I think it’s important to not give certain things the benefit of the doubt. This clock stuff is just plain stupid to get bent out of shape about, but the other two are serious concerns.

This is just anecdotal, but I was a late 90’s kid that had as much screen time as I wanted growing up. I played an absurd amount of videogames, and had to be dragged outside by my siblings or I could comfortably stay indoors in front of a game or the internet for hours on end. I spent most of my early years (age 3 to age 15) in front of a screen. Yet, I did just fine in school, got a degree, and now work as a software engineer. I fell in love with my highschool sweetheart, and after waiting until I had my degree, we got married at 23, almost 10 years after we started dating. It felt like my obsessive amounts of screen time as a kid didn’t have any negative side effects to my life as a whole (outside of being a quiet and reserved person, and some could argue that that’s not a negative) and led me down a successful career path.

However, I don’t think kids these days have the luxury of doing that anymore. The content put in front of me as a kid was games made by teams that were passionate about the thing they were working on. Forums and early YouTube videos were created by some no name person with the hope of sharing something they openly cared about. Social Media didn’t exist yet and once it did, I never really got into it.

The content put in front of children these days is one of three or so things:

1. Mindless dribble. (looking at you, Youtube Kids)
2. Rushed, broken games made barely finished enough to get people to buy them just to make a quick buck, and the ones that are finished are so heavily tied into marketing it’s like the game is basically one big ad. (looking at you, Fortnite and Rocket League)
3. Content made with the express purpose to either gain influencer status, or to use that influencer status to market something, primarily to children who are especially vulnerable to the scummy marketing practices they are using.

Obviously there are exceptions to these everywhere, but I’m talking about the things that are actively being shoved down kids’ throats. It’s not that I think that the content I consumed was better than what I see kids consuming now, but I think that the motivations behind the content can just as easily influence children as much as the content itself. I think that in a lot of ways, this kind of content is actively degrading kids’ brains, and from my experience, it’s not the screen time, it’s what’s being shown on screen that’s the issue.

Thankfully I’m tech savvy enough that I can make the internet for my children what it was for me as a kid, without all the marketing and money making schemes that pass as content these days, but a lot of people just toss a tablet in front of their kids and call it parenting.

I was going to rant about privacy as well, but this is getting way too long. Just know that I think digital privacy is really important, and think that we’ve paid the price for not considering it earlier, and there are ways we can save our kids from the same fate.

Sorry, I tend to write way too much on topics I care about, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

tl;dr - The clock thing is stupid, but please approach the constant exposure to the modern day internet and the digital privacy topics with a bit more scrutiny.