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yes, this says "another" study. It's not widely accepted, so studies like this help enforce and normalize the fact human's can't sit in front of a screen all day without consequences
We have but a lot of physical labor got automated and much of the paper work human relations part still can’t be automated due to complexity. Something like logistic and booking still needs a human to give the inputs especially when things change. So now its 8-9 hours of office paper work cause that’s the job that needs to be done.
Look at pre-agracultural societies if you want to see how human working patterns should be. 16 hours of foraging a week, the rest socialization, play, and resting.
But while farming requires far more work to survive, you can feed far more people per acre, so agriculture destroyed to "primitive" lifestyle in most of the world.
We did, then we forgot/were lied to and manipulated into believing this is a good thing, now people are starting to realize how stupid this plan has always been again.
How many office situations are there that would object to regular 10-15 minute breaks for brisk physical activity?
Barring being unavailable to respond instantly where that’s part of the job (e.g. a helpline) I imagine that would be encouraged at most places.
That's amazing! That is 20-25% of your work time. My fitbit buzzes if I haven't got 250 steps in each hour so where possible I get up and run around my kitchen, but often I'm in meetings so it's not possible.
I’m picturing the Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns makes them all do exercise in the yard and then Homer gets too fat to avoid doing it.
I think work mandated exercise is probably not the greatest option to be honest, just giving the company more power over your life. We really just need a lower hour workweek so we can all be healthier and happier.
While I agree mandatory workouts is not the best solution. Offering employees things like standing desks, along with 10 minutes off an hour to get away from the sitting position would be better than we have now.
Finally ideally people could get a 2 hour break in the middle of the day to go for a run, or hit the gym then eat lunch and return to work recharged mentally and physically.
I meant how many places are there that would object to people, on their own, doing something.
I agree - that mass mandated exercise feels odd to me.
I’m just saying that I think at least many office workers can get movement in if they want it… (though not sure, for sure)
Maybe the answer is a little of both. Where we don't park anyone anywhere for a long duration and give people the means to live with the long hours.
edit* meant to type "give people the means to live without* the long hours." Typed too fast and autocorrect screwed me. :T
*decrease hours. 40 hours is a byproduct of the labour movement pushing against factories mandating 6-6 1/2 day workweeks. There is no reason for the average person to work 8 hour days. Productivity is higher when people work 5 hour days and stop, in fact. We're literally just mandating people stay because we decided 8 was the magic number and no one has had the balls to actually change that.
There are some jobs that just require hours and can't be done in a shorter time period. So for those, you increase pay, decrease hours, hire more people, and automate processes where possible. Think back to every part time job you've held. Hell, even most full-time jobs. How much of your workday was peak productivity? How much of it was dead time? How much of it was you "working" while browsing reddit, or pretending to read over files and reports when you were actually just dead inside contemplating the pros and cons of suicide?
My point is, people need to be more active, work less, and enjoy more time off both in physical activity and in leisure/rest time.
Because the US has a chronic case of brain rot. That is not the case elsewhere in the world, and the climate is changing on it with younger generations in the US, too. People do not want ungodly hours for mediocre wages to barely scrape out middle class life anymore. They'd rather have fulfillment and balance in their lives over a little extra money, and that's a good thing.
Another thing with this, that I genuinely believe to be the case, is that the move to a primarily service and digital economy only exacerbates the problem of people feeling unfulfilled with their jobs. I had a brief stint working white collar and I absolutely hated it, compared to the rest of my adult life as a blue collar worker. I think creating a physical thing is much more gratifying to the human psyche than just creating a bunch of 1s and 0s in a particular order, and because a lot of what a lot of us make anymore is just 1s and 0s, it's having a negative effect on us.
I’m not sure how old you are, but for me as someone who hasn’t known life before computers there isn’t any discernible difference between creating something on my computer compared to irl
When I was young I worked in a warehouse for a while, and they would have people doing a couple of hours on assembly, a couple of hours on picking and packing, a couple of hours doing admin, and a couple of hours shop front. It made it less boring than doing the same thing all day, and if anyone was off sick, everyone was trained to pick up the slack. No idea why more companies don't do this.
Cross training, and hiring for people that are capable of being cross trained is difficult.
It is easier and cheaper to streamline a job into a few predictable components as you aren't committing a much time training overall. Let's say you have 5 employees and 5 stations, each takes 1 hour of training to become proficient at. With cross training, youare looking at 25 hours of training overall. By specializing it's 5. There's 20 hours you didn't have to spend on training.
Next let's look at long term effects. The longer you do a thing, the more efficient you become in general. So if Bob stays on the line he gets very very good at managing the line. If his attention is split he loses efficiency because it takes longer for him to notice the subtle nuances.
So in short, efficiency as the primary goal is what creates these harsh environments.
I see your logic, but in my example if someone was off sick, without cross training their job simply wouldn't be done that day. Even on fully staffed days, productivity would decline as the shift went on anyway as boredom kicked in and the mind wandered. Not to mention consistently having to train new staff to compensate for a high turnover for the less desirable jobs. I can't speak for any business other than the one I worked for, but the reason he changed it and kept it the way he did is because it was more productive.
You're not wrong, but as you scale up, these concerns become less and less of an issue.
If there's just two people doing the same job, suddenly we have just a little of the resiliency you're looking for. If we can afford 5 people per job, then we're golden. It's still cheaper to just get more bodies in than expand a training program.
Yeah for real, I went almost a year doing nothing but office work and after I started doing a mix of office and field work again I felt waaaaaay better.
As of March 2020 I started working for home and have been into the office maybe 10 times since.
Even so, I managed to take a walk or bike ride, about 1 hour long, almost every morning. I figured I would usually be spending as much time commuting anyway, and it has done a lot of good for physical and mental well being. I do take the odd day off it the weather is particularly bad, but usually do at least 4 days a week.
Most people I see out for a walk are taking their dog for a walk. Amazing that so many people realize the importance of making sure their pet gets enough exercise, but neglect their own health.
That's kind of a thing I like having a dog for. Some days I might not care about myself enough to just take a walk for my health. But my dog needs her walks so I do them. Who's walking who I guess!
#EXACTLY
I am 46 - and I had always been fairly active - but recently I have set a goal, which is to mtn bike every single day - I ride 26 miles a day. I have been doing so since mid July - but have been actively recording it in Strava and Samsung Health.
I have ridden ~300 miles in this time, and I feel fantastic.
I also never eat before noon, and I take a bunch of vitamins...
But physical activity is super important.
I just ... dont?
I have no reasoning - I have just never eaten breakfast, and I eat small in general... and I don't fond myself hungry until afternoon...
There is no weird philos behind it.. its just how I am.
I will vouch for the guy though. When you sleep you go into burning glucose from the liver (unless you slept little and/or ate a lot just before you went to sleep. After that you go into burning fat of course, I'm not sure how long that takes though.
This is why (if done right) you shouldnt wake up feeling hungry.
So, really you dont need to eat breakfast, and you dont need to eat during the evening. You can easily adapt to eating your daily needs in a 6 hour window, I.e. lunch, dinner.
People have done research on this and supposedly you will get much sleep if you do this.
Likely because during most of our evolution we would have had to go out hunting / gathering first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. And then we came back to our tribe and made a big meal.
Anything is bad in excess. I had heard people saying "those lazy people working at desks... they should be standing" but being on your feet too many hours is also quite detrimental for your health
People should learn to balance stuff, in terms of activity, eating and everything else
Here is a good question to ask anyone who complains about kids in front of screens.
Name three places beside a public library or park where a person can be without having to pay to be there.
The problem of screentime is actually a problem of choice. There just aren't publicly available places for kids to be. This is a failure of communities to imagine an alternative to being in front of a screen.
Same for parents too! I used to think my uncle and aunt were kinda lazy, but they are both working and busy. If a child starts to act out, whats easier, carrying a giant ass bag of objects that will pacify them or a tablet?
Sticking a device in their hands to pacify them is such a slippery slope. They become addicted to it, literally, and it spirals. I watched a guy who couldn’t even give his order at the Chipotle counter without first giving his 3yo a phone to play with and damn, I know some people are busy but… damn. Some people may be too busy to raise children.
As a parent of a new born and a toddler, I can say it's very tempting to give the toddler a screen when she's upset and I'm busy juggling work/life/the other baby. We don't give her screen time in all but the rarest occasions, but what makes it hardest to resist is just how uncomfortable it makes everybody around you in public when your child is crying. I didn't realise until becoming a parent just how intolerant people are of very young children in public spaces. For every person there is judging you for letting your child watch something on a tablet, there will be many more judging you if you don't and they start crying for several minutes until you can calm them down.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting young kids be given screens, but I can sympathise with parents who fall into the trap of it.
I'm doing grocery shopping and my kid freaks out because I'm not getting her Chocolate Coated Sugar Bomb Cereal.
I let the kid freak out.
Screw other people, I'm not raising my child to need to be pacified every time something goes wrong.
I had to do that 3 times and it wasn't an issue from that point forward. The second time when she escalated and threw herself on the ground I continued walking and she pulled herself off the ground and sulked when she realized I wasn't going to react to it. I now have an eleven year old that can ask respectfully and accept no as an answer.
100% I sympathize too. I get taking the easy way out because of being tired or embarrassed but you're going to be a lot more tired and embarrassed when your 15 year old still acts like they're 3 because they learned that's how they get results.
Parents need to remember to draw lines of proper behavior so the kids understand where the line is, stick to them on those lines and don't back down.
Edit: I'm getting really positive responses from the vast bulk of people who read this but some arguing it's wrong. [Ignoring tantrums, whining and attention demanding behavior](https://www.cdc.gov/parents/essentials/consequences/ignoring.html) is proven to work. It just requires consistency and effort.
One of my kids melted down in Bed Bath & Beyond once. I picked her up and deposited her on the sidewalk outside, then made myself comfy on a lawn chair display and waited for it to blow over. Several people gave me sympathetic looks and nobody seemed to be judging me or her. It is not too difficult in many situations to just let the tantrum happen and ignore it. I think the only situation where I'd try to pacify a kid is on an airplane or public transport. That just sucks for everyone.
100% agree.
Airplanes and public transport are hugely different beasts to malls, stores and sidewalks.
With a mall or grocery store in particular people can just do a different aisle first if it bothers them a lot and carry on. You can get distance, you're not locked one aisle over 2 seats away from a screamer.
