Is Video Watching Bad for Kids? The Effect of Video Watching on Children's Skills (nber.org) 21
Abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children's noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills -- potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
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Are they watching Taylor Swift videos? Complete waste of time.
Are they watching history, science, and other documentary videos? Good use of time.
It's rarely going to all be in just one category. Most of my early TV viewing was mindless entertainment, but I taught myself to read by watching Sesame Street. Most of my early computer usage was playing video games, but I also learned QBasic in 4th grade so I could create my own video games. Which ultimately led to a career that put me into the top 5% of earners (not writing video games though).
My 11 year daughter watches a lot of mindless YouTube shorts. But she also watching videos that help her learn t
At the bottom of the Cliff's Notes and digging. (Score:2)
My own unsupported hypothesis is that watching video probably has little impact on learning in and of itself, but that it tends to lower literacy when time that would otherwise be spent reading is spent watching video. And that the easy availability of a video version of the reading matter makes reading far less likely in general, because "Why read a book when you can watch a movie?"
My completely unscientific, anecdotal observation is that kids today are hooked on the YouTube and can't read for shit. And
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I'll meet your anecdotal evidence with my anecdotal evidence. My mom taught me to read very young and I took up the hobby for life. Knowing and enjoying reading made the educational process much easier.
With that said, I played a shitload of video games and watched a lot of television but I also road my bicycle everywhere from the age I could ride a bicycle. Minus being able to ride a bicycle safely where I live, I imagine kids are still playing a lot of video games and now watching tiktok as opposed to tele
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I would say screen time is screen time and what difference does it make? ... Tiktok can't be any worse there television, at least not from a health standpoint. I cannot account for the content of either though.
The ability to focus is an acquired skill. There is a quantitative difference between watching a series of 30 second shorts and watching a 30 minute T.V. show, or a 2 hour film.
Rather ironically, however, whilst the 'just one more episode / chapter' 'addiction' phenomenon exists with all media it seems to be worse with Tiktok, or doom-scrolling in general, than it ever was with books or television (e.g. the boxed sets of 24 / GoT proved a willpower challenge for me, and I regularly read into the wee hours).
Re: At the bottom of the Cliff's Notes and digging (Score:1)
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No, the most important thing, or at the the top of the list, is learning to write correctly using punctuation, good sentence structure and capitalization, something you need remedial education on. If you ever had any.
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Sure, we could do math and history on things a child likes: That requires personalized lessons which isn't so easy, at the moment. But foundational skills require learning a set of boring facts (most decided by historical events): There's no way round that.
This is what essay-writing is about: Alas, no school teaches it as a skill, so children don't gain competence in fact-gathering and analysis. Nowadays, children might 'research' with ChatGPT or Fox News or the Bible: That's not education. Thus, sch
Stop thinking of the children! (Score:1)
The effect of videos is much worse on middle age adults than it is on the kids.
It depends (Score:3)
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Re: It depends (Score:2)
Moderation (Score:2)
*Everything* in moderation. As soon as you go off the rails saying it's "always bad" or "always good" you've lost credibility.
Some video watching by kids is fine. Excessive video watching is harmful. Where's that boundary between "some" and "excessive"? That's the hard part. And the best people to make that determination are...parents. At least, parents who actually care about their kids.
Dumbing-down reality (Score:2)
Not mentioned in the article, is the dumbing-down of reality: Children can no longer glimpse death, nudity, pregnancy, the existence of sex, or the power to disobey an authority figure. These are the same reasons women (and most d
There are many kinds of videos (Score:2)
This is based on my perception and not on objective data, so yeah, I might be completely wrong. That said, I think some content might be OK, but things like shorts look harmful to the attention capabilities of anyone (not only children).