Whether you like it or not, technology is part of growing up in the 21st century. It's not just an "outlet" or a place to waste time on YouTube, it's interwoven into everything in their lives. Their ability to gather information depends on it. Their social lives depend on it. Just as yours does. If you restrict access, you're pretending like a very crucial part of living today doesn't exist -- or isn't as important as it actually is.

At the end of the day, I'd imagine your goal is for your child to have a happy and healthy life. As part of that, you probably want them to have a healthy relationship with technology. Restricting access instead of helping them build that healthy relationship just leads to them wanting to do things like go to the houses of friends to watch YouTube. I know this because I lived it and that's exactly what I did.

Restricting "screen time" is the simplest way to reduce access to the harmful things in that list, at the cost of also filtering the nice stuff. A more sophisticated approach is probably to control which apps kids have access to and for how long, but that's a lot harder to pull off effectively.

I'll use myself as an example:

I grew up with parents who restricted my time spent on video games and internet use (I just spent more time playing video games at friends' houses). They did however allow me to have computers in my room that weren't connected to the internet.

I spent a lot of my early teens tinkering with my computers and learning to code. When I was around 15, I finally saved up enough money from my summer jobs to buy an iMac (and a wifi router that I convinced my parents to let me replace theirs with). I then had unlimited internet access and continued to learn IT and programming.

A few months after graduating high school, I moved cities and applied for a dev internship at a local ad agency. I had started at a community college but dropped out to accept a full-time position. Now four years later, I've held 2 lead positions at two companies and am earning a senior-level salary.

Without a doubt, I wouldn't have had that level of opportunity if I wasn't allowed to have computers growing up. I think parents are doing their kids a potential disservice by placing all forms of 'screen time' in the same category. Restricting (leisure) internet use and video games is very understandable, but I think there is real value in allowing kids 'screen time' if they have any level of interest in technology.

Edit: Unwittingly.

I think restricting screen time is part of building the healthy relationship. We're not an all digital society, so kids still need to interact with the outside world - this includes people.

Think about how vile people can be on the Internet when the person they're shouting at is a faceless username. Breaking this immersion to have your kid run up the street to watch YouTube videos with a friend is a bit different than doing it alone. You can explain that your child's friend is also online behind and anonymous username, so if they intend to say something mean to someone, you can say that the child may be hurting their own friend's feelings without even knowing it.

Restricting access doesn't have to be a "back in my day!" spiel. Sometimes it's exploring other avenues of entertainment. Sometimes it's partial restriction like reading for 30 minutes. Sometimes it's just making sure that the child still has a foot grounded in reality. I'm a huge advocate for a connected world, but even as a developer, I still have to talk to my colleagues to my left and to my right.

This isn't just about screen time imho, it's about ensuring balance when kids don't yet know what's best for them. A "healthy relationship" doesn't mean "free to do as much of it as they want to the detriment of other aspects of being a healthy human being."

Anecdote: My best friend growing up was super into soccer. So much so that other parts of his life were suffering and he had little life outside of it. So his parents set a weekly limit on the number of hours he could practice and play. He hated it at the time. But during his down time he found programming and now he's a programmer and soccer isn't nearly that important to him anymore.

I think that's the center of the problem. In the current times online media and mobile apps are designed to maximize the participant's screen time by being as addictive as possible.

Even grown-ups face problems self-regulating with regards to an "adversary" that invests huge resources in getting our eye-balls (and data and ad views).

Restricting screen-time becomes more and more difficult the more kids grow up, I do not think that this is a very scalable solution.

I think it's more important that kids are made aware and learn how to deal with this "adversary". Make them aware how the TV (or smartphone) "catches" them when they actually had planned to do other things. Make it a game to find out, together with your kid, how a device can have this kind of control over a person. Kids are curious, they will want to know about mechanisms and incentitives of the system and I think this can be explained even with the vocabulary of a 6 year-old.

Humans are very adaptable, maybe kids growing up in our current environment will just acquire skills that the older generation does not have and has difficulties to imagine.

- For parents it is hard to implement N hours/day on long term basis ( parents may be able to do for a week or month)

- The parental control tools are too narrow in scope, good ones cost $10/month

- on top of all this, you do not know what they are doing in those N hours/day , using 50% time for FB/Snap etc..

