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kleinbl00  ·  1737 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Don’t fall for the moral panic over children’s screen time

    The burka can be the most versatile of capsule wardrobes. The uniform black costume has a charming egalitarianism about it, and is both a social and physical leveller. Once social status or physical beauty cannot be established, all sorts of hierarchies are flattened.

The author, arguing that burkas are grrrrrrreat in 2010

"Screen time" used to be television. For the first 20 years the argument was that kids could watch as much TV as they wanted 'cuz what could go wrong? By the '70s the argument amongst the general public was "less TV" while the argument among academics was "co-viewing".

And that's pretty much where the "let them consume as much Internet as they want" argument falls apart - you're offloading the education of your child onto a system you have no control over. Children's TV is largely designed to sell toys, with moral and social arguments and examples a secondary concern (one in which the creators of kid's TV have no training whatsoever - take it from me, I'm friends with the showrunners of several current hits). The Internet of children is largely designed to capture pageviews. But more importantly, it's not designed for "co-viewing" - you're not sitting there contextualizing everything your kid sees.

    All the hand-wringing also seems to miss another important dimension to the debate: limiting screen time assumes a certain degree of economic stability and social capital in the households that enforce the rules. For single parents who cannot afford childcare, for families isolated from friends or support networks, for children and adolescents caught in the middle of domestic dramas, and for women stifled by oppressive relationships or parents, screens are a boon. They are a window on to the outside world. A screen is not only a distraction: it is a rolling, cushioning conversation with the best friend of a teenage girl who has moved to a new country. Screens can liberate. They can, as books did for me, give blessed relief in a world where there is a poverty of leisure options.

A book is not interactive. Not only that, but the content of a book is set the minute it's printed. Most parents would argue against sitting your 8-year-old with a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray but, should your kid bring home a copy, you can have a discussion about what it's about and why. With the internet, their copy of Ladybug Girl can turn into Naked Lunch before you know what's happened.

The Internet is neither good, bad nor indifferent - it's a space that forms your child. I'm not a fan of leaving my child unsupervised anywhere I can't vouch for. The author is arguing that poor people shouldn't be shamed for letting their kids dive into their phones when there's nothing better to do; on the contrary, society should be shamed that there's nothing better for kids to do than dive into their phones and that there aren't any options for poor parents than letting Youtube babysit their kids.