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Medicine

Screen Time Not Intrinsically Bad For Children, Say Doctors (theguardian.com) 69

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Spending time looking at screens is not intrinsically bad for children's health, say the UK's leading children's doctors, who are advising parents to focus on ensuring their children get enough sleep, exercise and family interaction rather than clamping down on phones and laptops. From a report: The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has produced the first guidance for parents on how long children should spend on their laptops and phones, which throws the ball firmly back into the parents' court. Each family should decide what is best for its own members -- although all children would benefit from switching off the screen an hour before they go to bed to help them sleep. The college says the focus for parents should be on what the family is doing together, saying screen time is not an issue if parents have control over other aspects of their children's lives. The guidance appears to run counter to the thinking of the health secretary, Matt Hancock, a father of three young children, who has asked England's chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, to draw up some rules on the use of social media.
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Screen Time Not Intrinsically Bad For Children, Say Doctors More

Screen Time Not Intrinsically Bad For Children, Say Doctors

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  • Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Sunday January 06, 2019 @09:12AM (#57912988)

    What can we blame bad parenting on now? It used to be comic books, then radio, then TV, then violent video games.

    This would possibly imply that kids learn bad behaviors by:

    1. Watching their parents
    2. Their parents not setting boundaries and sticking to them

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      "We" nerds, or at least a subset of us, have been blaming parenting also on the parents for some time, if I remember correctly.

      I think one of the main problems is that blaming the parents for not spending enough time looking after their children is not something many people who have children themselves want to hear.
      A lot of people don't want others to tell them how to raise their kids. And let's face it, most people don't handle criticism well, but are prone to shift the blame to some scapegoat.
      This par

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      What can we blame bad parenting on now?

      Some irony here. Blaming parenting for bad kids is often not much better than blaming video games.
      Correlation between children and parental behaviour is mostly explained by genetics and the broader shared environment. With some obvious exceptions, especially for younger "spoiled kids", though I object to that term, as if it is just a lack of parental discipline, they can quickly learn how to follow the norms of their peer group when older.

    • What can we blame bad parenting on now?

      there are no bad parents, only bad children.

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Hallux-F-Sinister: Oh shit, there's a lump that shouldn't be there...uh-oh, it's bleeding.

      Friend of Hallux-F-Sinister: You need to see a doctor.

      Hallux-F-Sinister: No, they are all lying sacks of shit.

      Friends of Hallux-F-Sinister: (Through bag over his head, tie hands) We're going to see a doctor.

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Here’s an idea. Make all “scientific” “research” classified until not only has it been peer reviewed, but until the peer-reviewing has itself been peer reviewed.

      Yes, that's an option. Many scientists would love it if the public would just butt out and let them get on with it. Most realize that the public has both a right and a keen interest in ongoing research though. It IS unfortunate they're not more knowledgeable about it.

      There are two big problems:

      1) to get funding to do

  • Not intrinsically bad? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:14AM (#57913220)

    There’s this quote later in the article:

    But Prof Russell Viner, the college president and an author of the evidence review published in the BMJ Open journal, said that while there was moderately strong evidence that screen time is linked to obesity (through TV snacking and lack of exercise) and mental health issues, the way to tackle it was not through universal curfews and bans.

    “It is important that we recognise that screens are a modern way of being,” he said. “Reading we see as a hugely positive thing, but it is largely a sedentary thing. We have never done studies to look at the link between reading and adiposity [being overweight] but it is sedentary [lifestyle]. Five hundred years ago we thought it was bad for women’s brains to teach them to read. Reading and pamphlets have radicalised a lot more young people than screens have ever done. Yet we somehow worry about screens being different.”

    So, basically, we think it’s tied to obesity and mental illness, but so are other activities we accept, so it’s “not intrinsically bad”.

    • The problem is that screens are so environmental that it's like fish trying to study the effects of water.

      I'm thinking you have to follow McLuhan's lead and consider screens the latest manifestation of what started with the telegraph and the modern newspaper: study the effects of people having their senses stretched more and more out of the immediate physical vicinity every day into imaginary yet often real places.

