IMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in, but the average 15th century kid didn't have that many stuffs laying around for him to just consume. This problem is suddenly in our face now and we are scrambling around to try and keep our children away from the cacophony of information, but the better thing to do is to teach kids to see computers or phones as tools, and they are there for them to wield and command.
What you should actually do varies based on your kids' preferences, your experiences. You can teach them to code, to do graphic design, write stuffs. Hell, if my child feel inclined I will allow them to learn to create TikTok video, but they have to actually *create* a piece of original content, instead of regurgitating other people's ideas.
Tablets and smartphones are designed at every level to be devices for consuming (or being consumed by?) content. And if you do want to create things, they are terrible tools for that.
Even if it is a terrible tool for my purpose, I'd still want my kids to try (under my supervision) and find out the correct way to use it. Then they will be able to judge for themselves the pitfall of those tools.
But yeah, my kid will not have a smartphone/tablet until they are at least 12. It's going to be pen and paper first, then a potato computer (gotta be Linux, they can try installing Wine to play games I guess)
I have a favorite comparison between learning how to use technical devices and learning how to use woodworking tools. You have to start out with the hammer, the chisel, the handsaw for small things first. And then learn to use the lathe, the drill, the bandsaw. Jumping straight to the big tool give you the big risk of losing a few fingers.
I commend your caution, but if an adult with full faculties available to them has determined that smartphones and tablets have too many risks and downsides to be an effective tool, then what chance does a child have?
Also - why the pre-determined sequence of tech tools for your kid? I have found a much more valuable approach in general to tool selection is to first identify a problem or project, and then apply the appropriate tools. Learning tech for tech's sake to me indicates that we have become ensnared by our own tools and devices.
LumaFusion/LumaTouch is one counter-example, and I‘m certain there are others. At the surface, you may describe it as a „video editor“, but I totally agree that it‘s really about „Story Telling“. I use it on iPad, and I am mesmerised about how ideas click into place every time - there must be serious, long earned expertise at work at the makers of this app. „Designed for consuming“? LumaFusion is the most fun (for me as the creator and my tiny audience of family & friends) creator‘s tool on any device - be it programming on/for small or big iron, writing on Windows, photo editing… you name it.
Your statement may be true for anything knock-off or underpowered, though. Your sentiment just not generalises to premium.
iMovie has existed on it since the start, for all the professional accolades it earns the iPad. You're still not going to see Steve Jobs pitching it as a replacement for the Mac, though. The iPad's most holistic pitch was ebook consumption, everything else was Angry Birds, YouTube and the faint promise of Pornhub on a bigger screen.
I did my last leg of high school on an school-mandated iPad, and it's not hard to get what everyone here is talking about. Want to do CAD? Gotta get a different machine. Want to record music? iPads don't have the drivers for our DAC. Want to type an essay? Go rent a detachable keyboard from the library. So on and so forth until you never feel motivated to create anything superfluous again. It was an exceptionally poor replacement for a laptop, particularly when I wanted to make something or do creative work.
That's fantastic, if your jam is investing in premium hardware and story-telling in video format. Personally, I can't think of a bigger waste of everyone's time than videoing my own life.
Edit: I will take your point though, that Apple at least attempts to produce premium products with a purpose. However, judging by the number of iPads and iPhones I see being used as passive content consumption interfaces, I'm not sure the outcome is much different.
> IMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in
You say it as if kids prefer reading books over building with LEGOs :)
I mean, that's a very specific example of looking at it. But let me try and rationalize it:
- Books are not purely consumption. Rather, working through a good book is a very good creative exercise, because you are "creating" critical thinking for yourself. You still have to filter the intake of book for your kids, but imo there are very few books that have no value at all, because producing a book is costly to just put out junks on a massive scale.
- On the contrary, we have to agree that nowadays there are things that give your kids unbounded consumption. Very little critical thinking can be had after 2 hours of viewing mindless Youtube video. If you restrict your kids to only good content that provoke thinking, it's alright, but there is just too much crap on Youtube that lulls them to be mindless.
So, our kids are "consuming" at record high rate and "producing" at record low rate.
My seven year old went from doing animations with Scratch to drawing flip books. Now when she consumes media m, it’s usually about getting better at animation.
Needless to say, everyone who knows me in person sees clips of all her animations. And for some reason, it seems like they avoid me…:)
It's the Internet's big class distinction: the "creators" (0.1% with decent audience, 1% with any audience, 10% commenters) and pure lurkers/consumers (the rest).