- It is ironic in this day and age of ML/Deeplearning software and open source github thousands of projects, we do not have a open source Parental control that really works.

- The solution is to build an Open source Parental control on Iphone/Android/Mac/PC in an integrated way to enforce N hours/week screen time and smart enough to account all non-school work related screen time across devices.

- To have a small regulation( to force device manufacturers ) stating above mentioned kind of "high quality" open source Integrated Parental control software pre-installed on all devices .

> Most kids don't know how to self-regulate screen time. Saying "no screen time" for an arbitrarily large amount of time seems anathema to growing up today, but saying "no more than N hours a day" (where N depends on age and kid and what the kid does for the time) seems quite reasonable.

Our current rule is that you can have an hour of screen time for every hour of reading, music practice, etc, and after certain chores are done. Plus the screen time has to be at an appropriate time - for instance first thing in the morning and last thing at night are no-gos. They're currently on a ban until the end of the week because they went significantly over, but that's only happened twice in the year we've been doing this.

I'm thinking through what our approach to phones will be... at this stage I'm going with them getting phones for the start of high school and pondering what guidelines we'll use.

I think your thinking is right, but I'd instead focus on goals and rewards that are tied to discrete actions in the activity rather than just time. E.g. master the piece => one WoW raid or something. That worked marvelously on me as a kid and is actually something I still do for myself (although not with WoW thankfully).

I'm not a parent, so I'm sure this is quite hard to do in practice. But I'm sure your kids themselves may have good ideas! (I loved making my own rewards as a kid lol.) Food for thought.

But I may add some tech to see if the rules are being followed. I think that problem may be more tractable tech-wise. And (at least if I were the kid) it would be a lot less insufferable since it would give the kid the freedom to "break" the rule when he/she legitimately wanted/needed to and enables a conversation rather than serving as a dictator of policy.

I'm not a parent so I can't really comment on how easy it is, but I think if you're automating it you may be losing out on a key parenting moment and that's enforcement and inviting conversation about the rule and why it matters.

(Personally I remember many of the occasions where I broke a rule and then got "the talk" about why the rule was important - quite valuable in retrospect. If there had just been a software-enforcer I likely would have rebelled and/or tried to find a workaround.)

You don't need high quality expensive software either. There are sufficient free ones.

In my view there are four main categories, of screentime.

* Research

* Passive entertainment (watching videos, playing "pointless" games)

* Active entertainment (playing "real" games where you need to make decisions and other skills)

* Socializing (Messengers, Facebook, ...)

Point 2 is probably the most toxic for people. Since you waste lots of time, lose other hobbies and probably get deeply influenced by the things you watch.

Point 3 might be the next on the list, since you might get stressed from constantly socializing... All that matters is raising your "social" status, and you start neglecting other things in your life.

I am a parent now and I get restricting screen time for the sake of planning/scheduling, but not out of some utopian ideal. That never existed. Not when we were young and not when anyone else was, either. They just restricted reading the newspaper and books back then.

A healthy relationship with technology is not that of a consumer in my view, but that exact relation is most profitable to technology producers in this age. Tablets, chromecasts, smartphones and gaming consoles are consumption devices designed to elicit ever more desire to consume. Being a good consumer is not an important part of life imo and that is a message I want to thoroughly imprint on my kids. While they are to young to self regulate I'm right on top of it.

Personal anecdote: my kids are really getting in to mountain biking. Their screen time is more likely to be looking up tips for how to ride better, and then every once in a while we all sit together and watch MTB fail videos (100x the content of the old 'funniest home videos' shows, and more relevant, and I hope it's making caution sink in). Then they go outside and have been building jumps out of logs and dirt...

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-... - Steve Jobs, Chris Anderson, and Evan WIlliams limit/limited kids' screen time [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/apple-ceo-tim-cook-dont-let-... (Speaking at Harlow College in the U.K., Apple CEO Tim Cook warned against “overuse” of technology, and said he didn’t want young members of his own family to use social media.)

I avoid/restrict almost all screen time for my almost 6 year old. Why? There is unlimited content and you can essentially never get bored, which means you don't need to think about what you want to do.

In my experience kids are the happiest in self-directed play.

