Screens Are Bad for Young Brains

https://parentology.com/its-official-screens-are-bad-for-young-brains/

by laurex • 6 years ago

156 212 6 years ago

parentology.com

satya71• 6 years ago

"It's a small study" -- likely to be dominated by noise rather than effects.

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

There is also a selection effect where small studies with boring results don't get articles written.

unishark• 6 years ago

Absolutely it's called publication bias.

Also studies who's results challenge the prevailing bias are much less likely to get published.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

bcrosby952• 6 years ago

I don't quite understand where people are finding the time to let their kids watch over 1 hour of TV (much less read to them) each day.

My wife and I work a standard 8 hour day. Kids wake up at 700. We leave for daycare/work by 800. Arrive at work by 9. Work until 6pm. Pick up kids. Get home by 7pm. Prepare and eat dinner. Bedtime routine starts at 8pm.

This leaves zero hours of dedicated kid time during the work week.

logical_proof• 6 years ago

There are quite a few stay at hone parents. Also what do you think is happening at most day cares? There is craft time for sure and recess but also at the understaffed places that are lower cost a lot of movie time.

riffraff2• 6 years ago

may I ask what do you mean with day care, and where do you live?

In my experience kids in nursery/kindergarden don't have movies at all, other than unusual circumstances, so I may have a biased world view, or simply not understand the context.

polishdude202• 6 years ago

I'm not the one to get between a man and his daily routine especially when it comes to family so please take this as a curious question.

How bad would it be to move the kids bedtime one hour later and have an hour or a half hour of reading time with them before bed?

goodcanadian• 6 years ago

Depends on the age of the kids, but I would go with pretty bad. Daycare was mentioned which suggests preschool. Kids of that age need 10-12 hours of sleep (it really depends on the child). Even starting the bedtime routine as late as 8pm sounds too late to me.

vincent-toups• 6 years ago

Sleep is incredibly important for kids and its also extremely hard to perturb - if we miss our kids bedtime by an hour he is a wreck.

karatestomp8• 6 years ago

They’re supposed to sleep 12ish hours, give or take, until a later age than you’d think. Lots of people do put their kids down later and get them up just as early but it’s not clearly the better choice.

zrail• 6 years ago

Depends on the kid but my sample size of two says very bad. If they don’t get at least 12 hours they’re a mess the next day and it starts a horrible cycle of not enough rest leading to it being hard to sleep.

syedkarim• 6 years ago

My data should not be considered normal. I have a six year-old who goes to sleep at around 10pm and wakes up at 7:30am. Sometimes later than 10pm. She's been doing this for at least a year. When younger, she wasn't a napper. Extreme attitude if she goes to bed after 11pm, but bed time between 9pm-10pm yields a fairly consistent mood for the day. If left in a dark room by herself at 8pm, she'll be awake for at least an hour. Now we just let herself read herself to sleep.

The four-year-old and two-year-old go to bed at 8:30pm and wake up 7am. They have stronger negative responses to going to bed later.

The 6-year-old reads by herself for a couple hours a day? And is read to for about an hour. I would guess she's in front of a screen for two hours per day. Maybe more when she dives into BrainPop or something.

adamredwoods2• 6 years ago

I don't understand this comment. Why do you expect us to have the same schedules and lifestyle?

tw1010• 6 years ago

People generally seem to have difficulty thinking about the diversity of types of lives on a population-level scale.

lonelappde5• 6 years ago

There's the 2hr commute that some people avoid and can use for TV.

There's all the weekend time.

There's jobs with only 30min unpaid lunch.

There's the hour of morning time that only needs half hour.

There's dinner prep where the kids might have free time.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Depending on where your daycare is, you could fit in half an hour of commute to and from, where the kid could watch something on the mobile phone...

Then there's dinner. Kid gets done quickly and is bored, off to watch the pad.

At least that's what happens with some kids I know.

vnnkov• 6 years ago

I do almost everything like you said. But my kid wakes up at 700, and we could play or read chapter from a book for 30 minutes when my wife working on breakfast. When i came back from work at 1900 i'll either play with wife/kid in the yard, or i could read books/draw/play with kid, while my wife working on dinner, or we switch here (i'm cooking, she playing).

And my daughter has 20 minutes screen time a day. She choose on what to spend it between game on mobile, game on PC or cartoons on TV.

lr4444lr2• 6 years ago

A 6 PM pickup is pretty late. Mine wake up between 5:30 - 6:00 typically, and the screen time eases the separation from parents when the babysitter arrives. (Yes, we tested to see if they were faking it to get screen time.) wife takes over again at around 4 PM, and bed time is at 7, which leaves about an hour for wife to get stuff done. She gets up at 5AM leaves the house by 6AM, so asking her to wait until 7:30 to start prepping for the next day would not only be impractical as relates to her having dinner and getting to bed, but would be too mentally exhausting to start doing evening work, leaving her no time at all to mentally unwind.

rebuilder3• 6 years ago

I remember when I first tried to schedule my days after we became a family of 3, thinking "A bit of organizing is going to sort this madness right out!". Cue my dismay when I realized that no, I'm simply 1.5 hours short each day of getting everything done and sleeping 8 hours.

It did get better later on as the kid grew up.

birken• 6 years ago

The full text of the study is behind a paywall [1], but from the abstract we can see that:

- It's 47 participants (out of 69 recruited)

- The only other variables controlled for are household income and age

The study's conclusion itself says:

The findings suggest further study is needed, particularly during the rapid early stages of brain development.

So we should all be interested in the results of that future study, but at this point nobody can really make a strong claim one way or the other.

