Play. Actual children’s play. I have kids in the house, two sets, one lives with mom most of the time, others live with me. One set has screen limits, the other doesn’t. One 10 year old plays with their Legos and one doesn’t. Now this could be chalked up to personal differences, but it seems very correlated to me. And I see it clearly when other kids are visiting, less screen time = more creativity and play.
A lot of parents today just hand their kid a tablet when they expect the kid to be bored and leave it at that. Instead of learning to entertain themselves, they learn to sit passively and consume content. It starts young, too - toddlers with tablets with unfettered access to Youtube Kids, sitting back watching Cocomelon or AI kids’ slop (it’s out there, boy is it out there.)
To those of us who grew up without access to screens at any given time sometimes take issues with it, but not everyone does. There are some kids I work with whose parents explicitly say they don’t want their kid watching videos at school. I get it, you want your kid to interact with other people and explore their creativity instead of sitting around watching something - I love that.
Recently a new coworker, much younger than me, asked why some parents don’t want their kids watching videos. I was surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be. That coworker probably grew up with screens from an early age. Perhaps she can’t fathom the world without it. Either way, the idea that some parents want to limit their kids’ screen time was a foreign concept to her, which concerns me somewhat.
His book ‘The Third Wave’ posited that the change between the Industrial Age and the Digital Era was as big as the shift from hunting/gathering to farming, and the shift from farming to factories.
Play. Actual children’s play. I have kids in the house, two sets, one lives with mom most of the time, others live with me. One set has screen limits, the other doesn’t. One 10 year old plays with their Legos and one doesn’t. Now this could be chalked up to personal differences, but it seems very correlated to me. And I see it clearly when other kids are visiting, less screen time = more creativity and play.
A lot of parents today just hand their kid a tablet when they expect the kid to be bored and leave it at that. Instead of learning to entertain themselves, they learn to sit passively and consume content. It starts young, too - toddlers with tablets with unfettered access to Youtube Kids, sitting back watching Cocomelon or AI kids’ slop (it’s out there, boy is it out there.)
To those of us who grew up without access to screens at any given time sometimes take issues with it, but not everyone does. There are some kids I work with whose parents explicitly say they don’t want their kid watching videos at school. I get it, you want your kid to interact with other people and explore their creativity instead of sitting around watching something - I love that.
Recently a new coworker, much younger than me, asked why some parents don’t want their kids watching videos. I was surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be. That coworker probably grew up with screens from an early age. Perhaps she can’t fathom the world without it. Either way, the idea that some parents want to limit their kids’ screen time was a foreign concept to her, which concerns me somewhat.
Look up a sociologist name Alvin Toffler.
His book ‘The Third Wave’ posited that the change between the Industrial Age and the Digital Era was as big as the shift from hunting/gathering to farming, and the shift from farming to factories.