Once they've learned self-control/having balance (which not even most adults can handle), then I have no problems introducing technology.

Technology is fine if used as a tool, but for me, has no part in entertainment for my kids (up to a certain age)

I also have a young child who is absolutely absorbed in computers, youtube, etc. I understand how much their collective social lives revolves around it. But even all the time I spend on computers, I still find the experiences vaguely disturbing. The effects on mental health are immediately obvious -- a few hours of "screen time" has very obvious negative implications. There is also a quality of addiction to it all. The computer/smartphone is all.

Can you elaborate more specifically?

At the end of the day, the job of the parent is to protect. As a part of that, if i read and believe that technology is rewiring their brains for reason X, Y, Z then that's what i fix. Not if it makes them happy or not; I'm not their friend first.

I disagree. At the end of the day the job of the parent is to prepare. That involves a mix of protection, education, and other things, including refraining from protection, at times.

Be careful of using yourself as the sample of why or why not people should do something.

I was also given hard time limits of video games, hard times on television and my brother and I balanced it with playing basketball outside, biking around the neighborhood, going to a friends house (social interaction), and finding other things to do.

Never felt restrictive, just the rules.

It definitely isn't true that my social life depends on this sort of technology, and I suspect it isn't true for most adults. I suppose you may be using a broader definition of "technology" than me, but my social life would be unaffected if I had a text-enabled phone and a computer sitting at home all day while I'm at work or out doing stuff on the weekends. I don't do that, but not because of my social life.

Having said all that, insofar as it comes to kids, I think your point about the may be a good one! But the fact that this isn't the world many or must adults live in may give you insight on why they don't view this in the same way you do. I think it is hard to come to terms with the fact that your kids live in a different world with different requirements than yours.

I am not saying there isn't value in outdoor activities and climbing, but I find it interesting that we set the level of technology that we had as a kid as the 'baseline' for a normal experience. All those things you said about self-driving flying vehicles could be said about cars in general, but you don't think of that because cars are just 'normal' to you.

Being in a beautiful landscape isn't any more 'natural' than being somewhere boring and bland. Visiting different areas and seeing natural wonders is certainly enjoyable, and can improve your health and well being.

But that would be true even if you lived a primitive hunter gatherer lifestyle; most people aren't going to be living on a mountaintop, or living in a forest.

A big part of what makes visiting the pristine nature such a cathartic experience is that it is different from your day to day life. Novelty is a strong desire in humans. If you lived on an isolated mountaintop, you might feel that same good feeling visiting the city that you get visiting the mountaintop.

I take this as limit rather than ban. Which I think is a good thing. Screen time is addictive, especially for kids. We all know it. Try and pull your 4 year old away from the TV to get them ready and come back with your results.

It is like restricting (but not banning) sugar, and for older kids (depending on your country etc.), caffeine and alcohol.

When you limit screen time to x minutes per day, that should include screen time outside the house.

Anyway, "restricting" is not a synonym of "banning."

My kids get very limited screen time, and are expected to fill their life with art and activity that does not involve, at least not directly, cheap electrons. Expected, because its what we, their parents do by way of example.

And I'm damn proud of my kids now. They're the ones pointing out how their high-school is taken over by mobile-phone-zombies, utterly un-interesting and useless peers.

So, yeah. Its an epidemic. Kids don't need technology. It has been so for thousands of years, and I truly believe in an event horizon where there are limits to how involved in 'the next great thing' kids should be allowed be, and to engage.

I'm all for using computers productively. I'm not cool with 20 kids standing at the train station not talking to each other, not standing on the right side of the yellow line, not paying attention to the train that is about to push them off the platform, just so they can push a few pixels around. This is junkie dystopia, people.

When I was in high school I thought my peers ware un-interesting and useless too. :D

I've been struggling, lately, to figure out a way to be able to tell "different" from "worse."

Shit we did, because we had nothing better to do: * drive around racing off stop lights. If this is reduced these days, that's probably good, since cars are way more powerful. * drive around aimlessly listening to music * toilet paper houses and other random vandalism * go to movies * watch tv * play video games * try to get laid * light random things on fire * screw around with computers (not in a particularly productive "learn to program" way - just learning a ton about soon-to-be-obsolete windows 9x maintenance and customization) * chained three-way phone calls to get a big group conversation going * watching music videos was pretty big

How much of that is really any better than dicking around on Snapchat, iMesssage, GroupMe, or whatever?

