Our oldest recently started kindergarten and the teacher related that she’s seen a marked decrease in social skills the past few years. She blamed increased screen time which is generally videos on YouTube.
Our kids get about 20 min a day, 45 on weekends. I’d like to be rid of the devices entirely. Honestly withholding devices is the best discipline tool I have. What’s sad to me are the kids who are on them all day.
Maybe they've always been right. My wife is from a a developing country, and the incredible depth of the older generations who grew up without a drop of modern media is striking. Of course it is a complex situation since they had many other factors in their upbringing, but it is telling -- especially because their ability to patiently listen to and truly see the other person seems at least intuitively related to the lack of modern media consumption, which simply gave them so much more practice socializing, and placed so much more value on it. It was where life was at.
TV isn’t the rot of the western civilization/culture. It’s baked in much closer to the roots. We got two world wars well before any of this. And nukes.
War is the worst case scenario. It is not a good metric by which to measure a civilization or human growth, since we can be more refined, and virtually all wars are fought in self defense by one side - so say nothing at all about the quality of their way of life prior to the event.
I refuse to discard the death of millions as a statistical outlier. Particularly when the next example would likely result in the end of human life - possibly all life - as we know it.
Well then I expect you to note that the war was not "Western" only, and also take into account the extremely long and well documented history of war across this planet throughout human history. The danger of modern war is in technology, not culture.
Yep! Video games were ruining the youth when I was the youth being ruined. Meanwhile, I totally owe my career to the $300 my parents gave me for my birthday so that I could buy computer parts capable of running Age of Empires II.
But as a brand new parent, this YouTube stuff seems both tempting (as a distraction) and awful.
One issue is that an iPad is basically non-buildable or modd-able so you can't build your own PC to play a game... which one could argue is a more recent equivalent of buy a junky car and fix it up. Now maybe have the kid build a set top PC or something.. or a tivo.. That being said, video gamer kids tend to have super dexterity and they are better at taking in a lot of digital information quickly. So there is that.
They were right. Both video games and TV are pretty shit ways to spend time. I have never in my life thought “damn, I’m really glad I spent my Saturday playing halo instead of doing something else”. Video games and television are mental and emotional junk food.
And they've been correct for decades. Numerous studies have shown cognitive decline associated with television viewing, delays in language acquisition, deficits in attention and executive functioning.
As with everything there is nuance here, there is an equally valid argument in tandem to "Vidya bad" etc. which is the parents were watching a lot more TV (more channels arriving) and not interracting with their kids as much, hence less social skills for the kids to digest.
A child's cognitive recall abilities and associative thinking are super small when compared against an adult. Because of this, there typically isn't any room for additional information besides what's covered in the school day. The issue with video games is that some games take advantage of our attention span. In children, especially those without time management skills, the mind chooses between the instant gratification of the video game or the delayed gratification of studying for their school work.
Throughout every single year of my schooling, there was at least one teacher who would always tell us that we were without a doubt the worst class they'd ever seen in their life and they were quitting next year.
Are kids getting worse? Maybe. But teachers who think it's the end of the world and not just that they're getting old and grumpy have been around since teaching began.
Even Socrates was saying kids these days are hopeless. [1]
Kids today will be worse at some things previous generations were better at. They'll also do things that people today can't even imagine. Skills shift through the ages. I bet the average goober here on HN couldn't butcher a hog or build a barn like our great-grandparents could, but our great grandparents couldn't manage server farms either.
Our kids get about 20 min a day, 45 on weekends. I’d like to be rid of the devices entirely. Honestly withholding devices is the best discipline tool I have. What’s sad to me are the kids who are on them all day.