A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

Yes, RTS train certain skills and educate in general. Yes, some other games and whole genres do that. And still all video games cause non-linear, lets say "addiction", to them. They increase tendency to procrastinate. Especially after significant play time over lifetime, when those same educational aspects are a justification to continue procrastinating playing them. I know this from experience and it is very hard and feels like increasingly harder to stop or limit it.

I have a 2 and a half year old son now. My wife and I have found for us that the right answer is simply moderation, variety, and supervision.

1. We moderate how much time is spent on screens. Each day he probably spends a total of an hour or less in front of any screen (iPad/iPhone/Projector).

2. He does watch some (highly filtered) educational YouTube content, but we also make sure he's playing educational and interactive games, like building, drawing, and learning Chinese (we're a bilingual household). He also has lots of books and we read to him actively, he participates in sports, we take him outside to playgrounds and parks, do arts and crafts with him, and he helps us with chores around the house (in a fun way), etc.

3. When he is playing a game or watching a video, we're there participating. We're monitoring and filtering the content he's viewing, and we're actively adding to the educational experience by talking about the things he's seeing and doing with him.

Technology is a tool, and how it's used matters. Outright banning it means we're missing out on its potential benefits, and also we miss the opportunity to teach him from an early age how to use it properly. I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.

It was a little bit of a struggle at first, but now when we tell him it's time to turn off the iPad, he usually will do it himself without fuss, and he increasingly will turn it off without even prompting and move on to another activity like reading or drawing.

I see two problems with how we view addiction:

- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.

- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.

I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation.

Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.

If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.

Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."

I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.

Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.

But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.

I’m curious how people invite other kids over for kid parties. That kid can’t drink soda, this one is forbidden screens, this one is no gluten, that one is no meat. When you have a baby, does the hospital give you a giant list of stuff you could forbid them to choose from?