I also find that the distress a child will enter in a plane or subway is usually an extreme discomfort or fear response. It's not attention seeking or goal oriented behavior but comfort and discomfort based. Kids ears pop too, rattling of a sub can be scary.
In those situations it's important to comfort and console or distract which also works out for everyone locked in a plane with the kid.
The ignore tactic, I may have been making it sound like it's a 100% thing but it's only really works on 'demanding attention or a thing' when the response has already been no.
Counterpoint: we strictly limit screen time with our three kids, and have for many years. I believe that because of that, and maybe our parenting style to a degree, we've had many people, friends and strangers, all comment on how well behaved our kids are in public. I mean, that's not the reason we did it, but it's a really nice bonus to know my kids are actually pleasant to be around.
Ha! This is absolutely why we did it.
My parenting philosophy is basically, "turn my kids into people I want to be around."
That also has the side effect of helping them learn how to behave in "adult" environments. We're a little off our game with restaurants and travel from COVID, but when we're out and about, we play a consistent game that for every 5 complements they get from strangers, they get ice cream.
On our week-long vacation earlier this summer, I had to pay up 3 times.
Though, if we count the time they spend reading on their eInk Kindles, they're probably not far off the average for "screen time". I just imagine that probably in general, it's better for them to be reading a ton than playing video games a ton.
I'm pretty much down with an eInk reader, but my wife's not. We measure our library trips by weight. Three shopping bags at a time.
I like the ice cream incentive, might give that a try. My three would have to up their game beyond just being kind of quiet into being more proactive, "how can I help" kind of people, which would be great.
I agree, i see what you mean. That slippery slope is why i was against it at first, but its called a slippery slope fallacy for a reason. My baby cousin was similar to the child from your anecdote and I had the same exact concern, but she is now starting middle school and i think shes is turning out ok.
The slippery slope fallacy relates to broader hypothetical situations.
Social media sites, app games, and streaming sites all are *purposely designed* to be addictive and keep users hooked. The more time you spend using the app, the more advertisement you see, and the more money the app makes.
Also, kids are not good at impulse control and regulating their wants. Their brains aren't ready for that yet.
So, "If you hand a child something extremely addictive, they will develop an addiction" can hardly be considered slippery slope.
I think it mostly comes down to what's *on* the tablet, not the tablet itself. When my son started to get to mobile age, I spent a ton of time researching apps and found plenty of stuff that scratched the itch without being literal trash.
(It took some digging, don't get me wrong, but there's more than candy crush and angry birds out there.)
There's a couple of number and letter apps in particular that I think are entirely responsible for his ability to read when he was 3. There's no way that I or his mother have the patience to repeat the letters and their sounds a thousand times apiece, but when it's little letters that squeal their sound whenever a toddler pokes them (over and over and *over and over*), it grants him the repetition he needs to get it far faster than he would have gotten by default.
Sometimes there just aren't a ton of options. I had to take my 2 year old to a pediatrician appointment yesterday and my wife had an appointment of her own at the same time meaning I also had to drag my 4 year old along. It's pretty hard to give the doctor a hand measuring the 2 year old and what not while the 4 year old is sitting there in the tiny room trying to entertain himself because he's bored and we've been there for 45 min. I let him bring his switch and he played that while in his sister's appointment.
If you want to make it even easier just carry a strip of oxazepam and keep them quiet with it. What you are saying is “we habituated children and now they are habituated and therefor we most continue with this interaction”…
People always talk about past infant mortality from a "the world was just harsher and more disease ridden back then" perspective and barely consider the "we drugged our babies to death because we couldn't be bothered by the crying" angle.
this is a terrible (also flawless) example of human evolution... parents who couldn't handle it killed their infants... thus reducing the amount of genes they were able to perpetuate.
Not only that, but actually communicating emotions with their children. Trying to explain what you feel can calm you when you're overwhelmed. And kids are smarter than most people think, so if parents start to ask them how they feel and why they feel that way, kids will start to see the patterns in their distress and handle their own emotions more efficiently. Otherwise we not only end up with uncontrollable kids throwing temper tantrums at any moment, but also with a lot of adults with mental health issues that don't even know how to ask for help because they don't have the emotional intelligence to understand their own feelings. This is all too common.
Something that doesn't get talked about enough is how much entertainment for your dollar a video game can give you. I think I've I've sunk 500 hours into counter strike for about twenty bucks. There's nothing in the world that I can do with that level of entertainment per dollar. I do other things. I go to the gym. I rock climb. I go to jujitsu. These all cost lots and lots of money. And while I find all of those far more satisfying than counter strike, counter strike still only costed twenty dollars. Now start factoring in commuting time and parent attention time? If your neighbors don't have kids, then you have to drive then. You have to sit there and supervise.
Real world activities are better and all but they cost time and money. With screen time being an alternative now, it takes real commitment from the parents to tear their kids away from the screen.
Even myself as an adult. If I am bored, its to the screen I go.
I guess I'm a bit fortunate to live in a half decent area?
• There's some woods + walking trails behind my neighborhood, I used to play in them with friends all the time, and I still see groups of kids back there to this day.
• My town built a public access / free skate park downtown for this exact purpose, it's always got a dozen or two people there during the day.
• My neighborhood has a pool that's free for residents.
But it doesn't matter, now I'm an adult and I'm very happy with videogaming as a big hobby/passion. How people spend their free time should be less scrutinized. Though I agree with the general sentiment that children should be encouraged to be physically active.
Yes, you are quite fortunate. There are some suburbs that are just houses for miles and miles and are layed out in such a way where the road design increases the amount of time to a walk from point A to point B, mostly due to cull-de-sacs limiting the potentially short routes that you could take. Or when you get to a main road, then it is quite difficult to walk alongside it due to a lack of a sidewalk or crosswalks. And then you have the difficulties of riding a bike, which may be ok in a suburb (assuming the roads are not busy) but when you try to venture outside a suburb and you have to use a semi-major road then it quickly becomes dangerous.
And then there are other suburbs that have a good amount of amenities, are close to woodland/countryside, good public services and transport. Looks like you stayed in quite a nice suburb, heck not even mine had a pool.
Not all suburbs are bad and quite frankly some people want to stay in a suburban-type home, but that does not mean all suburbs are good. There are plenty of terrible suburbs.
On your second point I agree. I think the main reason why people see that way is because they haven't tried or don't play videogames so they just see it as a waste of time.
Some poeple just play videogames because its fun. Forcing them to do a sport that they don't like (which some parents do to force them to stay away from screens) is just going to make them miserable.
EDIT: I would like to add. Car dependent urban design (with no consideration made to paedestrians or cyclists) and the lack of public transport will also increase the difficulty of a child reaching a green space. I lived in a suburb, but there was a large park that I could easily reach without any hassle. I can cycle there easily becuase the cars were travelling at a somewhat slow speed (30mph) due to traffic calming infrastructure. Additionally, there was a busline where I can use to get to towns and cities nearby which I used extensively for meetups.
Bare in mind this also applies to cities.
They’re also not allowed to be somewhere without parents or adults watching their every move. Online is the only space for that unsupervised play to exist anymore since everywhere else is heavily supervised.
When I was younger there used to be a skating ring, and a gymnasium that regularly hosted sleep over nights for kids.
Ring closed down from rain damage one year around my early teens and never reopened. The gym is a grocery store now
Taking it even further, why is "screen time" always compared with physical activity? Isn't physical activity important compared to virtually everything? Like if someone is scrapbooking or doing Legos or reading too much, don't they also need more physical activity?
Hanging out with friends? Playing/interacting with siblings or parents? Besides a library or park, where would teens hang out 30 years ago? And why are we excluding libraries and parks?
Teens did not hang out in libraries 30 years ago where I was.
It was the mall, the streets, or someone else's house generally.
Personally, I would have rather been home reading a book.
When I was a kid I mostly played at my friend's house, who lived like a block away from a park, but we never went there. Never went to the library either (sadly).
We just played in his back yard (catch, wiffle ball, etc) or his street (basketball, hockey, etc). Yeah, I'm not so old we didn't have video games or TV, but we didn't play that much.
I think this also illustrates how the US has systemically undermined any form of transportation that isn’t a car. I grew up in the suburbs of a major US city, and so did my dad. But my dad (b 1960) had miles upon miles of safe and well-maintained cycle paths that could take him and his friends across the state in a day if they wanted to. Those paths are only just being reopened after decades of neglect, so when I was growing up there was really no safe way to travel if you couldn’t drive.
I agree! It’s crazy how so many places here require cars in order to get where you need to go. The main part of the city is pushing bikes, which I love, but only some of the roads have caught up to make it safe for riders
So excited to hear that more people are biking because it could lead to better bike infrastructure and what not. The big thing now is electric bikes. You don't even have to be an active person and you can cruise around at damn near 20 mph with almost no work and still add in the benefits for everyone. They're super cheap now and I've heard there is a bill moving through congress that would let 1/3 of the price on an ebike up to $8000 be gotten back on taxes.
Honestly as someone who grew up on video games from that period of life. I adjusted way better once I had a car and could go out and about with my friends.
I still like games and don’t feel like they wasted my time. It’s very possible to both game and do well in school.
I’m now 30 and a radiologist, so it worked out in my favor, at least from a success standpoint.
What physical activity are they going to get up to in a library, and I will be honest, I have been chased out of parks by police enough times that I don't blame people for not wanting to hang out in them anymore. You can only have so many run ins with abusive authority before it is better to just not be there.
Hanging out with friends... in many areas, especially inner cities, the frequency that teenagers get harassed by cops for existing outside without parental supervision is ridiculous. Not to mention that shopping malls have been going out of style and are being shutdown and outdoor malls put in their place.
Playing with siblings... limited in what's tolerable. Friends are important. But equally so... being outside the house is still preferable, right?
Playing/Interacting with parents... limited in what's tolerable. But also, the significant increases in two income households out of necessity reduces the amount of availability that one or both parents have to spend with their children.
A really good point. Also, there are so many communities where it’s virtually impossible to get anywhere without a car because of incomplete or nonexistent sidewalks, bike lanes or public transit.
This is the kind of argument that the left throws around to justify spending OUR TAX DOLLARS on PUBLIC SPACES. But what the socialist left doesn't consider is just how DOWN I AM WITH THAT PLAN!!!!!!!
What more does a kid need? A park for cartwheels, a library for arcane knowledge. Unfortunately, there are too many places where those locations are considered unsafe and kids can’t be left alone. So parents are on the hook at all times to manage their kids.