    • Re:Not intrinsically bad? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday January 06, 2019 @01:24PM (#57913938)

      The idea that somehow "screens" are inherently bad for you, in a way that other things like paper are not, always seemed like the latest Luddism.

      The UK college seems to have made a remarkably sensible statement: spending too much time at sedentary activities can have health implications; it's important to balance these with other, more active activities.

    • Anything done to excess can be bad for you. That does not mean those things are intrinsically bad. Lack of exercise is bad, too much exercise is also bad. Overeating is bad, too much dieting is also bad. If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body. Except doing nothing is also bad for you, which leaves you stuck in a catch-22.

      The key is moderation. Do the things you enjoy like staring at a screen (and some of the things you don't

      • If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body.

        If that’s what you think my logic is, then there’s been a failure to communicate between us. I’m actually on the same page with you. I was merely pointing out the disconnect between the researchers acknowledging the known, ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle and linking those effects to this activity while simultaneously using the fact that the activity is socially accepted to dismiss those effects as harmful when they are linked to this activity.

        I agree with you (and them) that the way t

  • My wife and I made our kids:
    Play a sport
    Learn a musical instrument
    Do their homework
    Join scouts
    Learn another language
    Cook meals
    Do their own laundry
    Etc., etc., etc.

  • It's only when people are lead astray that's it's bad. See, totally not intrinsic. ;)

  • "Spending time looking at screens is not intrinsically bad for children's health,"

    It's not the looking at screens per se that is unhealthy, it's the sitting on their asses for 12 hours that is.

  • We already know back from the '60s-'70s, when education was only for the elite, that those students were reading more books than the average, their eyesight was deteriorating towards myopia. There is ample proof from current research that extensive device time is leading to whole crowds suffering from myopia."Not bad for children" is one of the stupidest and worst statements I've heard from medical experts in a very long time.

  • But then, neither is sugar.

  • I haven't been one to buy screen time is bad in itself. The majority of my kid's screen time is educational stuff. My oldest kid is getting more into the toy videos. However, they do grow tire of it after maybe a half hour and put it down to do something else. If my wife and I start working on something in the yard or doing something interesting they'll put it down and get involved in what we're doing. The only time they really throw a fit about putting it down is at bedtime, but it's usually the typic

  • Sure, not intrinsically bad, but there's still the opportunity cost of not doing something (more) worthwhile with their time.

  • Before the 1980's and the introduction of much more screen time in education the UK had generations with the skills to keep and run a global empire.
    With the introduction of more screen time the UK has not become an educational, computer super power over a generation into the 1990's.
    The UK consumer used Microsoft and Apple. Played lots of computer games.
    Screen time did nothing good for the UK but make a generation buy into US game, computer, software and OS exports.
    Enjoying too much computer time, compu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      A user with the name A Huxley should know better. No, that's not at all what happened in the 80s. In the 80s you were far more likely to come across home-grown machines like the Spectrum, the BBC, Dragon or things like Amstraad (yes, double-a) or RS Nimbus at the more professional end. Apple had essentially zero presence - their UK pricing then makes today's nonsense look like bargain of the century. The only American machine with any presence would be Commodore - VIC-20 and C64.

      Games too - mostly home g
      • Born in 1973, and your post matches my memories more than AHuxley's. With the possible exception that Atari and Intelivision dominated the scene before 1982.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mccalli ( 323026 )
          1972 and yes - you're right. Was more speaking about computers than consoles but you're completely correct and I used to stare at the pages for Atari and Intellivision enviously in the Argos catalogue...

  • No link to the paper. No mention on who paid for the study. Zero hits when searching for "screentime" and "Royal College of Paediatrics" in the same document query search.

    is it just me? or is somebody actively hiding something, deep in that buried text that we are just not supposed to figure out?

  • Was listening to the news on BBC radio, where it is a religiously held fact that computers are evil and bad and wrong. They really, really didn't like this result and the reporting changed as they had time to react. "isn't bad" quickly changed to "insufficient proof that it is bad" (which is true of course, but we're in can't prove a negative territory), which quickly changed to "more research needed into showing this is bad" and full commentary utterly ignoring the results and asking what we could do about

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