1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

I continue to be surprised by the scope of these studies. Has nobody figured out that the screens are incidental and it is the content difference that matters? Listening to several hours of inane audio books every day is unlikely to be any better for a child's development.

Interaction. Competition. Surprise. These are the keys, not the lack of blinken lights

riffraff2• 6 years ago

Pedagogy is hard, but I am inclined to agree.

But it's really easy to put a kid in front of some cartoon and forget about them, they'll re-watch the same thing over and over and over, lacking interaction, competition and surprise. So "screen time" is probably a good enough proxy for "passive screen time", which would be bad by your definition too.

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

Yes of course it's important to note that screens are huge enablers of passive consumption.

But the way we name things is important. Calling it passive consumption yields all sorts of interesting questions. Is the sickness of Facebook/Instagram any different from that of Netflix/YouTube? How about than Fox news? Does it actually matter what age you are? How much is bad? Does live theater count? What about a concert?

Parents deserve the nuanced result/questions when deciding what is right for their children and selves (if indeed my supposition is correct ish). Calling it screen time is lazy science until it is shown to be unique to screens (which would be an immense surprise to me)

andrepd• 6 years ago

Since you've "figured it out" I assume you have done a complete study to come to that conclusion? Otherwise your hunch is as good as mine.

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

I've certainly not figured it out, but I think I'm allowed to make criticisms of a study and how it's reported. And further to describe what I think is a reasonable guess at the underlying cause. It's likely my guess is incomplete or even wrong. But I think it's even more likely that screens are a bogeyman.

teunispeters2• 6 years ago

I seem to have read a number of reports confirming that list. Challenge - but not overwhelming challenge - is really good for minds. All ages. And a passive screen does not challenge anyone ... without real world interaction...

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

Yes challenge is much better suited than surprise in this list. Thank you

Reedx2• 6 years ago

Right. The brain is like a muscle, and if it's not being engaged or challenged, then what would you expect?

You could replace these studies with: "Not using the brain is bad for the brain."

The screen itself is basically a red herring. What's on the screen matters. There's a big difference between interacting with a puzzle or strategy game and passively consuming a video, for example.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

The thing is your brain is 'stimulated' but not deep enough or the right way. So everybody feels attracted to it.

jacobolus12• 6 years ago

not the lack of blinken lights

I can’t agree with this.

Stimulating lights and sounds which distract attention and make it more difficult to focus on a problem or task are actively getting in the way of learning.

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

You're describing a situation where the screen is a secondary activity in the background. A conversation by adults could be just as distracting and yet you hopefully wouldn't advise that adults conversing is harmful to childhood development

ujjjujjj7• 6 years ago

There is a difference: Kids are really bad in learning from a screen and no one means with 'screen' a wikipedia article.

screen = tv with tons of ads, basic entertainment, simple mobile games with tons of ads etc.

Misdicorl8• 6 years ago

I think most people (parents) do not in fact distinguish between screen activities. In particular, games are bucketed into the same box as tv regardless of the game.

I'm not aware of any studies indicating learning something from a webpage is any less effective than learning it from a book. I'd be interested to see studies targeting that. Even more so if it had breakdowns by age

aeternum• 6 years ago

A more skeptical interpretation of the paper (worth a read): https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...

cwyers• 6 years ago

5. The abstract reports the study found significant associations between language scores and the ScreenQ, giving the impression that these are robust, whereas the main text notes that these associations are no longer significant when household income was included as a covariate. Since many readers only read the abstract, this is misleading.

I think "misleading" is a generous way of putting it, frankly.

o_p• 6 years ago

Yeah and TV will make you blind and videogames will give you epilepsy.. I heard so much nonsense when something new gets wide adoption, stop forcing the old world into your kids

Minor49er• 6 years ago

Do you think that raising a child in front of a TV is a good idea?

criddell• 6 years ago

If you are actually asking if television can be part of a healthy child's life, I would say absolutely. For example, I watched Sesame Street in the 1970's and my kids watched it in the 2000's and the quality was still great.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

Eh, in moderation it's fine. My kids get a couple hours of screen time a day, maybe even a little more sometimes. Both are at the top of their respective classes in school.

But I've also been careful to keep them aware of the consequences of their various choices (screen time, junk food, etc) and they self-regulate pretty effectively. Although my daughter is currently addicted to fantasy novels and I may need to help her dial that back a little so she gets enough sleep at night :).

karatestomp8• 6 years ago

Not being outside enough at a young age probably does give you nearsightedness, so it's kind of related.

The key seems to be exposure to bright sunlight including the UV part so you could watch TV outside and I guess that'd work (modern windows are often UV blocking so cheating and watching in front of a window might not do it)

To be fair, reading or doing anything else indoors while not getting outside much is just as bad, though.

adamredwoods2• 6 years ago

The review of 33 studies concluded reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance as opposed to reading an actual book. Even stranger was that students had a more realistic assessment of their own skills when reading a paper document. This only held true for non-fiction reading material, leading the Hechinger Report to remark, “go ahead and read Jane Austen on a Kindle.”

So non-fiction screen time is bad?

It's studies like these that get parents like me to get all riled up but with no answers. I should start a research that tests if too much media consumption by parents leads to erratic child development.

lonelappde5• 6 years ago

This smells of p-hacking. Split along enough dimensions and one of them will look barely significant under the wrong model.

teddyh• 6 years ago

— What other tools for creativity and learning do you arbitrarily limit? Do you have a hard rule on “paper time”?¹

1. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification

Related blog posts:

http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification

http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Some of the kids experienced parents reading often to them, and little screen time. Other kids who’d had lots of screen time (more than one hour per day, the max recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the WHO) throughout early childhood.