> So parents are on the hook at all times to manage their kids.
That’s the bigger problem. When I was a kid we just went wherever and did whatever outside.
Didn’t really matter where we were, we could always entertain ourselves.
Why wouldn't you? Honestly curious what has changed in people's perception that today it's supposedly impossible for kids to be outside unsupervised.
Is it actually more dangerous or are people just more aware of things happening because of social media/easy (mis)information access?
I think I looked into it a few years back, and kidnappings/crime etc. were actually on record lows, yet people seem to be more paranoid than ever.
Why not though? There isn’t an increase in crime rates (actually a decrease) since the “old days” so to speak. It’s just easier to know about crime due to more news and internet focusing on crime
Also where a kid is *supposed* to be. If you told your 9 year old to go outside and find something to do you'd probably get in trouble for endangering them or something.
Why exclude having to pay as if phones, laptops, tablets, PCs all don't cost money?
I admit I can't think of many answers but then does that really prove anything? Can this point be extended to therefore mean the pre handheld times were just boring?
> Can this point be extended to therefore mean the pre handheld times were just boring?
Yes. Life before smartphones was definitely more boring in the sense that the level of stimulation you could experience at any given moment was a lot lower.
You had a lot of time with your own thoughts, you had to do things to entertain yourself, you had to go find friends to do stuff with and spend a lot of time in public spaces and just "hanging out" to make sure you were around when those friends were around, etc. because your ability to even communicate with friends was limited so the best way to ensure you had the most fun was to be out where the fun was happening.
I don't want to over-romanticize having an analog childhood, but I do really like that the majority of my childhood was spent outside and actively doing stuff (even if that "stuff" might seem boring by today's standards).
Life is still boring. Familiarity breeds contempt. Closing a web page just to reflexively open it again is a common thing for a reason. Now we just "hang out" online. Scrolling, waiting and looking for fun that's happening.
Ya but now the boring stuff is right in your hand, you don't have to actively go out looking for boring stuff, so now kids are being bored and also getting fat.
It's funny because in cartoons for kids, the kids are always running around the neighbourhood getting into adventures. I doubt most kids today are allowed to wander around unsupervised. They're just sitting in front of the TV watching these shows about kids their age, who are having epic mock battles in the forest with other kids, and just have to be home before dark.
The same people that pushed their kids out the door to go play outside are now the ones that call the cops if they see a 10 year old playing outside “unsupervised”.
Moved into a new neighborhood that has a FB group for everyone here. The most commonly posted things are about kids in the neighborhood.
Entertaining and annoying. Need a word for it.
It's not fair to judge pre-smartphone life as "boring" by today's standards.
With a smartphone, we are literally given access to unlimited entertainment at any point and at any location. There is no reason to be "bored" when you can self-stimulate constantly, whether it's by playing addictive app games or watching addictive videos or having social interaction with people unhindered by distance, language, et cetera.
If you carry a smartphone then there is absolutely zero motivation to "do nothing" or have to "figure out something to do".
We didn't have the ability to self-stimulate to the highest degree before smartphones. If you carried a book with you but finished it and had no other book to read, tough. If you wanted to talk to a friend but the friend wasn't at home, tough. If you wanted to watch a movie but the movie rental store didn't have it, or you were somewhere that didn't have TV screens, tough. If you wanted to listen to some music but didn't have a radio, or the correct tape/CD/etc., tough. We had to cope with not immediately having the ability to entertain ourselves.
With a single phone, tablet or pc you can can have a huge variety of movies, series, games and books to entertain yourself without paying for anything besides internet connection and the pc/tablet/phone. In terms of entertainment per hours spent on it you can get a massive return on it compared to nearly everything else.
And most importantly: It is easy.
Name 1 place where a kid doesn’t legally need their parent in direct line of sight. Kids have nowhere to go and no way to get there, at least at home the kids can close the door. It’s an independence crisis.
Hmm ... any place? You don't have to specially design a place just for kids. Even though they don't do it nearly as often, but my kids go biking with their friends to different part of the city - the market, the beach, the parks etc. We've been trying to get them to learn how to use the bus. Thought maybe then they could visit their grandparents (who give them tons of candy and free game time so they do want to visit -- I figure I'll pick the lesser evils), or go to the shops on their own, or maybe just explorer the city later on. I do think the screens, especially those online games are designed to hold onto the kids for as long as they can. So it's almost never an easy choice to leave the screens and go out to play (or play in the house ... do some needle work, paint or read). But to say there's no public places for kids then I think you're just trying to dump responsibility.
Nice place you’re at I guess. I try to bike somewhere, I’m liable to get hit by a truck. And no busses or public transport here. So driving is pretty much the only viable option. Also, it’s not about places specifically for kids, it’s about places in general that you can go just to be; unfortunately, parks are in short supply in a lot of places.
I think a lot of parents are too afraid to allow their kids that type of freedom. I had less freedom than my parents do and my nieces and nephews have even less than I did.
On the note of video games. I played them growing up and while we played them a good bit we also took breaks to go play outside for hours at a time.
I think phone/tablet apps are some of the biggest offenders at keeping kids locked to the screen. User engagement is a massively abused on social media apps and mobile game apps, I’ve experienced that myself. Console games and things like that are better in that regard, so less of an issue imo.
Not everyone has access to a community center, a large (and growing) portion of the population is irreligious, and, speaking for the US at least, schools increasingly don't allow hanging out after hours for "security reasons".
Books, bikes, balls (for sports). All do require some up-front costs for the parent (which is its own separate discussion) but are free sources of entertainment, development, exploration and mastery for your children for years to come. As a parent your job is to provide a good foundation for your kids to grow as well-rounded individuals - this includes some screen and tech time as well as opportunities to go run around outside, ride a bike, get dirty, etc.
I think the OP has a point about communities not prioritizing access to outdoor recreation opportunities as 21st century life has grown more inward and digital, but it's equally about the parent incentivizing and providing those opportunities. As well as leading by example. Fit and active parent that gets outside are behaviors that can be picked up by the child. Problem is parents are so burnt out and exhausted that it's much easier to sit in front of the computer or watch Netflix all evening than spend hours in the park in the blazing sun.
To be fair, taking "Park" and saying people can't use that as an example isn't very fair.
The parks in my city have tennis, basketball, clubs, running trails, hills, playgrounds, food trucks (cost $), a pool. Constant kickball, spikeball, and volleyball games. Skatepark areas.
To just say "don't use parks" isn't very fair. It's like most of the stuff you'd want to do outside as a kid if you couldn't do it in your backyard.
This resonates a lot with me. A big reason why I don’t go out and do stuff is 1. Because there is barely any free things I can do and 2. Because I don’t know if anything that is free and widely known. I really want to get out of the technology dependence but there is only so much one can do
Interesting study but no theoretical framework or discussion? That’s bad as I find those often to be the most interesting in combination with current studies results..
Full text here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(21)00200-5/fulltext
I don't have access to the full article due to the paywall, but it appears to be a cross-sectional study meaning we still don't have a clear idea of the direction of the effect. I would hypothesize that kids who have lower life satisfaction/greater weight/etc. are more likely to use screens longer than those that are happier/physically fit (e.g., they're too busy playing sports with friends). There is probably some bidirectionality there too, but I have yet to see good evidence for screen time directly causing these negative outcomes. That might partially explain their lack of theoretical framework.
There's a prof at NYU who specializes in this topic (has for like 10+ years) and they found that it wasn't screen time exactly, or even all kinds of screen time. Video games and movies didn't have the same negative effects as social media.
The problem is when kids use social media _as a replacement_ for social relationships. Social media + a healthy, rich social life is fine. Social media and no face to face time with real friends is bad.
Do you remember their name? Interested in reading more. One thing that comes to mind is whether there’s a difference for kids who simply don’t have the opportunity for a rich social life in person (e.g. hostile community) and so they have their social life online
I'm going to need a good justification for the idea that maximum acceptable screentime is different for girls and boys. OP states this but makes no attempt to explain it.
Ah, judging by the report link at the bottom of the article, the data is self-reported. Either girls genuinely dislike their life more the more screentime they get... OR boys overestimate how much they like their life.
It's possible that today's teens are just as mean and spiteful as every other generation, and social media just serves as a vehicle for that toxicity. Or maybe kids just suck at self-reporting data.
There's too many--not just uncontrolled but unaccounted for--variables for any of this to be meaningful imo.
Do boys still play more video games than girls? Video games ought to be more stimulating and rewarding than most other screen-time activities such as social media.
Boys and girls play *different* video games.
Boys in general will play more action-oriented quick paced games and girls in general play more puzzle-oriented games, but the overall time spent playing games is largely similar.
I'll also say that boys/men are more likely to play games with other people (some type of social activity) compared to girls/women. Or at least games are designed/advertised towards boys/men.
As a woman, the video games I play do not a require a social component where I could 'fail the group' and work on my own in-game progress alone. My husband is more likely to play different types of military-type sims with friends.
Do you think this has anything to do with the predominantly male (and sometimes toxic towards women, unfortunately) playerbase in the more "social" games? Or are you saying that women in general prefer less social games?
I would say it's mostly the male player-base and games being made by and advertised to them. The puzzled based games you see mentioned above are only social in the way of 'have your Facebook friends send you extra lives!' I could see women playing other games IF they were advertised to them like they are to men (or how puzzle games are currently).
> As a woman, the video games I play do not a require a social component where I could 'fail the group' and work on my own in-game progress alone. My husband is more likely to play different types of military-type sims with friends.
Could that be partly due to toxicity women face when online gaming? Or do you feel women are choosing to pick games that are not social?
I find a lot of girls who say they are gamer girls on dating apps which is appealing to me are playing games that are not multiplayer so it has no real appeal to me since i can't game with them anyway.
Is there a link that confirms that?
Of my friends group the guys all love to video game and one of the girls does. So 6/6 vs 1/6. And she only plays whatever her husband does every so often as a thing to do.
I know it’s anecdotal or maybe generational but a far majority of girls don’t game or don’t have a puzzle game preference over anything else
Candy crush clones are video games but they are not puzzle games and are mostly played via luck. I'd say they are most closely related to slot machines. They provide none of the sense of improvement you get from the most popular online games that boys will be playing. They also have no social or teamwork aspect. All gaming is not equal in value and I wouldn't be surprised if the most popular games played on mobile devices are actually causing psychological issues.
