Re >> "Plenty of parents have the same debate in their own minds, or with partners and friends: Is letting kids use screens all right, and if so for how long?"
As an anecdote, my mom would only allow me 15 minutes at a time of Tetris on the household GameBoy. My views on kids & screentime is pretty conservative, especially when they're younger, but my mom was down-right draconian!
And your GameBoy wasn’t designed with psychiatrists on the team to improve the addictiveness/retention/click-rate.
It’s important to remember that todays screens aren’t the screens of yore, but quite a lot more devious. It’s fairly obvious that any negative impact of that would be larger on impressionable young minds.
It's funny that you bring this up. I think it is a very good point, and it's very accurate. Especially on mobile games and games like farmville, age of empires mobile, etc.... I say it's funny because it's specifically the reason that I can't stand them. I feel like it's always a carrot-and-stick, and the carrot is always moving, uncatchable - but you can get closer to the carrot briefly if you drop more coin in game. I get burned out. Give me SimCity 2000, Age of Empires II, or Quake Arena, and I'll play until I "get my fill", walk away happy, then come back for more later. I still play Sim City 2000 and AoE II semi regularly. It may be an age thing, having gotten into games so long ago.
I've found over and over again that prohibition and punishment tend to backfire. Children and adults need a reason so compelling that it will inspire them to not pursue cheap thrills at the expense of something better. Otherwise, they'll take up drinking, watching TV, eating way too much junk food and masturbating. Why shouldn't they? They feel really good!
Speculative, but I think that draconian measures only backfire when the parent-child relationship isn’t trusting and loving in the first place, i.e. if you’ve given your kids reasons to hate your parenting beyond your restrictions on their screen time. When I was a kid I had friends who were pretty strict about their internet access, but they did not mind because they have a good relationship with their parents anyway—they play sports together, share interests, work on the same hobbies or weekend projects, etcetera. Maybe this is what today’s millenial parents are lacking in, in the first place.
100% of strict parents would say they have a good relationship with their kids (or within a rounding error). If you asked adult children of strict parents if that was true, you would get fewer than 100% positive responses. People aren’t always reliable judges of their own behavior and relationships.
My comment was misleading—I didn’t ask the parents. I asked the then-kids, who are my peers. And looking back, there really were signs of healthy parenting, and my peers grew up to be happy, well-adjusted individuals who liked the idea of family, and they genuinely mourned when they lost a parent.
Around that age i got my pc privileges revoked. "Grounded" was how it was referred.
My parents both were tech savy. I managed to download a keylogger and swipe the login password before end of first week of punishment. I had access for HW, strictly hw. That's when i made a move. By 12 i had custom .exe made but god knows who with GUI capable of ddos among other nettools i shouldn't have had. Nobody taught those things to me. It just happened. Had the idea probably from a movie or tv..
As an anecdote, my mom would only allow me 15 minutes at a time of Tetris on the household GameBoy. My views on kids & screentime is pretty conservative, especially when they're younger, but my mom was down-right draconian!