If this description is accurate (and I haven't gone to the source and I'll admit that popular media descriptions of scientific studies are often quite bad), the study experimental group seems likely to differ from the control group in two ways (parental reading time and screen time), and the one which isn't screen time is already known to have a significant effect of exactly the type being attributed to screen time. Which would make the study useless for drawing conclusions about screen time. It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.

If more screen time leads to less white matter development (as the study cautiously indicates), the results might be truly detrimental.

So, even with it's conclusion on screen time taken at face value (which it looks like to shouldn'tbe), the study indicates an effect which, if true, “might be truly detrimental”, but the headline is the total clickbait: “IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS”.

keytarsolo• 6 years ago

It's quite possible for children to have parents reading to them often and more than an hour a day of screen time.

I wonder if this is the case? I think you're quite right about the fact that it's more likely the time with parents than the screentime. But I don't think there will ever really be a chance to study kids whose time with parents and time with screens differs.

My kids are pretty young, but because they're in bed so early there just isn't enough time in the day for them to have dinner, a story and even an hour of TV after pre-school. I suspect that's the case for most kids of two working parents.

AndrewUnmuted• 6 years ago

I was born in 89. Until I turned 9 or 10, one of my parents would read to me every night, and I had over an hour of screen time just about every day too.

That was probably not as common back then, since it was hard to get an hour in unless you were really into computers and happened to have one.

Today, it’s hard to find a parent who will read to their kid every night. Who will read them good stuff like poetry, the classics, Greek mythology, etc., Not Harry Potter or whatever. It’s also hard to find a kid today who isn’t exposed to at least an hour of screen time. And that’s not time being social or productive like screens meant for kids like me - it’s time for them to be pacified by some crap manufactured by Netflix.

The people here trying to apologize for their parenting choices and accusing the stats of having a twisted ulterior motive, are making some puzzling remarks. Haven’t these people not realized how much harder it is today to be a good parent than it was in prior eras? They should have thought of that before breeding children.

Obviously the way screens are utilized today is going to warp kids brains in some difficult to measure ways. But better parenting would probably offset that tremendously.

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

I read to my kids every night, until they could start reading to me and then to themselves. They also get plenty of screen time. My kids are doing great in school. This article seems like complete BS to me. At best it compares kids with lots of reading to kids with no reading - we already know this makes a difference. To say that the kids with no reading had lots of screen time and then to blame only the screen time seems disingenuous. This is a boat load of confirmation bias by smug assholes that know better than you.

thebean11• 6 years ago

How long is preschool? My guess would be like 5 hours of time between schools out and bed, but that could be way off.

freepor2• 6 years ago

It’s been obvious for years that the kids who are sitting silently through 3 hour weddings glued to their iPads are not developing any of the skills like creating fun, making friends, or being disciplined on proper conduct. It’s great for the parents though, but if you give a kid an iPad you should be aware that you’re damaging their brain, the same way that ice cream damages their health (that doesn’t mean kids should never have iPads or ice cream).

satyrnein4• 6 years ago

Letting your kid stare at an iPad for 3 hours at a wedding is damaging their brains? This is a bold claim and requires evidence. The article is talking about daily screen time, not the occasional one-off.

karatestomp8• 6 years ago

Some of those kids might be coming up fine but a bunch of them are growing up unable to behave without constantly being entertained by YouTube. It's why their parents give them the devices to begin with—it's work to train them initially, and there's some unpleasantness and inconvenience involved, and giving them your phone works immediately—and why they have to keep giving them to them even when they're older.

freepor2• 6 years ago

No, having a kid who you've never bothered to socialize because using the iPad is easier is damaging their brains. My kids are much more disruptive at adult social events than their iPad-addled peers, but 100x better-behaved than those kids would be if you took away their iPads. Sadly, the expected standard of behavior is tending towards the iPad zombies, it's mostly the older generation who sees my kids' petty transgressions as "kids being kids."

sadness23• 6 years ago

Failing to improve or temporarily affecting mood != damaging

wazoox3• 6 years ago

There are many meta-studies demonstrating that repeatedly for the past 20 years. TV is bad for children. Video games are bad. Phones are bad, and tablets, and consoles, and computers. It's bad for their mood, their IQ, their sleep, it gives them obesity, ADHD, it's bad any way you look at it; it's even bad when the parents are watching the phone instead of interacting with their children...

Here's one meta study:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

"This study suggests that education and public health professionals should consider screen media use supervision and reduction as strategies to improve the academic success of children and adolescents."

here's another one:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263708644_Media_Use...

"Our results indicated a small significant relationship between media use and ADHD-related behaviors."

bpizzi3• 6 years ago

Honest question: why don't you include books as a media?

umvi• 6 years ago

Same reason vegetables aren't grouped together with soda and candy and chips, despite all of them being "food"

jacobolus12• 6 years ago

From what I can tell, listening to books read aloud is by far the most effective and efficient way to promote child language development. Listening comprehension is a foundational prerequisite for most kinds of intellectual work.

In comparison watching videos, playing tablet games, etc. comes nowhere close.

The differences are (1) the language in books read aloud is more often tailored to the child’s comprehension level, because parents can figure out whether books are too easy or too hard; (2) the range of grammar, vocabulary, styles, ideas, etc. is much wider in books than most kids get from other kinds of media; (3) the book is not a fixed medium but also has a live interpreter who can define or skip difficult words, repeat sentences rephrased a different way, answer questions, ask questions, go back to cross-reference earlier parts of the book, point specific things out in the illustrations, etc.

