A good response & I'm definitely sympathetic to the notion that moral panics centre around departures from familiar (recent) norms.
I still hold to the claim that the screen use experiment is (1) particularly radical in that it involves substantially reducing children's exposure to the physical environment in which humans have evolved to develop (ie. that of human-scale 3D animate & inanimate things with which they physically interact). Note that 'radical' doesn't necessarily mean more harmful - just that it's hard to predict the developmental outcome as it's such a departure. And that it is (2) notably large scale due to the greater homogeneity of the change. A far larger proportion of kids are made subject to this particular experiment than in the past -- neither indigenous Australians not upper class English kids were chimney sweeps in the 19th C, but I'm sure both groups love their screens now.
Caution needn't mean adhering rigidly to an outdated template - that would be more like extreme conservatism or fundamentalism. It could just mean, er, caution! If I had kids, I'd consider how much screen time of different types they would be allowed, and how it might be balanced or blended with other activities. Like other parents, I would have no way of being certain about the answer most likely to lead to flourishing, I'd just have to make my best guess. I'm pretty sure for me that guess wouldn't be 'pass the child-training buck to Facebook & Google'. They take 'training' far too literally for comfort.
[Edit: My 'caution' would particularly extend to alarms &/or reassurances coming from studies such as this. For a number of reasons, it's a field I don't find very convincing ]
I still hold to the claim that the screen use experiment is (1) particularly radical in that it involves substantially reducing children's exposure to the physical environment in which humans have evolved to develop (ie. that of human-scale 3D animate & inanimate things with which they physically interact). Note that 'radical' doesn't necessarily mean more harmful - just that it's hard to predict the developmental outcome as it's such a departure. And that it is (2) notably large scale due to the greater homogeneity of the change. A far larger proportion of kids are made subject to this particular experiment than in the past -- neither indigenous Australians not upper class English kids were chimney sweeps in the 19th C, but I'm sure both groups love their screens now.
Caution needn't mean adhering rigidly to an outdated template - that would be more like extreme conservatism or fundamentalism. It could just mean, er, caution! If I had kids, I'd consider how much screen time of different types they would be allowed, and how it might be balanced or blended with other activities. Like other parents, I would have no way of being certain about the answer most likely to lead to flourishing, I'd just have to make my best guess. I'm pretty sure for me that guess wouldn't be 'pass the child-training buck to Facebook & Google'. They take 'training' far too literally for comfort.
[Edit: My 'caution' would particularly extend to alarms &/or reassurances coming from studies such as this. For a number of reasons, it's a field I don't find very convincing ]