The problem with this type of article is that Jobs and Gates have no real world limitations whatsoever. They can do anything with their kids and it won't matter. So that's not relatable to me as a person not in that position.
Example: pretend Gates & Jobs decided to remove their kids from school and teach them full time to be musicians. Completely impractical for me and would not set my kids up for success financially. But for them? Easily done, and their kids would still have hundreds of millions to fall back on at maturity.
Why does that matter here?
Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain, they could hire a dozen people to entertain their kids and look after them (and while the number is probably not that high, they do, actually, use that type of solution). Whereas for me giving kids device time is a practical solution, without those resources: it keeps them entertained, while I work to make money.
These kinds of articles are basically just fun trivia if the people in them have no constraints on their resources.
I don't have unlimited resources. I work to keep my family afloat. I don't let my kids be on the iPad so I can get on with work.
It's not a practical solution, it's an _easy_ solution. I'm sorry the article makes you feel like a bad parent, but don't go into denial mode to make yourself feel better about what you're doing.
You have absolutely no idea about family situation or financial situation or where parent commenter live (and in which circumstances), yet you indirectly call she/him bad parent and accuse she/him of denial.
And yet looks like you 100% sure that you solution of blocking access to iPads is the best solution for kids.
By the way, by blocking access to iPad, in your opinion, what exactly you achieved?
I don't presume anything about their situation, but I know about mine, and my parents before me. My situation could have been described as difficult by most. This (and where and how I grew up) means I have little sympathy for people with excuses.
I'm not saying this to put people down, but drag them up. Don't let excuses limit you. Those where I grew up who did, are still there. I my comment back and I definitely came across too strong, and think this is a sore point for me.
> By the way, by blocking access to iPad, in your opinion, what exactly you achieved?
Wouldn't have gotten into it because I know it's divisive without being constructive, but since you ask; I believe what we're doing to our kids as a society by allowing them consumer devices like the iPad will only be felt fully in 10-15 years from now. I think it's turning the next generation into people who can't take discomfort, quiet, or a still mind — and that's the tip of the iceberg.
>Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain
What is fundamentally different about the world today, compared to 10 years ago (when widespread child usage of phones and tablets was vanishingly rare), that it's impossible to parent without them?
I have friends who say they cannot get their child to brush their teeth without holding a tablet in front of their face. This statement would have been considered a sign of something horribly wrong in the parent-child relationship only a few years ago.
> Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain, they could hire a dozen people to entertain their kids and look after them (and while the number is probably not that high, they do, actually, use that type of solution). Whereas for me giving kids device time is a practical solution, without those resources: it keeps them entertained, while I work to make money.
That's one of the problems with the way we life our lives imo. The fact that we need those devices to manage having our children around should tell us something is wrong.
(I'm not saying I'm in any way not affected or better or anything)
Wacky question but does anyone know if this is a paid placement? The last three paragraphs seem to be soliciting investors for some random company I haven’t heard of, but most media declares something is paid. It’s yahoo so nothing surprises me but between the obvious sales tone and the fact an article this low quality front paged has me feeling marketed to.
The part I struggle with is, how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?
How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?
How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).
> How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?
Is it actually a thing tho? I think it's just general critical thinking. No every older person who starts using social media at their 60s becomes a flat-earther.
> How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).
I don't think you can. You should definitely keep them from, for example, random pedos trying to find next victims via online games. But loss of in-game items? It's more or less the point of games, isn't it? Teach you to balance risk and reward?
> how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?
You can program without an internet connection if you try. If someone points a gun at your head and asks you to code a binary search without googling you'll probably find yourself suddenly so smart. (not saying we should do that, especially not to kids)
Indeed it's probably good to practice coding without Copilot or Stack Exchange completing all your thoughts for you.
Actually, I would recommend, once in a while, trying to code the traditional way -- with pen and paper. That still has its place with high-level design and when toying around with algorithms. Sometimes it's helpful to strip away all the distractions, and instant-access documentation and compiler feedback are a kind of potential distraction, really. YMMV.
> How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?
"Don't trust strangers; they only want to humiliate, rape, or kill you" works well enough. Same as reality, the problem with social media is the people.
The "street smarts" kids have picked up from social media access is nothing to celebrate. /r/runaway is a very sordid place encouraging kids to hook up with total strangers. Rate of teen suicide has only increased since the invention of social media. Kids are exchanging scamming tactics and teaching each other how to maintain eating disorders covertly and fake illnesses convincingly enough to fool doctors.