Anecdotally, the preschool kids around me whose parents read to them for 1+ hours/day seem to end up advancing about twice as fast in their language skills as their peers. YMMV.

xorfish3• 6 years ago

Did the study only compare differences between siblings?

There are so many studies that are wortless because they don't controll for the environment.

Besides there is quite a bit of evidence that games and especially competitive games are good for the brain.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...

wazoox3• 6 years ago

Yes, these studies and particularly meta-studies control for other parameters, social, economic, etc.

gpanders• 6 years ago

Hours of TV watched also correlates with violent/bullying behavior in adolescence and adulthood:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/295/5564/2468.full

Deferred imitation is a powerful thing. "Brain Rules for Baby" is a great resource for new parents that covers this topic pretty comprehensively.

mcshicks• 6 years ago

I raised my kids without cable or broadcast tv, and they had limited access to computer games. However I did have a tv, later a digital projector and we would watch vhs tapes and dvds. They had a tandy 102 they could play with as much as they wanted. I think the problem is not so much screens, but a screen activity without a defined beginning and end, and in isolation. I had a lot of fun watching star trek, etc with my kids. Later as teenagers there was streaming etc, and at that point well they are just like me. The only kind of hard thing is when they felt kind of left out, like not knowing the shows other kids were talking about, or the games etc. I know it's not a easy choice for everyone to make, but at least for me I think it was a pretty good one. I more or less grew up watching tv every night, and what can I say, I know the lyrics to many tv sitcoms. It didn't wreck my life or anything, but it certainly didn't help it.

superkuh2• 6 years ago

It's like once people have children something flips in their brains and they become unable to think rationally about perceived dangers.

Screens are not bad. Screens display things. What is on the screen and how the child is interacting with that defines what is good or bad. Screens just are.

And re: this study, when I was a kid in the 90s I used my screens to read books (and still do). It's not either or when it comes to books and screens.

satyrnein4• 6 years ago

Do you think the AAP recommends a limit of one hour of screen time because parents are unable to think rationally?

I personally am a little skeptical that these studies have no confounding factors, but I don't think it's fair to blame parents for what doctors, researchers, and clickbait authors are saying.

superkuh2• 6 years ago

There's few groups more in the thrall of the irrational desires of parents than the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Waterluvian4• 6 years ago

The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts. I don't believe they have any idea what they're talking about and don't think they're capable of converting their research into practical advice that does good.

I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure." That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn't just on their n'th generation of, "everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice."

Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation. You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works.

It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn't the healthiest.

I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet.

So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you're doing a kind of harm that you're systemically incapable of measuring. I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.

xorfish3• 6 years ago

last time I looked there wasn't much evidence for breastfeeding when you controlled for other factors.

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2014/02/28/sibling-study-f...

jacobush• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you are advocating here. (Letting children fall asleep to Netflix???)

Waterluvian4• 6 years ago

I'm advocating against these studies being turned into blanket statement advice that can do real harm.

"IT’S OFFICIAL: SCREENS ARE BAD FOR YOUNG BRAINS" does harm.

If you want me to advocate for something, it would be, "find a balance, demonize nothing, you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it."

cle2• 6 years ago

Imagine these statements in an engineering context:

"Linked lists are bad."

"Java is bad."

"Databases are bad."

As an engineer, those are useless to me for making day-to-day decisions, because they're obviously made with some implicit context, and I need to evaluate them in a probably-different context. There are cases where linked lists are bad, and cases where they are great.

The same thing applies to these parenting generalizations. When some parenting guru or doctor says "x is bad", before we can fit that advice into our lives we have to know: how bad? In what scenarios is it worse, in which scenarios does it not matter, and in which scenarios is it better? What's the context in which they reached that conclusion? Does that context apply to me?

And all of that is just way too much effort for me to evaluate, so those recommendations don't carry much weight to me (they still carry weight, just not much). I trust my observations and my ability to understand my situations better than blanket statements.

tobmlt• 6 years ago

Right with you. I’ve watched them manipulate my wife and guilt her into so much stress over such things. (I’m a bit to much of an asshole (with classical statistics training at the level of grad school econometrics) to be anything other than bemused at best by their bald faced claims) No amount of deconstructing the studies and deconstructing the health care we receive can mitigate the doctor who tells her our son needs x and not y. Not to say that scientific medicine isn’t amazing. Just saying sometimes it gets ahead of itself.

dabbledash• 6 years ago

Yeah, I found actual medical professionals (even the lactation consultants I dealt with) to be pretty chill about breastfeeding and formula. Online mommy culture is a scourge though, and is ridiculous about the benefits (real, imagined, and wildly overstated) of breastfeeding.

jacobolus12• 6 years ago

You seem to have a serious grudge about breast feeding vs. formula. I am sorry that was so traumatic for you. But it seems to me that this is much more to do with “new (yuppie) parent culture” than with the medical establishment or research community.

Having spent a bunch of time around new parents, my observation is that most of them are way too hyped up about trivial threats. If a breast-feeding mother drinks a glass of wine once every few days the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs. If the baby plays with many types of toys marked “ages 3+” while the parents are sitting watching, the risk to the baby is trivial. If the baby climbs up on a play structure marked “ages 4–7” while the parents are standing watching, the risk of permanent injury is trivial. If a 2-year-old walks around barefoot on the sidewalk, the risks are trivial. Etc.

The same kind of tendencies bring us the anti-vax movement, a rush to sanitize all surfaces in the home, excessive fears about kidnapping, theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk, and so on.