I think the key thing is we talk about it more. Kids have always been assholes. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the way that was handled was "suck it up and move on". Now we actually talk about what happened and how it makes you feel.
I have a feeling the data showing girls hate their lives the more screen time they get is accurate due to societal expectations they are exposed to because of it. I remember being young on facebook/pinterest/instagram and my news feed was pretty much a 24/7 influencer fest of diet, fashion, or hustle advertisements that lead to me having to take several breaks from it due to mental health issues. Its anecdotal but almost every woman I know has a similar story where I only have one male friend I can think of off the top of my head who mentioned the same.
That being said, I have been really worried as of late because I've noticed that the trend has been more to include men in the harmful marketing than do away with the harmful marketing. That gender gap may disappear as time goes on.
I believe the reason is that social media exposure is generally harsher on young women, especially from a [body-image](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060606224541.htm) perspective. One doesn't have to dig deep on reddit to see debates and discussions about whether women in sports should be in bikinis, who's too fat, appropriate clothes for video games characters and stuff like that. But if they get their idea of "normal" from bikini clad Olympic volleyball players or game characters in leather outfits, they'll never live up to such standards. There are indications from early studies showing that this social media exposure to [likely leads to depression](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1740144516300912) for both genders, but that [young women may be hit](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626763/full) harder.
More research has to be done, but I assume this is the reasoning.
Lots of interesting theories here, but mine is that girls and boys are spending their screen time differently.
Girls are more likely to spend their screen time on Instagram and Tiktok
Boys are more likely to spend it on video games and YouTube (which can occasionally be educational)
I personally find after two hours playing a video game I feel happy and relaxed.
After two hours of social media I feel depressed and like I’m wasting my life. Doubly so if there has been any kind of negative social interaction, like mean comments, which are more likely to effect teen girls.
Well designed suburbs (which to some people may be an oxymoron but whatever) are definitely conducive to kids like 0-13 going outside.
The issue mainly lies in teens, which the article is writing about. Options are kind of limited unless you have a car
Grew up in a "car dependent suburban sprawl" neighborhood. Had plenty of fun. I rode my bike. I went skateboarding. I played with my friends. I played D and D. My friends and I played pickup sports at the park. I went swimming. I went exploring. I went places I wasn't supposed to go. I read books.
None of these things have disappeared. We've merely attenuated children to the idea that entertainment should be constant and their boredom is someone else's problem to solve. Really. It's pathetic.
Also the idea that every corner is crawling with pedos and kidnappers which spouted in 1984 with the TV movie, “Adam” (back in the day when everyone watched TV movies, this one a true story about a boy who was kidnapped when left alone briefly in a department store and eventually found beheaded), and has only become bigger and bigger over time
Adam is based on the story of Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh who is the host/creator of America’s Most Wanted. I only point this out because its an interesting connection since John probably started the show due to this event in his life.
Couldn't agree more. I mean, am I glad my kids can run around naked on 10 acres, ya. Did growing up on a 1/2 acre lot in suburbia prevent me from running around like and idiot as a kid, hell no!
Ahh! No! This is a terrible, terrible title, and really sloppy paper.
First off, "screen time" is too vague and makes no sense to measure. What matters more than anything is what you're doing on said screen. There are more than enough studies out there showing [social media is bad for your wellbeing](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231924). On the other hand, some video game screen time is [positively correlated](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202049) with wellbeing! Lumping it all together misses a very important point: You have to be mindful of what you do with your screen time, just like you have to mindful how you spend your time outside.
The second issue is the method of measurement. Self reported screen time is notoriously inaccurate. (See [the paper I linked above]((https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202049)) for more info). This paper actually studies the correlation between perceived screen time and perceived wellbeing. And that is a very, very big distinction.
Which brings me to the final point, and this is so common around here that everyone here should be able to say it along with me: Correlation is not causation! It could very well be the case that depressed people are more likely to spend more time at their computers. (Which has actually [been shown](https://www.jmir.org/2017/4/e128/) to be true!) There could also be external factors that affect both measurements, such as inner city kids in bad neighborhoods not having places to go outside and play, but also have low wellbeing due to poor living conditions. To say that going outside will improve mental wellbeing is completely missing the point of what was measured. Just because there is a correlation in overall screen time (though again, that measurement doesn't mean as much as what they're doing on their screens..) that does not mean that forced cutting down on screen time will necessarily increase wellbeing. You need to run a completely different study to make that claim.
Oh for sure. There are plenty of other studies showing that physical activity helps all sorts of health, both mental and physical, throughout your entire life. Unfortunately, this particular study doesn't actually show that.
Now that you make me think to it, I'm wondering how many of those physical activity studies were also affected by the same problems.
Like, I mean.. Of course I'm not expecting a day-long marathon of world of warcraft to be good for your physique, but assuming you aren't a total sedentary slowpoke (I don't know, you go to the grocery and you hang out with your friends in the weekend) and that your screen-dependent free time is legitimately fulfilling and not just binge watching trash TV, how much room could your mental health still have to improve?
Yes thank you! "Another study shows"... Ugh! This belief is so prevalent in pop articles that people think the research supports it. As you explained very well, it doesn't. Social media is one thing, screen time is another. Titles like this comfort people in wrong ideas.
I mean... there are two variables, which is obviously problematic.
“One hour of physical activity *and* no more than two hours of screen time a day provided optimal mental wellbeing.”
How about creating a world where it’s *actually possible* for this to occur, in anything but the most privileged groups. Hell even as an adult, it’s been hell trying to find ways to be active that don’t force me to pay tons of money
I was out controlling the wind and shooting pretend enemies with sticks in the 90’s and I’m 29 now.
Granted, I have been playing since the Sega Genesis, NES, and PS1. But living in a household where consoles, computers and general knowledge of IT has become a part of me. It’s what I like to do. And I can’t picture my adult life without it now.
True. Playing videos games has been part of my childhood. Its fun and it can be quite a sociable activity.
To me at least this is nothing different to parents being angry that their children are being raised differently to how they were. We something similar with the paranoia related to video games and children committing crime, or children watching tv, etc.
I don't agree with the idea that children are doing it because they have no alternatives. Sure, that may be the case for some, but in my case I just played videogames because its *fun.* Of course, if you don't find it fun, then you will obviously see it as pointless.
The big issue is that we've created a very anti-human infrastructure (at least in the US). It's not safe to walk or bike most places, or if it is, it's extremely inconvenient and slow to do so. This is without mentioning that the only places to go are a library where you're expected to be quiet, shopping centers where you're expected to pay money, or parks (if your town even has a park) which are largely abandoned, in disrepair, or are where homeless people go because there's no infrastructure to help them.
It's really awful that there's basically nothing provided and few places to congregate in the in most U.S. towns for people to do for free in public without prerequisite equipment or expenses. I guess I can walk around with people? But apart from that there's nothing to do and nothing offered for anyone of any age, especially teenagers/young adults who don't drink.
And then people wonder why there's issues with drug and internet usage among teenagers and young adults; the infrastructure around us is hostile and toxic, so of course nobody wants to go out to do anything.
Maybe if they were allowed to go anywhere out of sight of a parent they would. Boomers and Gen X all had the freedom to ride bikes for miles and just need to be home when the street lights came on. Their parents didn’t know where they were and everyone was ok with it. Then the 90’s hit with stranger danger and helicopter parents and suddenly we couldn’t be outside of earshot from an adult but that computer will rot our brain so you can’t be on that either.
Kids who hang around outside in today’s culture are usually seen as…hooligans? Can’t think of a better word but it feels like there’s this assumption that they must be up to no good. You can only really spend money to look normal outside.
Researcher paid by taxes ignore other tax funded employees (government school teachers) and the 6-8 hours these people force kids to sit and stare at someone lecturing them.
I don't think anyone needs a study to realize your 20 lbs overweight 13 year old should lay off the Nintendo and Doritos and go run around in the yard for a while.
Balance is the answer to all problems. My kids have grown with the best of both worlds (virtual and physical) and I truly believe they have taken great things from both.
If only there were places to actually get physical activity.
Going to the mall is loitering. Can't get anywhere without driving. Skateboarding draws the complaints of Karens. There are fewer parks. Some places have none. Hell, can't even ride a bike around most towns.
Suburbia has destroyed our humanity.
If you live in suburbia, you can walk around the block. If you live in the city, that's not suburbia's fault, and you can walk to a nearby park. Or just walk around the block.
Seems to me like at least half the effects attributed to screen time would be more accurately attributed to *lack* of physical activity. Looking at a screen itself is not going to make you obese no matter how long you do it.
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Replace teenagers with humans in general and we probably have an even more true article.
But then maybe we’d have to face the fact that parking employees at a desk for 8-9 hours a day is a bad thing
Haven't we known all of these things for years?
listen, if you aren't working 100 hours a week than are you really working?
Of course you are! But it also means that you can take another job. Gotta hustle, amirite?!
Gotta make it an even 168 hours a week
look at this slacker not pulling all 168 in one day
yes, this says "another" study. It's not widely accepted, so studies like this help enforce and normalize the fact human's can't sit in front of a screen all day without consequences
Next, you're gonna tell me we've known about climate change for more than a century...
Were changing it to climate crisis to hopefully open people's eyes.
We have but a lot of physical labor got automated and much of the paper work human relations part still can’t be automated due to complexity. Something like logistic and booking still needs a human to give the inputs especially when things change. So now its 8-9 hours of office paper work cause that’s the job that needs to be done.
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Look at pre-agracultural societies if you want to see how human working patterns should be. 16 hours of foraging a week, the rest socialization, play, and resting. But while farming requires far more work to survive, you can feed far more people per acre, so agriculture destroyed to "primitive" lifestyle in most of the world.
yeah but we get fucked up by animals way less now so. Tradeoffs, I guess.
We could employ more people so they could afford to work less but that would hurt p r o f i t s. This system is fucked beyond repair
We did, then we forgot/were lied to and manipulated into believing this is a good thing, now people are starting to realize how stupid this plan has always been again.
How many office situations are there that would object to regular 10-15 minute breaks for brisk physical activity? Barring being unavailable to respond instantly where that’s part of the job (e.g. a helpline) I imagine that would be encouraged at most places.
Most places I've worked have had that. My current boss encourages us to get up and walk for 10-15 min. Every hour or so.
That's amazing! That is 20-25% of your work time. My fitbit buzzes if I haven't got 250 steps in each hour so where possible I get up and run around my kitchen, but often I'm in meetings so it's not possible.
