"Data from 19,957 telephone interviews with parents of 2‐ to 5‐year‐olds assessed their children's digital screen use and psychological well‐being in terms of caregiver attachment, resilience, curiosity, and positive affect in the past month."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13007
Still plenty to quibble with in the study though.
Correlation is not causation.
You're taking it given that tech is a cause of that, but it may well be that other trends are driving kids to be indoors and separated from their peers (see various "mother gets arrested for letting child walk half a mile to a park" news stories), with tech merely filling the gap of lost activities.
And just like parents need to exercise some level of control over their childrens' diets, they should exercise control over their technology use.
At least in a UK context, "mother arrested for letting child walk to park" stories aren't realistic, but kids here still spend an awful lot of time using technology.
Kids today who spend at least 20x the time with iDevices still end up socially successful. You base the argument on the actual use of devices being comparable to sugar consumption. Are you saying there is evidence supporting that? I thought the lack of that very evidence was the basis of the discussion.
The father had completely disappeared from view before he realized his son was still on the other side of the store. Upon returning he complained to him, "I've been doing all sorts of silly tricks for you, and you aren't even there!" but didn't seem to make the connection with the phone, or take it away.
My best guess is that giving devices to toddlers is so popular for the same reason putting them in front of a TV is popular. It's the same sedative, in a more convenient form factor.
Is the idea that only the kids being studied will be subject to this deficiency? I'm pretty sure it would be widespread, and that society itself would adapt.
I'm not arguing with "tendentious," though. These studies are invariably BS.
Books would cause the same withdrawal from actual people and the physical world, yet I haven't seen anybody warn of too much reading in quite a while.
No. "Also", but not "the same". And certainly not in the same way.
rimliu made a similar point earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19074971
In my opinion the analogy is basically valid, but it's not clear that they are comparable.
I think that's a problem of all those studies actually. After all, reading books is a subset of things you could do on a tablet device.
No question there are harmful apps and movies, optimized to increase addiction. Few people you should simply hand kids these devices and never check what they are doing.
And presumably, harmful books also do exist. It probably makes a difference what kind of books you read.
But the fact is, we already have a generation of young adults more accustomed to conducting our lives via technology than face-to-face in the physical world. I greatly prefer conducting my business through user interface and electronic communication over use of the phone. Incidentally, my parents' generation preferred the phone to face-to-face interaction.
I don't think we really need to worry about real-world interaction skills being lost. Kids still go to physical school where they have face-to-face interaction. Maybe that will one day not overwhelmingly be the case, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
But first off, most people didn't do that sort of reading (if ever) until they were a couple of years into school, because of the reading skill threshold, and second, the books tend to hook you only to the extent that they offer a compelling story, and generally run out pretty soon, with some reservations about re-readability.
Contrast that with things like the parents at a New Year's party I attended recently, giving their two-year-old daughter a touchscreen phone to keep her pacified, and she sits mesmerized poking stupid bright colors and sparkles, not making eye contact, ignoring grown-ups when they did talk to her, except when pressed about being offered ice-cream, which she declined.
Ponder that. Poking brightly colored sparklies is higher priority to that kid than even taking a break a few minutes for ice cream.
I think you did pay with other opportunities for your reading, but I suspect it also gave you a lot that you would be willing to pay that for over again if you were asked to consciously make the choice. There are real trade-offs involved.
But anecdotally from what I see, the books were introduced at a less sensitive stage, hooked into better motivational systems in more benign way, and gave more back for the time spent. Time on the sparkly poking slabs can also be paid with time that would normally be used to tune the fundamentals of how it works to be a functioning human being, and for a great many uses it's not clear to me that it gives all that much back at all beyond cheap thrills in the moment, whether it's some slot-machine-like like matching game, restyling your selfie with a cartoon dog nose, fall-on-your-ass-videos or Facebook.
The quantitative differences are so big that they qualitative differences, and some caution is in order.
maybe the physical world is overrated
Who actually worries about children's "well-being" (in the short term) being impaired by too much iDevices?
I'm concerned about interference with learning and development needed to interact with actual people and the physical world. The kids themselves may not be particularly unhappy about losing those skills as long as mummy and daddy earn the money, serve the meals and drive them to daycare, but long term it's a major blow to their lives as independent individuals and the vitality of society, if the risk proves to realize itself to actual problems.
Weird stance to effectively advocate unfettered full-scale testing at high stakes just because the "has never been conclusive evidence that screens are a direct cause of harm".