New parents’ (and people’s in our society more generally) risk assessment and concept of hygiene is excessively black–and–white.

But this is not the fault of “modern medicine”.

0xEFF3• 6 years ago

The grudge against the breast is best is legitimate and valid. My son was just born in a baby friendly hospital 6 weeks premature. Mom was pumped full of fluids for days before the delivery and they built up in her lungs. The day after delivery, she woke up to the cardio and respiratory alarms going off at 6am and she was talking nonsense to the nurse, presumably because she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. That day, the nurses kept coming into her room and the top priority was to get her to pump. The top priority. I finally had to go talk to the charge nurse and demand they look at her lungs because she obviously couldn’t breathe.

So yes. The hyper focus on breast feeding is a problem. Baby friendly is often hostile to the mother. The medical community is to blame while in the hospital prioritizing pumping over breathing.

bgschiller• 6 years ago

I think you might be underestimating how hard breastfeeding is pushed in US hospitals. Our second night in the hospital with my son, my wife's milk hadn't come in yet.

Our son was screaming because he was hungry. The nurse kept saying this was good, that it would encourage breast milk production. It took several tries to convince her that, while it might be good in the long run, we needed some food for this baby.

This was a consistent experience with all nurses we dealt with. Interestingly, breastfeeding specialists tended to be more understanding.

jacobolus12• 6 years ago

More directly to the topic of this discussion: the problem with screens is that they are a very easy tool for making children shut up and stop bothering the adults, and a much more difficult tool to make into a challenging and thoughtful experience. As a result many adults lean on using screens to distract their children much more than they absolutely need, and end up reliant on them. And the kids end up using screens in a way that is wasting a ton of time and not helping their development.

The material on screen is very often (from what I can observe just walking around town and seeing kids looking at them) grossly inappropriate for the child’s current level – either too simple and repetitive or too advanced and incomprehensible – but the sounds, colors, and especially movement are so exciting as pure distraction that kids will sit entranced, whether or not they are learning anything. The overstimulation from the screen is addictive enough for the kids that the kids will start to fuss and cry when the screen is removed, and when given the choice the screen will crowd out other toys and activities.

It is probably possible to make a screen a meaningful learning experience for young kids, but few parents (especially the ones who are using the screen to get a break from childcare) have the time to research and personally vet material to figure that out.

If a kid watches 30m of Mr. Rogers every day, they’re going to be fine. But the kids watching 2 hours of YouTube low-budget animated nursery rhymes on loop, or watching endless unboxing videos, or playing a too-easy iPad game, when they could otherwise be playing with and learning about the physical world, are really missing out.

This is not to say that kids shouldn’t regularly spend some time entertaining themselves while the parents do something else. But if they can learn to do so with a wimmelbook or some crayons or some blocks or a cardboard box.... they’re usually going to be learning more than if stuck in front of a TV.

bcrosby952• 6 years ago

Our hospital had a 50 year old lactation consultant that called formula poison when she heard our pediatrician recommended us to supplement breastfeeding with formula.

We decided not to even try with our twins, because it took an hour of pumping to produce half an ounce, every doctor we saw still pushed breastfeeding on us.

There's immense peer pressure surrounding it too. People love feeling superior to each other.

beagle36• 6 years ago

It’s most definitely the medical establishment.

There are similar issues with the “back to sleep” campaign - the risk of SIDS apparently is indeed Slightly lower for babies sleeping on their back, but it is only very slightly lower, and some babies will not sleep on their back unless they are exhausted which causes other non trivial issues. If you actually look into the “back to sleep” study data, it is much, much weaker than proponents imply it is.

And yet, every nurse in the hospital kept telling us with religious fervor to not even think of letting the baby fall asleep on their stomach. I was so impressed that I was sure the evidence was overwhelming. But after a week with a hardly sleeping newborn (relatively speaking), I decided to look into it myself. You should to, rather than trust the “experts”. (Or a random internet post like mine, for that matter)

ebg132• 6 years ago

theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk

I'm with you completely except for this one. Cigarette smoke feels like it sucks the air out of a nonsmoker's lungs from quite a wide radius. A nonsmoker can smell an outdoor cigarette from a block away, and it doesn't smell good even at that distance. Up close it makes people involuntarily gag. Not recognizing that seems pretty blind.

Reedx2• 6 years ago

Those kind of overreactions and bulldozer parenting are in large part the result of 24/7 news, which made unusual events seem common and created an environment of neverending fear.

Additionally, as the world became safer and sanitized, we became more distanced from injury and it seems more traumatic. Parents are more afraid and focused on the downsides. As well as the fact that we have fewer kids than in the past. The potential consequences are greater.

It's also worth noting that the body and brain are anti-fragile. That is, they become stronger and more robust when challenged. Weaker in the absence of it. The end result of all this sanitization, safetyism and overprotection is a fragile human. One that is less able to cope with the challenges and messiness and nuance of the real world.

That negative feedback loop has led to quite a mess. The Coddling of the American Mind does an excellent deep dive on all this: https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...

gvjddbnvdrbv4• 6 years ago

theatrical demonstrations of disgust near smokers outside on the sidewalk, and so on.

We are disgusted because the poison in cigarette smoke is extremely harmful to young lungs.

Smokers should have to go into designated areas they should have no right to pollute the air of those around them.

stOneskull• 6 years ago

hyped up about trivial threats

and really, this is the worst for kids

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

If the baby sleeps in the same bed with the mother the risk to the baby is trivial, unless the mother is an a severe alcoholic or high on drugs.

Yep, this is just as obvious as you want it to be.

