Screens today provide a bottomless pit of content for kids. At a parent, yes I have to limit my kids time or they'd just do it 24/7. People talk about letting their kids figure out how to moderate themselves, but either I'm doing that wrong or (perhaps more likely) that just doesn't work the same for every kid.
Digital equivalents are pushed in every workspace. Scrawling unnecessarily on paper would be frowned on as wasteful in the average office. Sending a paper letter instead of an email is rare.
I'm not arguing that there aren't advantages of physical books, board games, and literal painting, but doing things the "right way" is clearly more expensive, less space efficient, and uses up more time packing up. It all influences parenting decisions.
In my experience in most places libraries are not common. They use lots of space and money, that usually is needed for more important things like building sewers in neighborhoods that have none.
While probably too far to walk for the average American, it's certainly not too far as to be unreachable.
No, at least no for most folks in western world. If you make your life hard on purpose living far away from civilization for whatever reason then yes you created your own challenges, but that's on you and you dragged rest of your family into it.
We have tons of libraries around, what kind of developed society would ignore such an important place? We also have 'ludotheques' which are literally for kids and also have various rental toys. And we live in small village, surrounded by other small villages. Complaining books take space... thats just sad, not commenting on that one.
Lego / Duplo are amazing (we bought 2 full sack of potatoes worth of original used duplos for like 50 or 100 bucks, with massive train setup), kids love it, but if you list as an issue that kids actually have to clean up after themselves, it becomes pretty obvious problem lies elsewhere (rest of your comment says so too). Parenting is hard, moreso these days, but its also massively due to the fact many parents simply don't do good parenting, they can't suffer even a bit for their kids because they are oh-so deep in their comfort zones or feeling important or whatever. Rather few teach discipline which is one of the most important skills for their future life success regardless of their path, and it shows pretty much immediately. But folks without discipline themselves probably can't teach one. More often than not they are glued to screens even in front of their kids. I am literally naming various shitshows and their direct causes we see around us across few countries and societies.
What kind of hobbies and passions do kids have? How did you invest yourself into developing those passions? What kind of role model are you for them? Thats completely parent responsibility, schools will never supplant that and its not their purpose (the fact that good teachers often end up as huge parental figure in their pupil's lives just shows what they have at home, have a friend a teacher on private school for very rich and influential people in Geneva, Switzerland and stories he tells me about 6-7 years old who like him much much more than their own dad with 7 lamborghinis...). And so on.
But if parent's mode is career and money first or general me-first and kids leave my precious free time alone then its always the same sad story at the end.
Libraries in much of the developed world are seeing decline. The problems of American libraries are often reported on HN. As an OpenStreetMap editor working across small-town Europe, the library is one of those pieces of community infrastructure I go look for first, but I have seen firsthand how they have been shut down, or opening hours may have been slashed to e.g. just a couple of hours on two days of the week. In cities library locations get merged when budgets are an issue, and while occasional big new central library projects are approved, they are a different kind of facility than the library of yore.
I'm talking about how small decisions influence parenting in general, including habits of busy or lazy parents, and how it's changed over recent decades. When I was young, consoles were barely a thing, so you played with construction toys and board games - everyone did. You couldn't read on a Kindle or app. There wasn't Procreate and a stylus. My point is that the modern equivalents are often very engaging (Minecraft, as one example), space efficient and affordable. When things are often easier and cheaper, people tend to roll downhill towards them.
Weekends only had good stuff on in the morning on Saturday and then on Sunday night, depending on what age you're thinking of.
On those occasions when we let them watch more than they should I'm sometimes amazed that they even remember to go to the bathroom. Good grief the devices today are addicting.
We've really mastered the art of creating compelling and addictive time sucks, and our kids are paying the price for it. Ok we're all paying a price for it, but kids the worst.
You really could and while its lost somewhere now I had the Pitfall Harry Explorer's Club patch I earned by doing just that.
Yep, Gen X is the last generation to have played with literal rocks and sticks.
> Yeah. 1980s.
As someone who actually group up in the 1980s, I am sad to report that 30 years ago was the 1990s.
> Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre.
Both bookstores and free public libraries with books more interesting to most kids of the time than Jane Eyre were, in fact, things in the 1980s and 1990s. As were gaming consoles, home computers, handheld electronic games,
> Kids back then had fucking nothing.
Nah, kids often had lots of stuff in the home.
But they also had a culture which supported parents allowing children unsupervised in the neighborhood at much early ages then is considered acceptable today, which meant that more of them were allowed to go out beyond the home more often than is the case today.
Model rockets. Water balloons. Oh yeah, if someone replaced their kitchen cabinets, there'd be cabinet doors in the alley to use as... a bike jump.
Soccer or kickball in the alley. Walkie-talkies. Cops & robbers. A swingset to jump off of.
Computers. We all had computers; my clique had Ataris. Also records. Movie theaters. Blockbuster.
The public pool. The beach.
Slot cars. I had a slot-car set, up in our attic.
And none of that stuff was expensive, except the computers.
Growing up in the '80s was great. And today, we have mastery of technology but weren't shackled to it as kids. Growing up today seems like a stressful, distracted, and rather empty affair.
I basically don't want TV anymore, and my kids are limited to 3 hours of screentime per day, which they basically only get on weekends. (They get maybe an hour during the weekday, but that's because their school/daycare/aftercare days are much longer than mine were as a kid). I do set limits for them, but both of them (preschool-age) are able to turn off the tablets on their own if faced with the choice of doing it themselves or having mommy & daddy do it.
Not "endlessly." 30 years ago, in the suburbia being decried, I had a bike and friends my age in the neighborhood. You called to see if they wanted to go do something, or went down the street and knocked on the door. And this was in a time (1990s) when the country's violent crime rate was about double what it is today, but there was no social media and 24-hour news doomscrolling making parents paranoid.
The older I get, the more I value ignorance about certain things like what’s happening in the wider world (beyond maybe 15 mins of headlines a day). The overload of minutia about people’s lives and irrational fears is such a waste of time and bad for health.
And someone else's news is not necessarily my news. Horrible crimes happening on the other side of the country don't make it any more likely that there's going to be a horrible crime in my backyard. That's a local news story, but drives clicks and outrage, so now it's national/world news.
It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.
This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.
Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.
Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.
They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.
Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions.
I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000
Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive.
That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education.
This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex.
The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything.
But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life.
Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost.
Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible.
That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime.
I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way.
I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.
Technology has made our lives faster, but not better.
Plus, there needed to be something interesting on schedule which was completely outside of my control.
It took some patience and some trust in own abilities w.r.t. a long-term goal.
Because he’s not interested (and a little jealous I bet), he mentions they could 3d print castles easier (neither own one so I’m not sure it’s a valid argument).
Kids are curious and stimulation-receptive and motivated, and so they're going to chase easy sources of those things.
Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with other sources that might enrich them in novel ways (like going outside or being bored), accepting that their kids may not buy into the idea, or they can defer to their child's sense and avoid tantrums and defiance.
It seems like kids turn into adults either way, but the choice is ultimately one being made by the parent, not by the availability of screens per se. The easy stimulation is omnipresent. That ship sailed about 100 years ago. As a parent caring for kids (and a person caring for yourself!) you ultimately have to figure out what you want to do about it.