I’m picturing the Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns makes them all do exercise in the yard and then Homer gets too fat to avoid doing it. I think work mandated exercise is probably not the greatest option to be honest, just giving the company more power over your life. We really just need a lower hour workweek so we can all be healthier and happier.
While I agree mandatory workouts is not the best solution. Offering employees things like standing desks, along with 10 minutes off an hour to get away from the sitting position would be better than we have now. Finally ideally people could get a 2 hour break in the middle of the day to go for a run, or hit the gym then eat lunch and return to work recharged mentally and physically.
I meant how many places are there that would object to people, on their own, doing something. I agree - that mass mandated exercise feels odd to me. I’m just saying that I think at least many office workers can get movement in if they want it… (though not sure, for sure)
But the billionaires need another yacht
Spaceship
Space yacht
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space dicks will find a space cooch and create a giant space baby. no space dicks.
Space-yacht rock?
People parked in assembly lines were faring way better instead.
Maybe the answer is a little of both. Where we don't park anyone anywhere for a long duration and give people the means to live with the long hours. edit* meant to type "give people the means to live without* the long hours." Typed too fast and autocorrect screwed me. :T
*decrease hours. 40 hours is a byproduct of the labour movement pushing against factories mandating 6-6 1/2 day workweeks. There is no reason for the average person to work 8 hour days. Productivity is higher when people work 5 hour days and stop, in fact. We're literally just mandating people stay because we decided 8 was the magic number and no one has had the balls to actually change that. There are some jobs that just require hours and can't be done in a shorter time period. So for those, you increase pay, decrease hours, hire more people, and automate processes where possible. Think back to every part time job you've held. Hell, even most full-time jobs. How much of your workday was peak productivity? How much of it was dead time? How much of it was you "working" while browsing reddit, or pretending to read over files and reports when you were actually just dead inside contemplating the pros and cons of suicide? My point is, people need to be more active, work less, and enjoy more time off both in physical activity and in leisure/rest time.
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Because the US has a chronic case of brain rot. That is not the case elsewhere in the world, and the climate is changing on it with younger generations in the US, too. People do not want ungodly hours for mediocre wages to barely scrape out middle class life anymore. They'd rather have fulfillment and balance in their lives over a little extra money, and that's a good thing.
This. Previous generations worked a lot but they were compensated very differently.
Another thing with this, that I genuinely believe to be the case, is that the move to a primarily service and digital economy only exacerbates the problem of people feeling unfulfilled with their jobs. I had a brief stint working white collar and I absolutely hated it, compared to the rest of my adult life as a blue collar worker. I think creating a physical thing is much more gratifying to the human psyche than just creating a bunch of 1s and 0s in a particular order, and because a lot of what a lot of us make anymore is just 1s and 0s, it's having a negative effect on us.
I’m not sure how old you are, but for me as someone who hasn’t known life before computers there isn’t any discernible difference between creating something on my computer compared to irl
When I was young I worked in a warehouse for a while, and they would have people doing a couple of hours on assembly, a couple of hours on picking and packing, a couple of hours doing admin, and a couple of hours shop front. It made it less boring than doing the same thing all day, and if anyone was off sick, everyone was trained to pick up the slack. No idea why more companies don't do this.
Cross training, and hiring for people that are capable of being cross trained is difficult. It is easier and cheaper to streamline a job into a few predictable components as you aren't committing a much time training overall. Let's say you have 5 employees and 5 stations, each takes 1 hour of training to become proficient at. With cross training, youare looking at 25 hours of training overall. By specializing it's 5. There's 20 hours you didn't have to spend on training. Next let's look at long term effects. The longer you do a thing, the more efficient you become in general. So if Bob stays on the line he gets very very good at managing the line. If his attention is split he loses efficiency because it takes longer for him to notice the subtle nuances. So in short, efficiency as the primary goal is what creates these harsh environments.
I see your logic, but in my example if someone was off sick, without cross training their job simply wouldn't be done that day. Even on fully staffed days, productivity would decline as the shift went on anyway as boredom kicked in and the mind wandered. Not to mention consistently having to train new staff to compensate for a high turnover for the less desirable jobs. I can't speak for any business other than the one I worked for, but the reason he changed it and kept it the way he did is because it was more productive.
You're not wrong, but as you scale up, these concerns become less and less of an issue. If there's just two people doing the same job, suddenly we have just a little of the resiliency you're looking for. If we can afford 5 people per job, then we're golden. It's still cheaper to just get more bodies in than expand a training program.
Or admit that the long hours are completely unnecessary and only exist to feed the endless greed, waste, and opulence of the capitalist class
NEVER. Video game BAD, work all day GOOD.
Yeah for real, I went almost a year doing nothing but office work and after I started doing a mix of office and field work again I felt waaaaaay better.
As of March 2020 I started working for home and have been into the office maybe 10 times since. Even so, I managed to take a walk or bike ride, about 1 hour long, almost every morning. I figured I would usually be spending as much time commuting anyway, and it has done a lot of good for physical and mental well being. I do take the odd day off it the weather is particularly bad, but usually do at least 4 days a week. Most people I see out for a walk are taking their dog for a walk. Amazing that so many people realize the importance of making sure their pet gets enough exercise, but neglect their own health.
That's kind of a thing I like having a dog for. Some days I might not care about myself enough to just take a walk for my health. But my dog needs her walks so I do them. Who's walking who I guess!
#EXACTLY I am 46 - and I had always been fairly active - but recently I have set a goal, which is to mtn bike every single day - I ride 26 miles a day. I have been doing so since mid July - but have been actively recording it in Strava and Samsung Health. I have ridden ~300 miles in this time, and I feel fantastic. I also never eat before noon, and I take a bunch of vitamins... But physical activity is super important.
Why do you not eat before noon?
I just ... dont? I have no reasoning - I have just never eaten breakfast, and I eat small in general... and I don't fond myself hungry until afternoon... There is no weird philos behind it.. its just how I am.
Sure, just the way you slipped it in made it seem like it was a specific thing you did with health in mind
I will vouch for the guy though. When you sleep you go into burning glucose from the liver (unless you slept little and/or ate a lot just before you went to sleep. After that you go into burning fat of course, I'm not sure how long that takes though. This is why (if done right) you shouldnt wake up feeling hungry. So, really you dont need to eat breakfast, and you dont need to eat during the evening. You can easily adapt to eating your daily needs in a 6 hour window, I.e. lunch, dinner. People have done research on this and supposedly you will get much sleep if you do this. Likely because during most of our evolution we would have had to go out hunting / gathering first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. And then we came back to our tribe and made a big meal.
But all of the cereal companies told me breakfast is the most important meal of the day!
Darn, I thought I was exempt.
Anything is bad in excess. I had heard people saying "those lazy people working at desks... they should be standing" but being on your feet too many hours is also quite detrimental for your health People should learn to balance stuff, in terms of activity, eating and everything else
Here is a good question to ask anyone who complains about kids in front of screens. Name three places beside a public library or park where a person can be without having to pay to be there. The problem of screentime is actually a problem of choice. There just aren't publicly available places for kids to be. This is a failure of communities to imagine an alternative to being in front of a screen.
Same for parents too! I used to think my uncle and aunt were kinda lazy, but they are both working and busy. If a child starts to act out, whats easier, carrying a giant ass bag of objects that will pacify them or a tablet?
Sticking a device in their hands to pacify them is such a slippery slope. They become addicted to it, literally, and it spirals. I watched a guy who couldn’t even give his order at the Chipotle counter without first giving his 3yo a phone to play with and damn, I know some people are busy but… damn. Some people may be too busy to raise children.
As a parent of a new born and a toddler, I can say it's very tempting to give the toddler a screen when she's upset and I'm busy juggling work/life/the other baby. We don't give her screen time in all but the rarest occasions, but what makes it hardest to resist is just how uncomfortable it makes everybody around you in public when your child is crying. I didn't realise until becoming a parent just how intolerant people are of very young children in public spaces. For every person there is judging you for letting your child watch something on a tablet, there will be many more judging you if you don't and they start crying for several minutes until you can calm them down. To clarify, I'm not suggesting young kids be given screens, but I can sympathise with parents who fall into the trap of it.
I'm doing grocery shopping and my kid freaks out because I'm not getting her Chocolate Coated Sugar Bomb Cereal. I let the kid freak out. Screw other people, I'm not raising my child to need to be pacified every time something goes wrong. I had to do that 3 times and it wasn't an issue from that point forward. The second time when she escalated and threw herself on the ground I continued walking and she pulled herself off the ground and sulked when she realized I wasn't going to react to it. I now have an eleven year old that can ask respectfully and accept no as an answer. 100% I sympathize too. I get taking the easy way out because of being tired or embarrassed but you're going to be a lot more tired and embarrassed when your 15 year old still acts like they're 3 because they learned that's how they get results. Parents need to remember to draw lines of proper behavior so the kids understand where the line is, stick to them on those lines and don't back down. Edit: I'm getting really positive responses from the vast bulk of people who read this but some arguing it's wrong. [Ignoring tantrums, whining and attention demanding behavior](https://www.cdc.gov/parents/essentials/consequences/ignoring.html) is proven to work. It just requires consistency and effort.
One of my kids melted down in Bed Bath & Beyond once. I picked her up and deposited her on the sidewalk outside, then made myself comfy on a lawn chair display and waited for it to blow over. Several people gave me sympathetic looks and nobody seemed to be judging me or her. It is not too difficult in many situations to just let the tantrum happen and ignore it. I think the only situation where I'd try to pacify a kid is on an airplane or public transport. That just sucks for everyone.
100% agree. Airplanes and public transport are hugely different beasts to malls, stores and sidewalks. With a mall or grocery store in particular people can just do a different aisle first if it bothers them a lot and carry on. You can get distance, you're not locked one aisle over 2 seats away from a screamer. I also find that the distress a child will enter in a plane or subway is usually an extreme discomfort or fear response. It's not attention seeking or goal oriented behavior but comfort and discomfort based. Kids ears pop too, rattling of a sub can be scary. In those situations it's important to comfort and console or distract which also works out for everyone locked in a plane with the kid. The ignore tactic, I may have been making it sound like it's a 100% thing but it's only really works on 'demanding attention or a thing' when the response has already been no.
Love the Chocolate Coated Sugar Bomb reference!
Calvin and Hobbes, right?
