of assholes dedicated to telling you that its going to kill your children. Just remember that its all made-up, and you'll be fine.
The Phantom
7 comments:
Few people who talk about "screen time" ever distinguish between the kind of screen time where the brain is passive, like watching TV, vs. the kind where the brain is active, like reading on a Kindle or playing "builder" type games like Minecraft or Factorio. I suspect the latter activities are way better for kids than the former.
Though to be fair, any time the kid is in front of a screen, he/she isn't running around outside — so the people talking about too much screen time may have at least that much of a point. Sitting all day looking at screens will, in general, lead to fatter kids than running around outside all day. But then, the same could be said about books — and I was a thin kid despite reading voraciously, so... *shrug*
Oh yeah, "reading too much is bad for your child" is another great one. FFS.
This is one of those deals where every generation some smartass discovers you can get free money from research funding, and if you're "proving harm" you get more money. You can prove ham sandwiches are harmful with the right study design.
Rinse, repeat for each new fad as it comes along. I'm sure there's a study on fidget spinners somewhere.
I don't know about studies, but this is one lawyer with a fidget spinner page that I found on a cursory DuckDuckGo search.
No doubt there are others. Trial lawyers would sue their own mothers if there was a buck to be made from the case.
You are forgetting the Dungeons & Dragons causes Satanism panic of the late seventies and eighties. I was a child living through those stupid times.
Less than an hour and a half?
SLACKERS!
My son spent about two hours a day online-- doing science videos and learning games, which were usually things like "put these numbers in order" or "choose the right homophone."
My kids spend about three hours a day online, between math, typing, educational games and plain old fun. I'm not counting things like reading Elfquest or other online stories.
They all eat like their dad, and the only one who isn't a twig is still pretty slender for her build, and get at least an hour outside each day unless it's too cold.
Foxfire, don't you realize that your childrens is going to grow up stunted and crazy from all that Screen Time? They are missing out on "Playing Outside!!!" and "Socialization!!!"
If I had a nickel for every time some well-meaning moron said the word "Socialization!!" to me about home schooling, I would have more money than Paul Allen.
"Socialization!!!" means throwing your kid into the institutional monkey cage to fight it out with the other feral yard-apes, while unionized public employees surf Amazon on their PCs and hose down the cage once in a while.
I think it is worth a considerable parental sacrifice to keep them OUT of that environment until they are big enough, strong enough and know enough to -win- those battles without suffering permanent scarring.
So far, in my little Clan here in the Demented Dominion, my radical notions are winning.
*laughs* My kids get more time outside than *I* did at school-- and honestly, I love that my daughter doesn't flinch when people start paying attention to her. One of 'em is shy, but they don't expect to be hurt just because they caught someone's attention.
Definitely worth it.
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