The key issue often is the parents' role and guidance. Let your kid aimlessly click through YouTube? Or are you fostering their skills and challenge and motivate them to learn something new?

It might sound a bit fascist, but factors that is commonly questioned and scorned nowadays such as screen time, sugar intake, lack of outdoors activity and not wearing bike helmets are more common among families with generally lower status. The more upper middle class a family gets, the more important it seems to be to avoid doing harm to our children. Maybe mostly to save face among our peers?

My point is that kids with more screen time may overlap with not being read to as much, not given as much attention to tell their family about their thoughts, not challenged to exercise their ability to focus, and so on. In a very general sense.

There are mornings when you just want a quiet breakfast while you’re on vacation without an embarrassing meltdown happening and, for better or worse, the most effective way to accomplish that is by giving your kid a movie or show to watch on the iPad for 30 minutes while you eat.

It's lazy to judge parents just because you see a 30 minute slice of their day

We have almost completely eliminated devices with this tactic because by the time they are done with those two the meal is almost over. And if it isn’t then we also sometimes tell them that they must just wait or engage in conversation with us.

We are lucky that they like painting and playing with playdoh, though.

The game system was a notepad and pen. The game selection included Hangman, Tic-Tac-Toe, and dots-and-boxes.

But also, as a parent, I am kind of inclined to hear and accept that my kid being noisy or something is sewhat disrupting other tables. In all honesty, sometimes it disrupts me.

I am significantly less inclined to accomodate randoms whose issue is completely made up problem with phone or tablet during hotel breakfast. I do not care at all. I use tablet to make hotel meal pleasant as opposed to disciplinary issue, for me and for people around other tables. These people don't have problem or pain, they are making up problems in their heads.

It is just that part that makes this complain particularly dumb. Of course public situation is when you are much more likely to use phone. And of course in grand scheme of things it does not matter at all. It is one of millions situations you solve in one way or the other, nit exactly queen visit.

I do not recommend this option.

This is really just nitpicking parental decisions that basically don't matter.

That these things have an effect shows the study above. In addition, you have to evaluate the magnitude of an effect. For example, not every high IQ person who wants to have a well-paid job has one even though a high IQ is known to have a positive impact on reaching that goal. Similarly, not every toddler who uses touchscreens regularly will show increased anti-social behavior, even though that might be a related effect.

First, it is extremely unlikely that sight of touch screen does any harm at all for development of children. The possible small effects are quite unlikely to show up unless the kid is using them a lot, to the exclusion of other activities.

Second, you placed emphasis on during as if hotel meal were the special one place where parent would exclude screen even if the kid is overusing it everywhere else. I hope you are aware, hotel/restaurant is the place where movie is more likely to be used then normal. Restaurant time is not special sacred non-screen time, it is the screen time.

You also wrote:

> I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.

I can hardly imagine harm. I can hardly imagine kids to gain on it. In all likelihood, taking in all minuscule effects touch screens have on kids, watching movie during hotel breakfast is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

That's not what the study is about. The study was about a particular effect, and they published their conclusions. The need for such a study can be debated but there is a difference between "common sense" and a proper peer-reviewed study. And to be published by what looks like a serious journal, I guess it wasn't so obvious to experts.

I am fed up with articles that proves a controversial point and then the reporter has to add a "but...". Maybe useful on prime time TV, so that people who are unfamiliar with scientific work don't get the wrong idea, but this is a university, and people reading this are supposed to be familiar with the scientific process.

Maybe some other group will later use the results of all these study and say something like "even though kids with more screen time are better at video games[citation], there is no significant improvement in related activities, we also noticed a decrease in...". But that's another study.

"What we need to know next is whether this attention difference is advantageous or detrimental to their everyday life."

A lot of the comments on HN imply that the researches found a negative effect, when they did not conclude that.

I agree that this study doesn't measure anything useful, but in my circles, I have heard of and seen children younger than 2 years old learn to read by playing touchscreen games and children younger than 3 learn the names of states, capitals, and other trivia from playing touchscreen games. Achieving that is possible without touchscreens, but it would require an incredible amount of work from the caretaker.

I think their method does count as a natural experiment and as such does have empirical evidence. From the article:

“Preschoolers from a 2010 study (612 children) were compared to preschoolers from a 2014 study (492 children) because of the digital explosion into everyday life that occurred between the two time periods. Television viewing patterns have remained similar over time, but technological device usage has increased.”

> If it were true that usage of touchscreens cause lower intelligence test scores, we would have seen this show up as a population-wide reduction in scores as touchscreens became widely available.

Exposure in formative years is vastly different than adult exposure. The affected cohort in the study is now only in middle school and population wide effects will have a lagged appearance.

Strictly speaking, the discussed research of toddlers using touchscreens is not an experiment also. In experimental setup researcher must control independant variable (touchscreen use). For this research it would mean to get a group of toddlers, split them randomly into two groups, give touchscreens to one group and some "placebo" to other. Researchers didn't do that, they split toddlers into two groups on the ground of the existing touchscreen use. So what they did is called a "correlational research", not an "experiment".

Correlation doesn't allow to speak about casuality. Maybe children ability to a visual search drive them to use touchscreens. Maybe touchscreens teach them to search. Maybe some other factor (like parenting style, or family income) teach them to love touchscreens and to effectively search for visual stimuli.

To be frank, I do not like this reseach much. It is correlational reseach, and there were no attempts to exclude interfering variables: if toddler used touchscreen more, than he/she would be better at tasks on a screen, wouldn't he/she?

* Spatial intelligence is positively correlated with socio-economic status.

* Screen (TV + Digital) time is negatively correlated with socio-economic status.

Concluding from this that spatial intelligence is negatively correlated with screen time is dubious. Similar reasoning is used to promote all kinds of class-correlated fashions, e.g. breast feeding.

Sorry for being silly in my reply, but the reason we have studies confirming simple “obvious” to you correlations is that we can’t just rely on random peoples intuition without proof. Even simple things need to be studied and sometimes our expectations are broken and we discover that no, everything isn’t made up of combinations of earth, water, fire and wind, even though that was what was “obvious” to the smartest elders of all the lands.

For clarity to your point; I think it would be hard to argue that among kids tested playing piano that those who had an interest and practiced more would sound better statistically. Your toddler may not be davinvi, but they should end up with better fine motor control and maybe learn to enjoy expressing themselves in that medium.

The answer is probably the usual: money.

Someone got a "use it or lose it" budget.

I don't put much stock in intelligence assessments. There's no real standards around the exams. My school placed you in cohorts based on IQ, and it was pretty obvious that the scoring system was measuring something other than your innate ability. My dad worked in civil service for many years, where promotions and appointments are governed by exams that were a combination of grammar tests and proxies for IQ exams. I didn't see any evidence that those assessments did anything other than reducing patronage and making it harder for non-native speakers to move up the ladder.

It could very much be that kids that grew on TV have some other thought patterns that caused the reality we live in today. It's extremely confounded on so many things. We cant really know for sure anything about it.

The fact that some knowledge and intelligence is not accessible to science (today) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that we don't have the tools to study it, yet.

I doubt it. We reward some behaviors differently in 2020 vs 1980, and have different inputs from an information perspective. But people are wired the same way. The "racist uncle" stereotype of 2020 was "Archie Bunker" in 1980.

And no, high iq is not particularly useful in other areas, not when I don't have the ability to work hard on anything except what I'm actually interested in. So formal education was painful.