And yet there's a massive government advertising campaign taking out billboards with the message "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother and your baby will die". Check out the posters in the BART system sometime.

I find this incredibly disgusting. Nothing can justify this official message. But there it is out there anyway. The government, spending your money to hurt you.

refurb• 6 years ago

It seems like in developing nations were getting into the realm of diminishing returns around health risks (obviously not everything, but a lot of things).

Go back 50 years and the things like nutrition, vaccination, etc had huge benefit in risk reduction.

Now that we’ve tackled those, we go after the next set. Now it’s breast feeding, screen time, etc. we put a similar focus on those but the returns are much smaller and sometimes questionable.

Is breast feeding better? Sure. Is your child going not going to reach their full potential if you use formula? No. Not worth getting stressed over.

dragonsky• 6 years ago

Nope. Medical staff effectively saying you must feed your baby now or it will die three hours after it was born and after a 24 hour labour tends to focus your mind and scare the crap out of you.

There is just as much unsubstantiated fear generated by medical staff when it comes to kids as everywhere else in the community.

Seems that just having been a child qualifies somebody to comment on how you choose to raise your children.

Too much attention and you are a helicopter parent, not enough and you are neglectful. God forbid you let them play in the park without you being there.

rstuart4133• 6 years ago

He is commenting on the depressingly short 1/2 life of recommendations from the medical fraternity, and he is spot on about breast feeding recommendations having changed recently. I'm guessing the abandoned recommendations got their start when Nestlé dressed up their sales women in WHO uniforms and instructed them to tell African woman "formula is best", and the medical fraternity understandably went basaltic, but they also went too far. Now that has come back to bite them.

Medicine is not unique in it's "accepted dogma" having a 1/2 life of course, all sciences do. But it's horribly short. From https://hms.harvard.edu/news/medicine-changing-world :

Today, the half-life of medical knowledge is currently about 18-24 months, and it is projected that in about four years that half-life will be only 73 days.

That's from a mob trying to flog education so it's going to be an exaggeration, but it's still short no matter who measures it. By comparison Engineering knowledge 1/2 life is till measured in decades, although I expect they conveniently leave software engineering out of that.

Overall I agree with him, the doctors are far too eager to hard sell the latest advice in some paper. I guessing that's because selling advice is how they make their money. That behaviour has its downsides.

Swizec2• 6 years ago

constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet

I don't have kids but I was 8 when my sister was 0 so I like to think of myself as having seen how things go.

Kids are very resilient. They'll raise themselves if they have to. Just keep them fed and sheltered and you're fine. The more you leave them to their own devices, the more confident and self-sufficient adults they'll become.

Our great grandparents raised their kids by letting them run around in the fields "helping" while everyone else was working and everyone turned out just fine. You do not have to optimize every little second of their lives.

It's okay for kids to struggle a little in a nurturing environment. You are not their butler.

carapace3• 6 years ago

(Parentology: Scientology for Parents?)

Anyway, I just want to point out that the medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo (except surgery (but then there was that study of placebo knee surgery...))

And how can you "do science" to parenting without multi-generational "longitudinal" (I think that's the word) studies with control groups?

Can we compare e.g. Amish children with Sentinelese children with tech-saturated children?

(The people of N. Sentinel Island are likely the closest thing we have to a control group for human society.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are one of the world's last uncontacted peoples.
...the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on the island.

ujjjujjj7• 6 years ago

wtf?

"medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo"

What? Is there anything at all from your side which resembles an argument here?

What beef do you have with 'medical system' that you think that it is as good as just guessing everything?

meddlepal• 6 years ago

A lot of medicine is basically cargo-culting or at least it feels that way because Doctor's rarely talk about the curve of how doing something will affect an outcome down the road. Are we talking about 50% chance of bad thing happening or 1% chance in 30 years? The former is serious, but the latter is probably one of those things most people would be very happy gambling on if it means to prevent that one percent they're gonna need to take a bunch of medications with all kinds of fun possible side-effects and interactions.

ujjjujjj7• 6 years ago

I have seen parents bring their kids to a nice holiday, sit them down on the table with a tablet.

This boy actually missed the dance performance from the native people. Where do you draw your line?

When does it become just normal vs. neglecting your child? And i'm not talking about neglect in a directly hurtful way, i mean it in a way that the potential this kid could have had in the future is between university vs. non university.

Whats <kid> up to? He watches tv. Oh so why does he not play games? Or with others? Or why does he not have any interesests etc.?

"So !@#$ you Parentology." there are people out who smoke in the same room as their kids. People who do not take any precautions and have a dead kid because the shelf collapsed. You think they do the articles? Those are click bait articles.

dmje2• 6 years ago

You're obviously right about badly formed science, and of course stuff should be verified before it's shouted about. I also have personal experience (well, personal via my wife!) with the whole breastfeeding thing - you're right, there are some BreastNazis out there and they do need calling out, for sure.

Having said that - people have managed to parent their kids for ever without screens. Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.

It's kind of blindingly obvious to me - even without the evidence of science - that putting a screen in front of your kid falls short in so many ways compared to how it used to be - maybe encouraging them to play, properly, with blocks / Lego, soft toys or books. This is so obviously more likely to enable them to build their spacial awareness or encourage reading than staring mindlessly at YouTube Kids, surely? Not least of all it will give them some understanding of how to interact with the real world around them. Plus - and this is a big one for me - real, quality time with parents actually interacting, properly, with their kids - talking to them, reading to them, playing with them - is lost! You can pretend you're "browsing YouTube together" or whatever but we all know that's b/s - there's no meaningful interaction between you and your kids in doing that.