Give them a book and a Python interpreter. Plenty of us got started that way, and some of us still have to work that way-- in SCIFs or other air-gapped environments with no internet access.
> How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).
What does this have to do with the internet?
Everyone has lost local saves due to bugs, power outage or corrupted media. "Save early and save often" was a lesson taught by a creepy middle-aged guy named Larry Laffer, using entirely-offline software bearing his name.
> The part I struggle with is, how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?
Same way we did "back in my day"? Books are still a thing, and in my opinion, much better. When you have to work for something, you value it more, and in the case of information, are more likely to retain it (this is due to real-world connections being made).
> How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?
Why do you care? Being the odd one out in a wrong world isn't a bad thing. I was the odd one out in a similar way when I was a kid, and it did me wonders.
> How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too
Presuming you mean negative generally, why would you want to? Ups and downs are what make games interesting, not just constant endorphin pushing ups.
If you can't understand the messages from your complier or need other resources from people that you can't find in the doc, either the language/compiler you are using is crappy and you should use a real one, either you aren't a developer but a copy/paster that pretend to be one.
If you let your kids on social media, meta and YouTube is raising your kids, not you, using all the manipulative tricks they have to shape them into consumers and attention addicts, who think these online services are reality, letting them convince them of god knows what
Instead of a complete blockade create an allow list. So Stack Overflow and MDN are allowed but general Internet is not. You can also keep offline copies of books, courses and videos.
1. Set the example and model positive behavior.
- Stop using social media. If they see you doom scrolling they are going to doom scroll.
- Stop playing mmo or games that require subscriptions or have egregious monetization.
-I'm sure you have other skill you can teach them that don't require an internet connection, and if you don't, you can show them how to use the internet for educational purposes instead of watching idiots on social media.
2. Monitor and correct. Your kids are going want the same apps their friends have. Monitor their usage so you can help them get the street smarts. A lot of the apps have privacy settings so you will need to get familiar with them. iOS and android both have tools to limit the amount of time they can use the app for as well.
Unfortunately this takes a lot of time and effort on your part. Try your best and good luck.
> Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework.
Bit of a misleading title. Not really banned, limited use, which should the case with consumption of any of these technologies anyways.
The only trouble I have with all of this is that I became who I am by being obsessed with my computer. I’m fairly confident many people on this site would not have become software engineers if not for playing hours of counter strike for mouse skills, mmos for touch typing and editing files and installing scripts.
The computer (and the internet) is different now, but the new things are additions. We definitely can nurture the same wanderlust we had growing up. I’m getting more and more convinced the solution is to ban all short form content.
I empathize with the sentiment, but we grew up in a different ecosystem. (I’ve assumed your age bracket a bit judging from the comment.)
The lack of online ‘low effort’ content to consume was part of why the tool itself was fascinating. “Okay, what is this terminal thing for?” is something that happens _in boredom_. Your curiosity has space to come up if you’re not constantly overloaded with content to consume.
I started working on social media in 2006. I did it for a big name for most of the 2010s.
It can be a good thing, it’s easier to make it a good thing. It’s expensive as hell to make a screen more destructive than narcotics, you need PhDs and server farms and shit for that.
The problem is that software companies aren’t “allowed to mature”. Sometimes you tap out the market, you aren’t doing 20% next year without pushing the envelope.
Until it’s ok to win in a market and that’s enough, you can’t trust any of this shit.
How could we remove the temptation to squeeze every last dollar from a company, even if it crushes society in the process?
What if the market leader in an industry was taxed such that there was no incentive to make more money than the 2nd or 3rd place company in the market? This would encourage competition, and also remove many of the perverse incentives when a single company is dominant.
Because not only do we have something close to functioning representative government here, even in places they don’t?
The United States military is the most terrifying embodiment of force in human history. It could dismantle any regime on earth in a day. And they got their asses kicked by a bunch of semiliterate extremists with a bunch of surplus Soviet small arms and RPGs hidden in basements.
The point of the digression is we make the rules, and no plausible oppression can stop that short of our consent, and for big parts of our history we made a lot of rules in the general public interest, and enforced them as we saw fit.
I abhor violence and a big reason why I post on the Internet is that I want to see people stop parroting arch-Randian narratives that don’t serve them before one of these tent camps drags Altman out of his Tesla and beats him to death with his own iPhone.
How would that work? Is the market a town, a city, a country or the world? What about companies that supply other companies with goods or materials? What about natural and logical monopolies (eg roads, railways, water supplies). It’s gets messy instantly.
