You make a really funny analogy, but I hope you see the other side to that argument.
Kids really might stay up all night playing with "addictive" wooden blocks. They might spend 10+ hours a day with the blocks. They may have violent mood swings when you take the blocks away.
But wooden blocks...suck. The types of entertainment kids have had access to in the past is nothing like what they will have access to in the future.
When I was 6-10, I had an unhealthy relationship with comic books. I stole them. I read them to the detriment of education. My parents just had to manage my addiction, because beating it was impossible. And these were just ultimately just crappy drawings on crappier paper.
When my child is 6-10, he will be able to put on a VR Headset and actually BE a comic book superhero. If children can be overwhelmed by a wooden blocks obsession, how the fuck are they supposed to incorporate the type of stimulus into their lives we are now building for them?
At least blocks and comic books have some value for kids' development (and maybe a lot).
If we're at a point where we consider hours of toy unboxing videos and watching adults play with toys on a little screen developmentally equivalent to hours of playing with physical objects or reading comic books, I guess I give up on this whole humanity experiment.
I remember as a kid one Christmas playing with the boxes themselves with my younger siblings, almost forgetting about what was in them. I seriously doubt my (future) kids will do that and that makes me sad and is a little terrifying.
You make a good point-- it does still feel like you want your kids to be bored though. :-P
I think that if the games are structured correctly they can be pro-social. I've been playing PUBG and I've made a handful of friends by joining a squad where I only know one person, and meeting the other people, and then next time I see them on Discord saying hello.
I suppose the other parenting fear is that kids who are addicted to amazing games/VR/youtube won't have the drive to accomplish things in life? I think that games can, to some extent, teach and reward goal-setting. I bait-and-switched Youtube for Games in my previous comment, and I am concerned with kids who watch TV for multiple hours a day, so... the youtube/toddler criticism from kodt may be pretty on-point.
I'm starting to seriously think that moving out to the middle of nowhere and letting my kids run around and play in the woods all day would be the absolute best thing I could for them. Along with a shed to build stuff. I have a six-year-old who is obsessed with YouTube Baby Alive videos and gets very, very upset as we limit her time watching them. It's upsetting for everyone involved as what started out as a cool, fun thing for her as evolved into a daily problem.
I had a borderline unhealthy obsession with legos when I was a kid. It would be all I thought about at school before I got home.
Fast forward a few decades and I've found a nice niche in hardware supply chain. I think play that becomes an obsession can indeed have healthy effects that aren't immediately apparent at the time, but I share your skepticism about YouTube.
The Amish made the argument that maybe we shouldn't be getting so much sugar. They were obviously wrong on the whole.
Now our sugar is being upgraded to crack-cocaine. The Amish are always going to be wrong, until they are right.
I work in Las Vegas, where we had to put VERY strict rules on the gaming industry to prevent them from absolutely destroying large chunks of the population (more than they already do). I'm sure that someday our government will have to step in and protect the vulnerable in our society from the Candy Crush of the next decade.
Kids really might stay up all night playing with "addictive" wooden blocks. They might spend 10+ hours a day with the blocks. They may have violent mood swings when you take the blocks away.
But wooden blocks...suck. The types of entertainment kids have had access to in the past is nothing like what they will have access to in the future.
When I was 6-10, I had an unhealthy relationship with comic books. I stole them. I read them to the detriment of education. My parents just had to manage my addiction, because beating it was impossible. And these were just ultimately just crappy drawings on crappier paper.
When my child is 6-10, he will be able to put on a VR Headset and actually BE a comic book superhero. If children can be overwhelmed by a wooden blocks obsession, how the fuck are they supposed to incorporate the type of stimulus into their lives we are now building for them?