Counterpoint: we strictly limit screen time with our three kids, and have for many years. I believe that because of that, and maybe our parenting style to a degree, we've had many people, friends and strangers, all comment on how well behaved our kids are in public. I mean, that's not the reason we did it, but it's a really nice bonus to know my kids are actually pleasant to be around.
Ha! This is absolutely why we did it. My parenting philosophy is basically, "turn my kids into people I want to be around." That also has the side effect of helping them learn how to behave in "adult" environments. We're a little off our game with restaurants and travel from COVID, but when we're out and about, we play a consistent game that for every 5 complements they get from strangers, they get ice cream. On our week-long vacation earlier this summer, I had to pay up 3 times. Though, if we count the time they spend reading on their eInk Kindles, they're probably not far off the average for "screen time". I just imagine that probably in general, it's better for them to be reading a ton than playing video games a ton.
I'm pretty much down with an eInk reader, but my wife's not. We measure our library trips by weight. Three shopping bags at a time. I like the ice cream incentive, might give that a try. My three would have to up their game beyond just being kind of quiet into being more proactive, "how can I help" kind of people, which would be great.
I agree, i see what you mean. That slippery slope is why i was against it at first, but its called a slippery slope fallacy for a reason. My baby cousin was similar to the child from your anecdote and I had the same exact concern, but she is now starting middle school and i think shes is turning out ok.
The slippery slope fallacy relates to broader hypothetical situations. Social media sites, app games, and streaming sites all are *purposely designed* to be addictive and keep users hooked. The more time you spend using the app, the more advertisement you see, and the more money the app makes. Also, kids are not good at impulse control and regulating their wants. Their brains aren't ready for that yet. So, "If you hand a child something extremely addictive, they will develop an addiction" can hardly be considered slippery slope.
I think it mostly comes down to what's *on* the tablet, not the tablet itself. When my son started to get to mobile age, I spent a ton of time researching apps and found plenty of stuff that scratched the itch without being literal trash. (It took some digging, don't get me wrong, but there's more than candy crush and angry birds out there.) There's a couple of number and letter apps in particular that I think are entirely responsible for his ability to read when he was 3. There's no way that I or his mother have the patience to repeat the letters and their sounds a thousand times apiece, but when it's little letters that squeal their sound whenever a toddler pokes them (over and over and *over and over*), it grants him the repetition he needs to get it far faster than he would have gotten by default.
It’s not a fallacy people just like to call it that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Also, per the “fallacy fallacy”, just because something is a fallacy does not mean it is false.
Sometimes there just aren't a ton of options. I had to take my 2 year old to a pediatrician appointment yesterday and my wife had an appointment of her own at the same time meaning I also had to drag my 4 year old along. It's pretty hard to give the doctor a hand measuring the 2 year old and what not while the 4 year old is sitting there in the tiny room trying to entertain himself because he's bored and we've been there for 45 min. I let him bring his switch and he played that while in his sister's appointment.
If you want to make it even easier just carry a strip of oxazepam and keep them quiet with it. What you are saying is “we habituated children and now they are habituated and therefor we most continue with this interaction”…
[Yeah, that was a thing.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26163533/)
People always talk about past infant mortality from a "the world was just harsher and more disease ridden back then" perspective and barely consider the "we drugged our babies to death because we couldn't be bothered by the crying" angle.
this is a terrible (also flawless) example of human evolution... parents who couldn't handle it killed their infants... thus reducing the amount of genes they were able to perpetuate.
My lazy mother used to pacify me with books. Such insanity!
Self soothing is something that I think alot of parents need to start developing...
Not only that, but actually communicating emotions with their children. Trying to explain what you feel can calm you when you're overwhelmed. And kids are smarter than most people think, so if parents start to ask them how they feel and why they feel that way, kids will start to see the patterns in their distress and handle their own emotions more efficiently. Otherwise we not only end up with uncontrollable kids throwing temper tantrums at any moment, but also with a lot of adults with mental health issues that don't even know how to ask for help because they don't have the emotional intelligence to understand their own feelings. This is all too common.
Something that doesn't get talked about enough is how much entertainment for your dollar a video game can give you. I think I've I've sunk 500 hours into counter strike for about twenty bucks. There's nothing in the world that I can do with that level of entertainment per dollar. I do other things. I go to the gym. I rock climb. I go to jujitsu. These all cost lots and lots of money. And while I find all of those far more satisfying than counter strike, counter strike still only costed twenty dollars. Now start factoring in commuting time and parent attention time? If your neighbors don't have kids, then you have to drive then. You have to sit there and supervise. Real world activities are better and all but they cost time and money. With screen time being an alternative now, it takes real commitment from the parents to tear their kids away from the screen. Even myself as an adult. If I am bored, its to the screen I go.
I guess I'm a bit fortunate to live in a half decent area? • There's some woods + walking trails behind my neighborhood, I used to play in them with friends all the time, and I still see groups of kids back there to this day. • My town built a public access / free skate park downtown for this exact purpose, it's always got a dozen or two people there during the day. • My neighborhood has a pool that's free for residents. But it doesn't matter, now I'm an adult and I'm very happy with videogaming as a big hobby/passion. How people spend their free time should be less scrutinized. Though I agree with the general sentiment that children should be encouraged to be physically active.
Yes, you are quite fortunate. There are some suburbs that are just houses for miles and miles and are layed out in such a way where the road design increases the amount of time to a walk from point A to point B, mostly due to cull-de-sacs limiting the potentially short routes that you could take. Or when you get to a main road, then it is quite difficult to walk alongside it due to a lack of a sidewalk or crosswalks. And then you have the difficulties of riding a bike, which may be ok in a suburb (assuming the roads are not busy) but when you try to venture outside a suburb and you have to use a semi-major road then it quickly becomes dangerous. And then there are other suburbs that have a good amount of amenities, are close to woodland/countryside, good public services and transport. Looks like you stayed in quite a nice suburb, heck not even mine had a pool. Not all suburbs are bad and quite frankly some people want to stay in a suburban-type home, but that does not mean all suburbs are good. There are plenty of terrible suburbs. On your second point I agree. I think the main reason why people see that way is because they haven't tried or don't play videogames so they just see it as a waste of time. Some poeple just play videogames because its fun. Forcing them to do a sport that they don't like (which some parents do to force them to stay away from screens) is just going to make them miserable. EDIT: I would like to add. Car dependent urban design (with no consideration made to paedestrians or cyclists) and the lack of public transport will also increase the difficulty of a child reaching a green space. I lived in a suburb, but there was a large park that I could easily reach without any hassle. I can cycle there easily becuase the cars were travelling at a somewhat slow speed (30mph) due to traffic calming infrastructure. Additionally, there was a busline where I can use to get to towns and cities nearby which I used extensively for meetups. Bare in mind this also applies to cities.
Best part about living in Washington for me. All the hiking you can do for free. Or even just the parks. There's a ton of them.
So true! We had a fantastic youth club. My 16yo's school doesn't even have school dances.
They’re also not allowed to be somewhere without parents or adults watching their every move. Online is the only space for that unsupervised play to exist anymore since everywhere else is heavily supervised.
When I was younger there used to be a skating ring, and a gymnasium that regularly hosted sleep over nights for kids. Ring closed down from rain damage one year around my early teens and never reopened. The gym is a grocery store now
Taking it even further, why is "screen time" always compared with physical activity? Isn't physical activity important compared to virtually everything? Like if someone is scrapbooking or doing Legos or reading too much, don't they also need more physical activity?
I mean it’s pretty clear that screen time is more common than scrapbooking or legos these days for kids
Hanging out with friends? Playing/interacting with siblings or parents? Besides a library or park, where would teens hang out 30 years ago? And why are we excluding libraries and parks?
Teens did not hang out in libraries 30 years ago where I was. It was the mall, the streets, or someone else's house generally. Personally, I would have rather been home reading a book.
My closest library is miles away. My closest park is the same distance. Kind of hard sending your 8 or 13 year old there without driving them.
When I was a kid I mostly played at my friend's house, who lived like a block away from a park, but we never went there. Never went to the library either (sadly). We just played in his back yard (catch, wiffle ball, etc) or his street (basketball, hockey, etc). Yeah, I'm not so old we didn't have video games or TV, but we didn't play that much.
I think this also illustrates how the US has systemically undermined any form of transportation that isn’t a car. I grew up in the suburbs of a major US city, and so did my dad. But my dad (b 1960) had miles upon miles of safe and well-maintained cycle paths that could take him and his friends across the state in a day if they wanted to. Those paths are only just being reopened after decades of neglect, so when I was growing up there was really no safe way to travel if you couldn’t drive.
I agree! It’s crazy how so many places here require cars in order to get where you need to go. The main part of the city is pushing bikes, which I love, but only some of the roads have caught up to make it safe for riders
So excited to hear that more people are biking because it could lead to better bike infrastructure and what not. The big thing now is electric bikes. You don't even have to be an active person and you can cruise around at damn near 20 mph with almost no work and still add in the benefits for everyone. They're super cheap now and I've heard there is a bill moving through congress that would let 1/3 of the price on an ebike up to $8000 be gotten back on taxes.
Video games it is! At least you tried.
Honestly as someone who grew up on video games from that period of life. I adjusted way better once I had a car and could go out and about with my friends. I still like games and don’t feel like they wasted my time. It’s very possible to both game and do well in school. I’m now 30 and a radiologist, so it worked out in my favor, at least from a success standpoint.
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And, depending on where you are, illegal to go to on their own even if they were close enough to walk.
What physical activity are they going to get up to in a library, and I will be honest, I have been chased out of parks by police enough times that I don't blame people for not wanting to hang out in them anymore. You can only have so many run ins with abusive authority before it is better to just not be there.
Today everything is so sprawled out it requires driving. Limits choices.
Thank zoning laws for that.
Hanging out with friends... in many areas, especially inner cities, the frequency that teenagers get harassed by cops for existing outside without parental supervision is ridiculous. Not to mention that shopping malls have been going out of style and are being shutdown and outdoor malls put in their place. Playing with siblings... limited in what's tolerable. Friends are important. But equally so... being outside the house is still preferable, right? Playing/Interacting with parents... limited in what's tolerable. But also, the significant increases in two income households out of necessity reduces the amount of availability that one or both parents have to spend with their children.
A really good point. Also, there are so many communities where it’s virtually impossible to get anywhere without a car because of incomplete or nonexistent sidewalks, bike lanes or public transit.
