Returning to analog and putting digital in its place

    The free access which many young people have to *BLANK* has poisoned the mind and
    corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving
    their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with
    wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether
    they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?

I'm all for carefully considering which tools you use every day, but spare me the moralizing - it was gauche in 1790 and it hasn't improved with age.

It's even worse than TV was 25 years ago (actual TV became worse too during that period).

Even what I'm having on my screen, non-work-related, is information equivalent of trash food.

I now have doubts whether I am comfortable in letting my kid on this crapfest. Case in point: games that have no gameplay, no difficulty, no plot, no information, and exist solely to make spend money via in-app purchases. This of course lets them kill off everything else on market by putting half of that money into advertising.

I have a child and they have access to a Kindle, our television (with Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) as well as our Nintendo 3DS. These all (in my opinion) serve much the same purpose: entertain, distract and in some circumstances help people relax. Since the beginning my partner and I have been clear that it's not okay to sit in front of one (or cycle through them all) for hours at a time. At this point our child is seven and they rarely exceed more than 30 minutes at a time of screen interaction. For the most part, they move onto something else on their own.

Clearly part of it is personality, but I do think some part was the establishment of clear boundaries from the start. Perhaps when my child hits the teen years, I'll have to revisit this battle but for now keeping screen time at a minimum is a fairly low friction activity.

As this author demonstrates, there's a very real challenge as parents to make the time to schedule activities or to encourage children to get out and play. This strikes me as eternal problems: no seven year old is great at planning ahead or has the ability to schedule their own play dates. But, unlike when I was a child, there are more options than staring at a blank wall or digging deep holes in the backyard.