Comment by mabbo

5 days ago

Not all time spent interacting with a screen is "screen time".

The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff. It culminates in kids (and adults) who cannot mentally handle being bored- they must have the screen to relieve the horrors of the idle mind.

If achieving these same goals is easier without an app for you and your kids, then by all means, do that. But an app on a screen is a very powerful tool to structure and organize things. My daughter is still a bit young for this one, but I can see how useful it will be when she's a couple years older.

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mabbo

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ale42  5 days ago

> The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff.

That's totally true, but it's not the only point. Here we are also teaching kids that they need apps for anything they do. They should be able to do that themselves, before using an app to assist them. Otherwise they wont develop capabilities that they wont be able to acquire so easily at a later stage in their lives. If we take this approach to the extreme, why bother learning to write and do maths, when a computer can do it for you?