Of course, plenty of people from my generation spent their childhoods in front of the TV, but perhaps that was more easily regulated. (My parents, at least, wouldn't let me watch TV endlessly.)

(Of course, a video game is vastly more engaging and interactive than a random YouTube video.)

soon they'll take away the keyboards and other ways/inputs to mess with the "insides" of a computer ... and all you'll have is a touch screen to choose this or that.. while consuming...actually thats happening already with iPad etc..

...is that so bad? She has an incredible world of content at her fingertips; what's the virtue in refraining from involving herself in it?

For example, this is the kind of thing that the particular kid I know watches: https://youtu.be/5O66ssNpg_A

22 million views. So basically nothing is gained from watching these sorts of videos. But what's lost? Maybe the opportunity to connect with family members?

Watching stupid Call of Duty videos as a teenager is what allowed me to learn English (I am not a native English speaker) and I now owe my entire career to that.

On the other hand, proper “educational” stuff has yet to make me a penny.

Just because it doesn’t look “educational” (or should I say boring) to you doesn’t mean the kid isn’t learning stuff by watching (or listening to) the video. Chances are, those people are doing real-life stuff that is never taught in school and they would otherwise try to figure it out by themselves via trial and error.

My comment about English was just an example, when completely stupid (by my own admission) videos still somehow still managed to contribute to my life and career.

My own kids watch similar stuff quite a bit, and while I don’t enjoy watching it with them, they enjoy it and talk about it with their friends. They even make their own (private) videos for fun.

Ask any kid age six to twelve or so these days what they want to be, and most will reply “I want to be a YouTuber!”

https://www.melbournechildpsychology.com.au/blog/the-benefit...

I think there's plenty of "cultural evidence" for this too: the subreddit for wacky revelations is called /r/showerthoughts, and the shower is the last place where we have no screens or books around us.

Sitting on the couch staring at a wall won’t have the same effect, but doing housework will.

I'm mostly concerned about the specific category of content that tries to be as addictive as possible to young minds. Yes, people in the 80's tried to make content as addictive as possible, but people today are so much more skilled at it.

I mean, when I was 12 we built a little fort in the woods. My parents didn't mind letting us disappear with hammer, nails, saw and sandwiches for the weekend, as long as they knew we weren't going alone.

Now there's places where the parent can get in trouble just for letting their kid walk to school. So the kids end up building their fort in minecraft instead of the woods, but I don't think the kids can take 100% of the blame for it.

We are faced with technology that is designed to be as addictive as possible, and unleashing it on the developing brains of our children without limits. Personally I think it's absolutely terrifying the effects that we'll be seeing down the road from this.

For the early part of our kid's lives there was only an hour or two of kids TV a day - between end of school and around 5:30pm in time for the evening news. Limiting consumption was far easier.

Course there'd still be opportunity to watch soaps etc with parents

I have never once heard anyone criticise radio consumption that I can remember. Walkmans in the 80s, yes; games, yes; TV, definitely as mentioned. All of those have cropped up in the news more than a few times while they were topical.

Maybe UK radio got a different reaction to the US?

You're far too young to remember. There were two distinct moral panics about radio; the first in the 1930s when radio first became popular in the home, and the second in the early 1960s when transistorisation allowed teenagers to have radios of their own.

Until 1967, the BBC did not have a pop music station. Until 1973, commercial radio was illegal. The pirates who filled the demand for pop radio in the interim were hugely controversial. A great many column inches were spent fretting over the corrupting influence of foreign broadcasters, beaming salacious rock and roll music into the bedrooms of British children.

Of course I also remember the huge moral panic over us all going to hell for playing rock records backwards for satanistic messages. We all tried, and failed, to find one of course after hearing of this. :)

I'm rather surprised about the 1930s - early British radio was so worthy and busy and educating the populace. I'm surprised there was much scope left for panic.

IF you're talking only about children-specific stuff, then maybe so. But otherwise I totally disagree. There is SO much amazing content on Youtube (especially educational content); where nothing on TV can come close to match it. Pick a subject you want to learn, and there are hours and hours of content, a not insignificant amount from top tier universities, covering same.

I agree about YouTube for adults and older children; there is an amazing amount of top quality content there for people who are capable of searching for it :-)

They live in the same metro area but being an hour and half away in traffic they might as well be in different parts of the country.

Keeping in touch with people is great, but I think there is value in children learning the lesson that the people you hang out with today might not be your forever friends. To lesson most people don’t learn to well after high school would’ve been beneficial to know earlier.

Just posing the question. I don’t know your kid. Nor our specific kids but I was talking about my post. Of course her benefits and features, at the cost of possibly losing the ability to deal with people in the real world. Maybe.

What benefit do you get from seeing people in person? When I see my friends in person we talk, play cards, and play video games. We may go out and eat/drink but everything else we can do online. I don’t need to physically see other men to keep a friendship with them.

I did specifically call out my male friends. I purposefully distanced myself from my (platanic) female friends after getting married except for the ones where I was friends with the couple because having friends of the opposite sex as a married man just brings in too many complications.

Yea, IDK, social ques maybe? Are you really arguing that there is no difference talking to friends in person vs on the internet or phone?

The short version is, your digital friends, aren't real people. You can hang up on them, or not answer when you don't feel like. The second you put your controller or phone down, they disappear and wait to be pulled back into your existence. Real people you can't manage like that, so you have to use different methods of interaction.

I don’t have any friends that I don’t want to talk too to the point I would hang up on them. The friends I talk to in person - I can just as easily not hang out with them if I don’t feel like seeing them either.

I have a group of five friends that I use to work with and we’ve all gone our separate ways as far as jobs, we mostly talk on Slack but we do go out of our way to meet for lunch at least once s month. Honestly, at this point in my life, it takes an effort to keep friends because I know I should. I’d much rather spend my limited free time with my wife or working out in my home gym.

I would also be strongly suspicious of childhood nostalgia were I in your shoes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suicide-youth-teens-whats-behin...

(I don't live in the US, but I'm afraid this trend will arrive here soon enough.)