You want space in the evening to be an adult? Sure - get your kids to bed at 7pm every night so they have a routine and you get to have grown-up time! You don't need a screen to do that shit - you just need to parent with conviction and stick to your guns. It's hard, really hard, but it's never been anything else. Expecting it to be somehow made easy with an iPad is a fools game.

Final thing - we gotta be really careful with the "I don't believe in experts any more" thing. That way ...is Trump.... ;-)

untog• 6 years ago

Why are we suddenly so reliant on this shit like it's some kind of third arm? I just don't get it.

Because our lives are different. It was overwhelmingly common for a parent to stay at home a generation or two ago (yes, it was almost always the mother but there’s no reason that would have to be the case today). But plenty of families, my own included, need both parents to be working in order to get by.

Simply put, we’re paid less than people used to be. Housing is more expensive than it used to be. Transport is more expensive than it used to be. So we have to work harder and our personal lives suffer.

coldtea• 6 years ago

The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts.

That's a valid sentiment. We should be suspicious of experts in non-hard sciences (in hard sciences a proof is a proof). They often get things wrong, they are often paid by industry, and they often follow ideological or other fashions.

But the suspicion should also be cautious, and you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".

I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over "breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure.

What "harm" was that, and who said they are wrong? For one, there are several 100s of millennia of evolution backing beyond breast feeding, and feeding a baby is at the very core of evolutionary processes, so if anything one should began being suspicious of any novel industrial formulas made for profit...

Not sure why screens wouldn't be bad for "young brains". Evolutionary speaking almost everything that's not part of 1000000s of years of evolutionary history and takes such a huge time each day and such huge changes in lifestyle (from eyesight/brain used outdoors to eyesight/attention devoted to a backlit screen for hours each day), will be bad in one way or another -- unless it actively corrects for another bad thing (like how housing corrects for exposure to raw weather elements).

marcus_holmes2• 6 years ago

The problems with science as it is practised now are well-known on HN. The system is broken in ways that are designed to produce erroneous newsworthy blanket statements like the one in this article.

This article was not produced in order to help parents. The "science" behind it was not produced in order to help parents. The article was written to get clicks. The "science" was done to get citations/funding/tenure.

It is entirely appropriate as a parent to tell these "experts" to go and stand in the corner and think deeply about what they've done, and only come out again when they're ready to actually do something useful for society.

CathedralBorrow2• 6 years ago

you don't seem to have much of an argument, just "I dislike what the experts say".

I don't think that's a very generous interpretation, and your paraphrasing feels like you decided early on that you could safely dismiss everything that person wrote.

Gatsky2• 6 years ago

Surprised this rant is the top comment, seeming to put the feelings and convenience of the parents in prime position. You may think that is ok, but it is not the basis of proper argument.

It’s really quite simple - have we have proven that formula is non-inferior to breast milk over the life time of the child? No. Is there some evidence that it is inferior? Yes. What is the size of the difference? Not clear, but probably depends on the child. Who decides what goes into formula? A for-profit company.

For the health system to encouraging breast feeding seems eminently reasonable under these conditions.

in_cahoots• 6 years ago

If the benefits were large they’d be much easier to measure. From my research, it seems to amount to 1-2 fewer colds as a baby, if that.

Contrast that with what pregnant women are told from doctors and lactation consultants: that breastfeeding helps with bonding, dental structure, allergies, weight gain in babies, weight loss for mothers, etc. They’re pushed to websites like KellyMom that cherry-pick studies supporting these outcomes, and shamed for choosing alternatives. They’re told that just one bottle in the first month can ruin their chances of breastfeeding successfully.

Many hospitals belong to an initiative that pushes breastfeeding on new mothers to the extent that they have to get a prescription to give formula. You can’t put your baby in a nursery anymore because the baby needs access to the breast round the clock. But heaven forbid the mother fall asleep holding her baby! Babies go home from the hospital to mothers who are exhausted from birth and trying to feed round the clock. Their milk supply hasn’t come in yet and their babies leave the hospital having lost 5-10% of their birth weight. Some of these babies never get enough milk, and they die while their mothers are still told ‘Breast is Best’. Others feel shame, embarrassment, and inadequate for not nursing their children, from professionals and laypeople who have internalized this message.

All this to prevent a couple of colds in a baby. It’s insane.

analog31• 6 years ago

My kids are high school and college age now. The impression I formed of "parenting" advice is that anything works if you're unusually organized and self disciplined, otherwise it will fail and you'll find yourself being blamed.

One thing I learned: Any advice that starts with "just" should be ignored. Smile and nod.

micmil• 6 years ago

How about instead of bitching at experts you bitch at the idiots that pump up and propagandize the results of one study that vaguely adheres to their predetermined outcome?

Kind of thought that this site would attract a slightly more intelligent group of people than that.

polishdude202• 6 years ago

The first part of what you're saying sort of aligns with one of the rules in "12 Rules for Life". Don't let your kids do something that'll make you hate them. Which essentially boils down to take care of yourself so that you can be the best parent to your child when it matters most.

lm28469• 6 years ago

It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media
who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child

But that's your problem, not science's. You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better. If the fact is "breast feeding is better than formulas" and you can't breast feed just get over it...

WarOnPrivacy• 6 years ago

Op's comment is about harm done by people who directly interact with new parents:

they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of "Breast is Best" posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they're a failed parent because they used formula

Your response inferred the OP desired scientists to lie - but that's a notion you introduced to the conversation:

You seem very resentful, do what works for you but don't expect scientists to lie to make you feel better.

rijoja• 6 years ago

Yeah and maybe watching Netflix would give an improvement say decades down the road from being exposed to extreme amounts of culture at an early age.

