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Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#12I would like to add one other small question for a soon to be 3 year old, how to encourage books over tech?
Father of a 4 year old boy here. The way you encourage reading, it seems to me, is to read books to your child and read your own books. If there's a micro-culture of literacy in your home, it's easy. A good time to read to your child is right before bedtime. It also helps with bedtime by easing the child into going to bed as a positive routine (instead of child feeling "I have to stop doing [thing child enjoys] because it's bedtime.")
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#13I would like to add one other small question for a soon to be 3 year old, how to encourage books over tech?
Do you really think there is an advantage to books over tech? I tend to think most people are attached to books for nostalgic reasons.
There's an emphasis on words and stories with books that's difficult to emulate fully with tech. I talk extensively with my son about what we read, and about what he does on the ipad. Those conversations are similar, but qualitatively different as well.
There are also some physical skills that kids develop from learning to turn pages, and handle books.
Books and devices are going to be around for a long time. Kids who develop appropriate fluency with both are going to be in a better position to make sense of their world.
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#14I would like to add one other small question for a soon to be 3 year old, how to encourage books over tech?
Read to them. That's it. Just read to them regularly.
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#15My daughter is 5. We've done several things: 1. Blocked youtube on all iOS devices. This has been the most significant, positive action. She was rabid and unhappy whenever she used youtube, even for 20 minutes. The mental unbalance would sometimes last for hours. 2. NO live TV (no ads), unless we're watching a special event, e.g. a tennis tournament or other major cultural happenings (usually via BBC/VPN). The TV scr…
Your daughter made fake cards to let her watch anything she wants whenever she wants??? Congratulations on raising a very cool little person!!! :)
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#16Only tangentially related, but I thought it was relevant enough to post here: Andy Baio wrote a post about how he's introducing his son to videogames.
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#17I would like to add one other small question for a soon to be 3 year old, how to encourage books over tech?
As a new parent I quickly learned that kids emulate what they see (and they seem to pay more attention that we give them credit for) In an effort to prove this out my wife and I got library cards and started reading books during my daughter's (alone) play time after dinner. Very soon after this experiment started she too started picking books and now likes to read (recite from memory) her bed-time books.
This is the only answer, in my opinion. I was in the kitchen using google to set my alarms to time the oven, and by that evening she was taking her tablet and saying "Ok google".... Now I'm buying a kitchen timer
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#18“What other tools for creativity and learning do you arbitrarily limit? Do you have a hard rule on “paper time”?”¹
① http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification
Edit: Related blog posts:
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#19So the generation that grew up with free love and drugs did everything to prevent their children from experiencing the same, and the generation that grew up with free tech does the same with tech. The cycle continues.
Re: Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
#20I would like to add one other small question for a soon to be 3 year old, how to encourage books over tech?
Read to them. That's it. Just read to them regularly.
This. Plenty of citations backing it up here: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=reading-to-young-chil...