The Toys of Today's Kids and Coordination Woes, Not to Mention a Lack of Social Skills
Too much time indoors, too much screen time
It's a well recognised and well-researched area; today's kids over-exercise their thumbs. They use mobile gadgets too much and few of them still take a football (or baseball, basketball, whatever) outdoors to have a kick-about (or similar activity). This causes a physical health crisis, aside from the mental health crisis caused if not merely exacerbated by excessive "screen time". Exercise as a factor aside, there are also aspects like coordination. Computing devices are worse than a piano in that respect.
I'm by no means perfect or a role model or anything like that, but as a kid myself and others around me didn't use tablets or even mobile phones. I have photos of me as a baby holding up a phone, but it had cords on it and no screen. It was just for making calls.
RMS has commented on children in his latest talk. He mentioned how recommendation engines (as in, social control media) impact their minds; "I'm not saying ban recommendation engines," he said, "I'm saying disconnect them from platforms so platforms can't dump recommendation engines on poor users, or on any user if the user doesn't choose it."
My face-to-face interactions with today's kids sometimes cause concern because many of them, especially those who grow up with too many gadgets, lack tact and verbal communication skills. It's almost like they're too timid to even talk to a real person in real life. They don't get much practice at it.
The effects of these "skinnerboxes" (gadgets with particular "apps" on them) remain to be seen when these kids become adults, e.g. when kids born after 2008 ("smart" phone era) turn 18 (2026 onwards). It won't be pretty and it'll leave a society that's supine, powerless, and herded by companies like ByteDance and misogynists, unable to form an independent opinion or assess what's true and what's false. █