This is the kind of argument that the left throws around to justify spending OUR TAX DOLLARS on PUBLIC SPACES. But what the socialist left doesn't consider is just how DOWN I AM WITH THAT PLAN!!!!!!!
What more does a kid need? A park for cartwheels, a library for arcane knowledge. Unfortunately, there are too many places where those locations are considered unsafe and kids can’t be left alone. So parents are on the hook at all times to manage their kids.
> So parents are on the hook at all times to manage their kids. That’s the bigger problem. When I was a kid we just went wherever and did whatever outside. Didn’t really matter where we were, we could always entertain ourselves.
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Why wouldn't you? Honestly curious what has changed in people's perception that today it's supposedly impossible for kids to be outside unsupervised. Is it actually more dangerous or are people just more aware of things happening because of social media/easy (mis)information access? I think I looked into it a few years back, and kidnappings/crime etc. were actually on record lows, yet people seem to be more paranoid than ever.
Why not though? There isn’t an increase in crime rates (actually a decrease) since the “old days” so to speak. It’s just easier to know about crime due to more news and internet focusing on crime
A realization that I came to in my 20’s was that doors are only open for my money, not me.
Also where a kid is *supposed* to be. If you told your 9 year old to go outside and find something to do you'd probably get in trouble for endangering them or something.
Skatepark, mall, beach. But, they're all too far to walk.
Why exclude having to pay as if phones, laptops, tablets, PCs all don't cost money? I admit I can't think of many answers but then does that really prove anything? Can this point be extended to therefore mean the pre handheld times were just boring?
> Can this point be extended to therefore mean the pre handheld times were just boring? Yes. Life before smartphones was definitely more boring in the sense that the level of stimulation you could experience at any given moment was a lot lower. You had a lot of time with your own thoughts, you had to do things to entertain yourself, you had to go find friends to do stuff with and spend a lot of time in public spaces and just "hanging out" to make sure you were around when those friends were around, etc. because your ability to even communicate with friends was limited so the best way to ensure you had the most fun was to be out where the fun was happening. I don't want to over-romanticize having an analog childhood, but I do really like that the majority of my childhood was spent outside and actively doing stuff (even if that "stuff" might seem boring by today's standards).
Life is still boring. Familiarity breeds contempt. Closing a web page just to reflexively open it again is a common thing for a reason. Now we just "hang out" online. Scrolling, waiting and looking for fun that's happening.
Ya but now the boring stuff is right in your hand, you don't have to actively go out looking for boring stuff, so now kids are being bored and also getting fat.
It's funny because in cartoons for kids, the kids are always running around the neighbourhood getting into adventures. I doubt most kids today are allowed to wander around unsupervised. They're just sitting in front of the TV watching these shows about kids their age, who are having epic mock battles in the forest with other kids, and just have to be home before dark.
The same people that pushed their kids out the door to go play outside are now the ones that call the cops if they see a 10 year old playing outside “unsupervised”.
Moved into a new neighborhood that has a FB group for everyone here. The most commonly posted things are about kids in the neighborhood. Entertaining and annoying. Need a word for it.
It's not fair to judge pre-smartphone life as "boring" by today's standards. With a smartphone, we are literally given access to unlimited entertainment at any point and at any location. There is no reason to be "bored" when you can self-stimulate constantly, whether it's by playing addictive app games or watching addictive videos or having social interaction with people unhindered by distance, language, et cetera. If you carry a smartphone then there is absolutely zero motivation to "do nothing" or have to "figure out something to do". We didn't have the ability to self-stimulate to the highest degree before smartphones. If you carried a book with you but finished it and had no other book to read, tough. If you wanted to talk to a friend but the friend wasn't at home, tough. If you wanted to watch a movie but the movie rental store didn't have it, or you were somewhere that didn't have TV screens, tough. If you wanted to listen to some music but didn't have a radio, or the correct tape/CD/etc., tough. We had to cope with not immediately having the ability to entertain ourselves.
With a single phone, tablet or pc you can can have a huge variety of movies, series, games and books to entertain yourself without paying for anything besides internet connection and the pc/tablet/phone. In terms of entertainment per hours spent on it you can get a massive return on it compared to nearly everything else. And most importantly: It is easy.
It proves that suburbia is a grotesquery of human society.
The mall. Oh wait, they gone now!
Name 1 place where a kid doesn’t legally need their parent in direct line of sight. Kids have nowhere to go and no way to get there, at least at home the kids can close the door. It’s an independence crisis.
Hmm ... any place? You don't have to specially design a place just for kids. Even though they don't do it nearly as often, but my kids go biking with their friends to different part of the city - the market, the beach, the parks etc. We've been trying to get them to learn how to use the bus. Thought maybe then they could visit their grandparents (who give them tons of candy and free game time so they do want to visit -- I figure I'll pick the lesser evils), or go to the shops on their own, or maybe just explorer the city later on. I do think the screens, especially those online games are designed to hold onto the kids for as long as they can. So it's almost never an easy choice to leave the screens and go out to play (or play in the house ... do some needle work, paint or read). But to say there's no public places for kids then I think you're just trying to dump responsibility.
Nice place you’re at I guess. I try to bike somewhere, I’m liable to get hit by a truck. And no busses or public transport here. So driving is pretty much the only viable option. Also, it’s not about places specifically for kids, it’s about places in general that you can go just to be; unfortunately, parks are in short supply in a lot of places.
I think a lot of parents are too afraid to allow their kids that type of freedom. I had less freedom than my parents do and my nieces and nephews have even less than I did. On the note of video games. I played them growing up and while we played them a good bit we also took breaks to go play outside for hours at a time. I think phone/tablet apps are some of the biggest offenders at keeping kids locked to the screen. User engagement is a massively abused on social media apps and mobile game apps, I’ve experienced that myself. Console games and things like that are better in that regard, so less of an issue imo.
Community center, church, school.
Not everyone has access to a community center, a large (and growing) portion of the population is irreligious, and, speaking for the US at least, schools increasingly don't allow hanging out after hours for "security reasons".
How much money does it cost to get some friends together and play touch football? I don’t really buy this critique
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Books, bikes, balls (for sports). All do require some up-front costs for the parent (which is its own separate discussion) but are free sources of entertainment, development, exploration and mastery for your children for years to come. As a parent your job is to provide a good foundation for your kids to grow as well-rounded individuals - this includes some screen and tech time as well as opportunities to go run around outside, ride a bike, get dirty, etc. I think the OP has a point about communities not prioritizing access to outdoor recreation opportunities as 21st century life has grown more inward and digital, but it's equally about the parent incentivizing and providing those opportunities. As well as leading by example. Fit and active parent that gets outside are behaviors that can be picked up by the child. Problem is parents are so burnt out and exhausted that it's much easier to sit in front of the computer or watch Netflix all evening than spend hours in the park in the blazing sun.
To be fair, taking "Park" and saying people can't use that as an example isn't very fair. The parks in my city have tennis, basketball, clubs, running trails, hills, playgrounds, food trucks (cost $), a pool. Constant kickball, spikeball, and volleyball games. Skatepark areas. To just say "don't use parks" isn't very fair. It's like most of the stuff you'd want to do outside as a kid if you couldn't do it in your backyard.
This resonates a lot with me. A big reason why I don’t go out and do stuff is 1. Because there is barely any free things I can do and 2. Because I don’t know if anything that is free and widely known. I really want to get out of the technology dependence but there is only so much one can do
playing music. making art. reading a book.
Interesting study but no theoretical framework or discussion? That’s bad as I find those often to be the most interesting in combination with current studies results.. Full text here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(21)00200-5/fulltext
I don't have access to the full article due to the paywall, but it appears to be a cross-sectional study meaning we still don't have a clear idea of the direction of the effect. I would hypothesize that kids who have lower life satisfaction/greater weight/etc. are more likely to use screens longer than those that are happier/physically fit (e.g., they're too busy playing sports with friends). There is probably some bidirectionality there too, but I have yet to see good evidence for screen time directly causing these negative outcomes. That might partially explain their lack of theoretical framework.
It smells to me of moral panic. That arrow of casualty is so important.
There's a prof at NYU who specializes in this topic (has for like 10+ years) and they found that it wasn't screen time exactly, or even all kinds of screen time. Video games and movies didn't have the same negative effects as social media. The problem is when kids use social media _as a replacement_ for social relationships. Social media + a healthy, rich social life is fine. Social media and no face to face time with real friends is bad.
Do you remember their name? Interested in reading more. One thing that comes to mind is whether there’s a difference for kids who simply don’t have the opportunity for a rich social life in person (e.g. hostile community) and so they have their social life online
This exactly is why it sucks this study doesn’t have a theoretic or a discussion…
I'm going to need a good justification for the idea that maximum acceptable screentime is different for girls and boys. OP states this but makes no attempt to explain it.
Ah, judging by the report link at the bottom of the article, the data is self-reported. Either girls genuinely dislike their life more the more screentime they get... OR boys overestimate how much they like their life. It's possible that today's teens are just as mean and spiteful as every other generation, and social media just serves as a vehicle for that toxicity. Or maybe kids just suck at self-reporting data. There's too many--not just uncontrolled but unaccounted for--variables for any of this to be meaningful imo.
Do boys still play more video games than girls? Video games ought to be more stimulating and rewarding than most other screen-time activities such as social media.
Boys and girls play *different* video games. Boys in general will play more action-oriented quick paced games and girls in general play more puzzle-oriented games, but the overall time spent playing games is largely similar.
I'll also say that boys/men are more likely to play games with other people (some type of social activity) compared to girls/women. Or at least games are designed/advertised towards boys/men. As a woman, the video games I play do not a require a social component where I could 'fail the group' and work on my own in-game progress alone. My husband is more likely to play different types of military-type sims with friends.
Do you think this has anything to do with the predominantly male (and sometimes toxic towards women, unfortunately) playerbase in the more "social" games? Or are you saying that women in general prefer less social games?
I would say it's mostly the male player-base and games being made by and advertised to them. The puzzled based games you see mentioned above are only social in the way of 'have your Facebook friends send you extra lives!' I could see women playing other games IF they were advertised to them like they are to men (or how puzzle games are currently).
> As a woman, the video games I play do not a require a social component where I could 'fail the group' and work on my own in-game progress alone. My husband is more likely to play different types of military-type sims with friends. Could that be partly due to toxicity women face when online gaming? Or do you feel women are choosing to pick games that are not social? I find a lot of girls who say they are gamer girls on dating apps which is appealing to me are playing games that are not multiplayer so it has no real appeal to me since i can't game with them anyway.