What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?
One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.
What if we could hold the board and the CEO personally liable with prison time for crimes by all the agents, contractors, employees, and so on of a company (with exception when they explicitly went against company policy to commit said crimes)? You'd think that was already the law but given that the Wells Fargo CEO avoided any prison time when management misused blacklist on employees who didn't meet their illegal quota, I am not holding my breath.
I don’t think we should look at these people as the paragon of parenting. It’s easy to imagine that every decision they made is some blessed path, but that’s just a halo effect.
It’s easy to engage in some magical thinking about Jobs or Gates as if they know something distantly ominous about screens that told them to ban their kids from them, that they kept secret from the public in order to sell the screens. I don’t think so.
I think it’s pretty obvious that “too much screen time is bad” for kids, but it’s not that simple either.
As a parent, I struggle to find the right balance for my kids, but I also don’t think it’s some weird sinister plot to ruin humanity, and I’m just a sheep for letting my kids veg out on YouTube and Minecraft on the weekends.
Jobs and Gates also are(/were) extremely wealthy, which has to be a factor here. If you can afford to pay someone for in-home childcare 30+ hours a week, it's a lot easier to avoid the temptation of parking your kid in front of a screen for a few hours to give you time to eat breakfast and do laundry and take a quick breather.
> Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework.
"Banned" sounds like zero, but they actually got 2 hours (per day?) on weekends. That's a pretty good amount.
Since when are kids allowed to have unlimited access to whatever they want? whether it be entertainment or foods. Even if there was a kid who spent too many hours reading, you'd probably be like "hey you need to go outside once in a while"
People have been raising kids without devices for a long time. They've even been telling kids they can't have what they want. Kids have even survived not having consumer device parity with their peers, if you can believe that. They did fine for quite a while, inventing things like every great work of art, the Pythagorean theorum, airplanes... heck, even the iPad! There's no real reason it couldn't be done today, it just isn't.
Disclaimer: I don’t have children, but have nephews of different ages.
It’s way easier to say than actually do it, since completely banning your children from devices will just make them an outcast in most of the circles. When they’re hanging out in school, or after sports, they talk about about either games they’ve played or some stuff they saw online. This is one of the cases where all families should come together or some sort of weird regulation to ban children (reads: impossible to control).
I can’t even judge, growing up I had unrestricted internet access in a shared family PC. Spammed WoW and Runescape for hours every day, and that’s what I talked about with friends. Now we didn’t have social media, but we still were on MSN and its derivatives all the time. There should be some sort of ramp up from no internet access to social media-esque exposure to the entire world so the kids would know what they’re dealing with. How? I don’t know.
You need not spend a lot of time, couple of high-quality hours a day suffice. Considering billionaires have to spend 0 hrs on chores and setup, it should be entirely possible.
I have a niece and nephew ~10yo that whenever I see them are just staring at their devices. I don't want that happening to my 1yo son, I don't want him to miss out on normal life stuff either. When do and how do people normally introduce devices to their kids? So far we haven't shown him any technology, other than seeing himself on the screen when we take a selfie.
I feel like it sneaks up on you. You want your kid to be quiet for a few minutes so you say "10 mins of ipad time won't hurt". It happens slowly in every moment of weakness. Every moment you're too exhausted to take the hard way out. That said, I have no advice other than to just restrict it as often as possible or just limit how many you have at home.
Discipline is the most valuable and precious thing a parent can give their child. They did good but ideally, the ban would not be a mere removal of ipads and electronics but developing trust with them and teaching them to resist the temptation and possible peer-pressure and FOMO.
Banned their kids from iPads ... but probably had an entire 24/7 staff on hand to look after/feed/entertain/keep-quiet their kids for them. This removes probably 90% of the time people give their kids the iPad (the "I just need 15 mins" thing).
My computers launch without XSession. And I have all the documentation about how to launch a basic X server on root. My SO found how to use my computer by 'spying' on me (it was more of a game tbh), and hopefully my future kid will too.
Just like the executives of tabocco companies didn't smoke either. Why are 'people' downvoting you? Is there a small but dedicated Sackler family fan club on this forum?
What you should actually do varies based on your kids' preferences, your experiences. You can teach them to code, to do graphic design, write stuffs. Hell, if my child feel inclined I will allow them to learn to create TikTok video, but they have to actually *create* a piece of original content, instead of regurgitating other people's ideas.