Maybe being exposed to order of magnitudes higher level of culture will make them build an utopia. How could they rule that out?

pergadad2• 6 years ago

Anecdote is not data and data is not annecdote. But you have one experience and I have the opposite:

I am 100% pro tech, showing the kids how to use smartphones constructively, etx. We were controlling what our kids watch to avoid in particular all the modern crap pumper onto YouTube or various American TV channels - and yet our four year old developed serious attention issues.

It's not gone but it's MUCH better since the TV is banned to only be on on Friday evenings. Choose your own path forward but I am happy I managed to help my son be a more balanced person, rather than park him in front of the TV just to have my own 'quiet time'. We read more, the parents themselves drop their phones more often - all in all family life is much happier. I just wish my wife would accept to get fully rid of the thing. Spending time with kids is enjoyable, especially when they are not unbearably begging for TV TV TV or can't focus on a thing longer than 20 seconds.

That said - not sure what you're going on about breastfeeding but the evidence that it's good for kids is pretty overwhelming. You shouldn't feel guilty if it doesn't work out for one reason or the other, but breastfeeding is a positive for the child.

robbrown4512• 6 years ago

What if they are video chatting with a relative? Is that bad because it is a screen?

If you are going to make an exception for such things (as they usually do), you really need to step back and look at the whole idea of lumping all things screen based as a single entity, "screen time."

Is it possible that the real problem isn't that it is in a screen, but it is the type of content, the passiveness vs. interactivity, the intentionally addictive nature of games and video content, etc? And maybe the likely correllation between kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and parents who aren't very interested in interacting with their kids.

dcolkitt2• 6 years ago

Decades of twin studies, consistently replicated across dozens of large-scale studies, have found that family environment explains effectively 0% of the variance in adult IQ. In contrast, genetic heritability explains well over 50% of the cross-sectional population variance[1].

Always keep this indisputably true fact in mind when reading association studies like the one in the link. In fact one simple exercise is to imagine a close analogy between intelligence and height. After all, the structure of adult IQ inheritance closely matches that of adult height[2].

Imagine if you read a study that found that kids whose parents frequently played basketball were several inches taller. Would you conclude that basketball causally increases height? Of course not. Given what we know about the highly genetic hereditary nature of height, there's a much more logical conclusion. Tall parents pass along their genes and tend to have tall kids. Tall people are more likely to play basketball. Therefore basketball players are more likely to have tall children.

When you have highly genetically inherited traits like IQ or height, association studies can find all sorts of superficially compelling ways to supposedly improve the trait. However all of these findings are basically worthless unless we control for genetics, for example by pairing siblings.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160800... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...

rlonn• 6 years ago

And as we all know, IQ is a perfect measure of mental capability and the only thing that really matters in the end. Self-confidence, ambition, passion, knowledge - that's just balderdash!

dcolkitt2• 6 years ago

Twin studies on personality factors[1] find that genetic heritability explains 40-50% of the cross-sectional variance in adults, while the impact of family environment is non-significant. All of those factors you listed show a nearly identical genetic pre-disposition as IQ itself.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6494....

sys_64738• 6 years ago

They've been saying this since the computer revolution started back in 1976.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

How do they account for the correlation that kids on screens are the ones that have less parental involvement?

sadness23• 6 years ago

Our kids would definitely be worse off without screens. We don't have time to give them their ideal levels and kinds stimulation, and screens are a tool which helps their parents' sanity. Us, as their parents being driven insane would adversely affect these children. One of them has special needs and the other 2 crave constant input. Overall screens are the lesser evil, and they're all doing just fine. It's all contextual and this article is nowhere near holistic enough.

lonelappde5• 6 years ago

Why can't the two provide input for each other? How did our grandparents with 8 kids do it?

sadness23• 6 years ago

Context is everything

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

5 kids here, ages 1-8, with the school aged ones at or near the top of their class reading-wise.

Basic points on how we use technology: -totally disable the internet before the age of 6 -find all the interesting ABC / Songs / etc. that are interesting and download them locally (ssyoutube) -Always differentiate between the activities, i.e. are they consuming, creating, or playing with content?

On the last point, it is interesting that the kids will sometimes not want to play the iPad if they aren’t allowed to watch ‘shows’ Once it becomes another toy, instead of an addictive consumer-driven device, it gets used just like the other things in the house.

Can answer questions if there are any>

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

Why did you have so many kids and so close together in age? Or are they adopted?

Are you able to work or are you a stay at home mom?

If you work, does your company or government provide assistance/aid?

I hear people with 1 or 2 kids struggling, I don't think I've met any with 5 kids so young.

lonelappde5• 6 years ago

2 years between kids is quite common. Sometimes you get a multiple and sometimes "the last one" isn't a "one".

aaron695• 6 years ago

This article is absolutely incorrect.

Go to the source journal article (Not CNN, it also is blatantly incorrect), it does not say what they claim.

What this article claims is phenomenal. Why would you trust parentology.com with a discovery that would win a noble prize?

To me, if you trust this article and use it to justify "Screens Are Bad for Young Brains" you clearly are not looking at the evidence. And that to me means you are not thinking at a low level what's best for a child. That's bad parenting.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

Yeah, but they're bad for my brain as an adult. Video games and Netflix occupy 90% of my free time, which I would rather spend on hobbies, family, or exercise. But I am habituated.

lonelappde5• 6 years ago

Cancel Pause Netflix justbfor a month. It's super easy to go back if you don't like it. Or make a gym-only rule.

Screens Are Bad for Young Brains

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