Note that I was both unproductive myself and disdainful of other teens. :)

Remember kids, the values I'm teaching you are the only right ones, and people who think otherwise are wrong and need to be avoided. Anyone who doesn't like what you like is uninteresting.

Oh, wait...

Neither is anyone else.

But then again, the objectionable part of that has nothing to do with the use of technology, or even the not talking. If kids were standing at the train station, talking to each other, and even physically interacting, and also not staying on the right side of the yellow line and not paying attention to the train about to push them off the platform -- behavior with kids in similar circumstances without technological toys have shown themselves just as likely to engage in as the scenario you describe -- I think it is equally problematic.

That’s an awfully cynical observation for a kid to make.

To arrive in high school, and nobody wants to talk about anything other than their Candy Crush score, or whether or not "Peer Y" has an "iPhone X", and so on .. this was a bit of a disappointment to my kids, raised as they were to have human interaction be a priority over technology and material possession.

How will they get interested in technology then. I suspect a lot of HH readers got into tech by actually using it first, either websites or games or whatever.

From the outside, people like to say "screen time" as if it's all one thing and all of it's bad. But we've seen studies showing that video games help people develop real-life skills. Talking to people online is just social interaction. Cyber bullying, on the other hand, isn't all that different from the real thing. What I'm getting at is that using a computer or cell phone isn't so different from doing stuff outside with your friends. There's a whole world of things online and not everyone uses it the same way. Lumping it all into some big box of evil and taking it away from your kid is really just the same as locking your kid inside and only giving them the internet.

if they keep giving you shit, you could always try showing them entry level software engineer salaries on glassdoor.

My kids do have access to technology - they have laptops, and a small collection of video games. But they're not allowed to just zone out for hours on end, consuming pixels.

I gave them laptops so they'd learn what real computers are. And, they have! The (10 and 7 year old) kids are coding!

But there is a huge difference between this level of engagement, and that of the decadent-consumer-of-mobile-content that we've produced in the last 5 years. There's a huge difference between the endless hours I spent, typing in programs from magazines on my 8-bit systems in the 80's, and just downloading the latest pixel-blah on the No-friend-o.

Kids should have technology - but they should be given the opportunity to become masters of it, not slaves. That's the decision that has to be made, in my opinion, by the modern parent. Tech has evolved to enslave us - it also can serve. Kids who know how to make technology serve them and not the other way around, are the only hope for the future ..

I don't think that there is. Only a few years ago, I learned by typing in programs from YouTube videos and online forums. This doesn't mean YouTube and forums have eroded our culture; I think they are the new media and serve the same purpose as magazines. My success was because of my access to video games and the internet, not in spite of it, and in a different era it would've been through computer magazines and access to "toys" like the C64.

You probably don't want to take a vacation in Sweden then.

  [...] their high-school is taken over by mobile-phone-zombies, utterly un-interesting and useless peers.
  So, yeah. Its an epidemic. Kids don't need technology

An example: my six year old loves Algodoo (a physics simulator) and builds all kinds of crazy stuff in it. I have no problem with him building and creating things (not all day of course) - It's the passive viewing of content without thought ir interaction that bothers me.

Seems like the initial list of complaints he's responding to are chosen to be the most superficial (and easily argued against) ones.

And things like this:

   "these self-assured statements are being made by Americans who spend an AVERAGE of 5 hours per day watching television,"

In articles like this, I'd prefer to see the author present the strongest possible case for the other side of the debate, and then argue against _that_. It doesn't make me want to examine his counterpoints very deeply if he's manipulating the argument by positioning the other side as foolish or easily disproven.

Yet these arguments are very common. Once you get people to see that the superficial objections are wrong, only then can you start to discuss nuance... how much is beneficial? what kind of screen time? what games are okay and which are only dopamine triggers?

I find just picking different projects and giving broad exposure to a number of different fields a better framework. Even if you are assisting them in a project, the exposure they gain builds confidence that they can carry on in that field if they so choose.

That sounds like a wonderful way to get killed by either the law or your neighbors if you're the wrong social status.