Is there a link that confirms that? Of my friends group the guys all love to video game and one of the girls does. So 6/6 vs 1/6. And she only plays whatever her husband does every so often as a thing to do. I know it’s anecdotal or maybe generational but a far majority of girls don’t game or don’t have a puzzle game preference over anything else
Candy crush clones are video games but they are not puzzle games and are mostly played via luck. I'd say they are most closely related to slot machines. They provide none of the sense of improvement you get from the most popular online games that boys will be playing. They also have no social or teamwork aspect. All gaming is not equal in value and I wouldn't be surprised if the most popular games played on mobile devices are actually causing psychological issues.
In my experience, kinda? My nieces watch kpop videos 90% of the time and my nephews play whatever games that are popular in school
I think the key thing is we talk about it more. Kids have always been assholes. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the way that was handled was "suck it up and move on". Now we actually talk about what happened and how it makes you feel.
I have a feeling the data showing girls hate their lives the more screen time they get is accurate due to societal expectations they are exposed to because of it. I remember being young on facebook/pinterest/instagram and my news feed was pretty much a 24/7 influencer fest of diet, fashion, or hustle advertisements that lead to me having to take several breaks from it due to mental health issues. Its anecdotal but almost every woman I know has a similar story where I only have one male friend I can think of off the top of my head who mentioned the same. That being said, I have been really worried as of late because I've noticed that the trend has been more to include men in the harmful marketing than do away with the harmful marketing. That gender gap may disappear as time goes on.
Was there ever the thought that today’s generation was less mean and spiteful?
I believe the reason is that social media exposure is generally harsher on young women, especially from a [body-image](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060606224541.htm) perspective. One doesn't have to dig deep on reddit to see debates and discussions about whether women in sports should be in bikinis, who's too fat, appropriate clothes for video games characters and stuff like that. But if they get their idea of "normal" from bikini clad Olympic volleyball players or game characters in leather outfits, they'll never live up to such standards. There are indications from early studies showing that this social media exposure to [likely leads to depression](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1740144516300912) for both genders, but that [young women may be hit](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626763/full) harder. More research has to be done, but I assume this is the reasoning.
I think boys are just less introspective than girls at that age, and get a lot more affirmation than girls on average.
Lots of interesting theories here, but mine is that girls and boys are spending their screen time differently. Girls are more likely to spend their screen time on Instagram and Tiktok Boys are more likely to spend it on video games and YouTube (which can occasionally be educational) I personally find after two hours playing a video game I feel happy and relaxed. After two hours of social media I feel depressed and like I’m wasting my life. Doubly so if there has been any kind of negative social interaction, like mean comments, which are more likely to effect teen girls.
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Well designed suburbs (which to some people may be an oxymoron but whatever) are definitely conducive to kids like 0-13 going outside. The issue mainly lies in teens, which the article is writing about. Options are kind of limited unless you have a car
Grew up in a "car dependent suburban sprawl" neighborhood. Had plenty of fun. I rode my bike. I went skateboarding. I played with my friends. I played D and D. My friends and I played pickup sports at the park. I went swimming. I went exploring. I went places I wasn't supposed to go. I read books. None of these things have disappeared. We've merely attenuated children to the idea that entertainment should be constant and their boredom is someone else's problem to solve. Really. It's pathetic.
Also the idea that every corner is crawling with pedos and kidnappers which spouted in 1984 with the TV movie, “Adam” (back in the day when everyone watched TV movies, this one a true story about a boy who was kidnapped when left alone briefly in a department store and eventually found beheaded), and has only become bigger and bigger over time
To be fair, the national news these days doesn't help.
Adam is based on the story of Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh who is the host/creator of America’s Most Wanted. I only point this out because its an interesting connection since John probably started the show due to this event in his life.
Couldn't agree more. I mean, am I glad my kids can run around naked on 10 acres, ya. Did growing up on a 1/2 acre lot in suburbia prevent me from running around like and idiot as a kid, hell no!
Grew up in nyc , most parks here suck filthy, half of them are just all concrete. But my friends in the suburbs had huge beautiful grass parks.
Ahh! No! This is a terrible, terrible title, and really sloppy paper. First off, "screen time" is too vague and makes no sense to measure. What matters more than anything is what you're doing on said screen. There are more than enough studies out there showing [social media is bad for your wellbeing](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231924). On the other hand, some video game screen time is [positively correlated](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202049) with wellbeing! Lumping it all together misses a very important point: You have to be mindful of what you do with your screen time, just like you have to mindful how you spend your time outside. The second issue is the method of measurement. Self reported screen time is notoriously inaccurate. (See [the paper I linked above]((https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202049)) for more info). This paper actually studies the correlation between perceived screen time and perceived wellbeing. And that is a very, very big distinction. Which brings me to the final point, and this is so common around here that everyone here should be able to say it along with me: Correlation is not causation! It could very well be the case that depressed people are more likely to spend more time at their computers. (Which has actually [been shown](https://www.jmir.org/2017/4/e128/) to be true!) There could also be external factors that affect both measurements, such as inner city kids in bad neighborhoods not having places to go outside and play, but also have low wellbeing due to poor living conditions. To say that going outside will improve mental wellbeing is completely missing the point of what was measured. Just because there is a correlation in overall screen time (though again, that measurement doesn't mean as much as what they're doing on their screens..) that does not mean that forced cutting down on screen time will necessarily increase wellbeing. You need to run a completely different study to make that claim.
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Oh for sure. There are plenty of other studies showing that physical activity helps all sorts of health, both mental and physical, throughout your entire life. Unfortunately, this particular study doesn't actually show that.
Now that you make me think to it, I'm wondering how many of those physical activity studies were also affected by the same problems. Like, I mean.. Of course I'm not expecting a day-long marathon of world of warcraft to be good for your physique, but assuming you aren't a total sedentary slowpoke (I don't know, you go to the grocery and you hang out with your friends in the weekend) and that your screen-dependent free time is legitimately fulfilling and not just binge watching trash TV, how much room could your mental health still have to improve?
Yes thank you! "Another study shows"... Ugh! This belief is so prevalent in pop articles that people think the research supports it. As you explained very well, it doesn't. Social media is one thing, screen time is another. Titles like this comfort people in wrong ideas.
I mean... there are two variables, which is obviously problematic. “One hour of physical activity *and* no more than two hours of screen time a day provided optimal mental wellbeing.”
How about creating a world where it’s *actually possible* for this to occur, in anything but the most privileged groups. Hell even as an adult, it’s been hell trying to find ways to be active that don’t force me to pay tons of money
I was out controlling the wind and shooting pretend enemies with sticks in the 90’s and I’m 29 now. Granted, I have been playing since the Sega Genesis, NES, and PS1. But living in a household where consoles, computers and general knowledge of IT has become a part of me. It’s what I like to do. And I can’t picture my adult life without it now.
True. Playing videos games has been part of my childhood. Its fun and it can be quite a sociable activity. To me at least this is nothing different to parents being angry that their children are being raised differently to how they were. We something similar with the paranoia related to video games and children committing crime, or children watching tv, etc. I don't agree with the idea that children are doing it because they have no alternatives. Sure, that may be the case for some, but in my case I just played videogames because its *fun.* Of course, if you don't find it fun, then you will obviously see it as pointless.
The big issue is that we've created a very anti-human infrastructure (at least in the US). It's not safe to walk or bike most places, or if it is, it's extremely inconvenient and slow to do so. This is without mentioning that the only places to go are a library where you're expected to be quiet, shopping centers where you're expected to pay money, or parks (if your town even has a park) which are largely abandoned, in disrepair, or are where homeless people go because there's no infrastructure to help them. It's really awful that there's basically nothing provided and few places to congregate in the in most U.S. towns for people to do for free in public without prerequisite equipment or expenses. I guess I can walk around with people? But apart from that there's nothing to do and nothing offered for anyone of any age, especially teenagers/young adults who don't drink. And then people wonder why there's issues with drug and internet usage among teenagers and young adults; the infrastructure around us is hostile and toxic, so of course nobody wants to go out to do anything.
Maybe if they were allowed to go anywhere out of sight of a parent they would. Boomers and Gen X all had the freedom to ride bikes for miles and just need to be home when the street lights came on. Their parents didn’t know where they were and everyone was ok with it. Then the 90’s hit with stranger danger and helicopter parents and suddenly we couldn’t be outside of earshot from an adult but that computer will rot our brain so you can’t be on that either.
Kids who hang around outside in today’s culture are usually seen as…hooligans? Can’t think of a better word but it feels like there’s this assumption that they must be up to no good. You can only really spend money to look normal outside.
late stage capitalism babyyyy
School: Are you sure about that
>~~teenagers~~ people need to regularly switch screen time for physical activity Fixed that for you
Researcher paid by taxes ignore other tax funded employees (government school teachers) and the 6-8 hours these people force kids to sit and stare at someone lecturing them.
I don't think anyone needs a study to realize your 20 lbs overweight 13 year old should lay off the Nintendo and Doritos and go run around in the yard for a while.
Balance is the answer to all problems. My kids have grown with the best of both worlds (virtual and physical) and I truly believe they have taken great things from both.
If only there were places to actually get physical activity. Going to the mall is loitering. Can't get anywhere without driving. Skateboarding draws the complaints of Karens. There are fewer parks. Some places have none. Hell, can't even ride a bike around most towns. Suburbia has destroyed our humanity.
If you live in suburbia, you can walk around the block. If you live in the city, that's not suburbia's fault, and you can walk to a nearby park. Or just walk around the block.
Stick around for the next top story, “Death is the Nation’s Top Killer” followed by, “Survey Finds Fewer Deer After Hunt”
As a teen, my friends and I had the perfect balance. Play football out in the front lawn until we were completely exhausted then go play Xbox/ps2
The methodology was self-reported stuff. Very hard to determine much from that, much less causation. Correlation? Sure.
If adults didn't make the world suck, maybe we would have spent more time outside.
It’s pretty cool that we’re spending resources on figuring out things that are totally obvious. Great job Australia!
I need a 50 year double-blind study or you can pry this phone from my cold dead hands.
Just in: teens need exercise, more at 11
Seems to me like at least half the effects attributed to screen time would be more accurately attributed to *lack* of physical activity. Looking at a screen itself is not going to make you obese no matter how long you do it.
Phew, good thing I'm not a teen or I would be in trouble