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."