this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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The latest studies seem to show it's a correlation based on a common source.
What matters is spending time interacting with your child. It just happens that parents that are bad at that bit (or lack time for otter reasons) tend to also dump kids in front of the TV.
Screen time is not inherently bad. It just correlates with other bad behaviours, and can displace good ones.
And cigarettes aren't inherently bad, only when you smoke them
Nicotine is a useful pesticide, so I would actually partially agree with you.
Kids watching excessive TV is a symptom of a larger problem. The negative effects mostly come from those problems, not the screen time itself.
I get what you're saying. I still think it's appropriate to consider screen time negative, though. I think if you had two parents and one threw a screen in front of their kid and the other thought twice about it because someone told them it was bad, and they did something else, or even just let their kid be bored, the second kid would be less damaged. So I'm going with the practical reality.
I'm playing that balancing act already. They like watching TV, or a tablet, but it's not their life's entertainment. They use it to help decompress, before moving on to something better, when they have the energy.