I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs.
My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.
That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one.
Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix.
The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children.
Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.
The vast majority of parents are trying, reading at least a couple times a week.
I also haven’t seen any data to suggest that WHAT is read is all that important. The important things seem to be that the reading happens and roughly aligns with or mildly stretches the child’s language capacity.
Finally, there is no reason to assume a “twisted ulterior motive” to parents doubting the article- the study was small N (47) and doesn’t seem to disentangle high screen time from low reading/other interactions.
That's interesting! I'm mainly going by my mother's recollections of her childhood in 1950's rural Finland, but in her words: "We kids didn't spend time with our parents. It would have been embarrassing!"
My kid's bedtime is 7:30. So not much time to do anything other than eat and get ready for bed.
If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.
> If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental.
So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.