Screens Are Bad for Young Brains
The last three years of being a parent have left me disenchanted with experts. I don&#x27;t believe they have any idea what they&#x27;re talking about and don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re capable of converting their research into practical advice that does good.<p>I watched first hand the harm that was done by the medical community obsessing over &quot;breast feeding is best and formula feeding is basically admission of failure.&quot; That experience left me so untrusting that the medical community isn&#x27;t just on their n&#x27;th generation of, &quot;everyone before us had it wrong, our advice is finally the right advice.&quot;<p>Do you know what damage you can do when you convert some study, full of error bars and reproducibility concerns into a blanket statement? You fuck with struggling parents who just need a few hours of their evening to be quiet so that they can do chores and maybe watch an episode of Netflix. Not everyone has the luxury of a stay-at-home mom or plenty of free time or money to throw at problems like meals and transportation.  You pile onto that barely-getting-by-near-crisis-where-alcohol-at-night-sounds-like-a-great-idea yet another negative factor: you get to feel like a shitty parent about the screen-based remedy that works.<p>It ticks me off that this junk ends up on social media because it undermines the things that _actually_ have a real lasting effect on raising children. Build lifestyle habits that enable you to be happy, sleep well, and spend time with your kids. Even if that means hours of tablet time on weeknights or a quick to make meal that isn&#x27;t the healthiest.<p>I blame this ass-backwards non-holistic look modern medicine likes to take on problems like these. They did the study on breast vs. bottle feeding and found real measurable results (I do indeed believe the results are valid), but they never found a way to quantify what practical harm they cause to parents who get judgy nurses and a birthing room full of &quot;Breast is Best&quot; posters, who eventually spend nights weeping over their inability to feed their child, constantly feeling like they&#x27;re a failed parent because they used formula or a tablet.<p>So !@#$ you Parentology. With these articles you&#x27;re doing a kind of harm that you&#x27;re systemically incapable of measuring.  I hope people much smarter and more articulate than me take up this banner.