Eli Stark-Elster

speaker

114 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 21 Dec

Eli Stark-Elster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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Up First from NPR · Where Kids Play · 21 Dec 2025 podcast

Right.

That's not a very useful measure.

You want to break that down into different kinds of screen time in the same way you would break it down to different kinds of food.

Right.

You mentioned Roblox, and I think that's an interesting example because it combines elements that are probably really good for kids, looking from this perspective of autonomy, and elements that are probably quite bad.

So on the good side, Roblox, like Minecraft, is very, very user-driven.

And people playing the game have a lot of freedom to design their own little experiences with the game, to socialize, to collaborate on different kinds of projects.

The company that owns Roblox, though, has also built in many of these kind of slot machine-like features, various incentives that... Robux.

No, exactly, right?

And that's an example of something that I think is certainly a negative.

But, you know, going back to the point of autonomy, I think the good and the bad here reflect different sides of that.

It is good for the independence of kids that in this game they can sort of build whatever they want.

It is bad for the autonomy of the kids that the company making this game has added all of these incentives that try to coerce them into making decisions that they probably don't want to make.

Absolutely.

Yeah, 100%.

It is worth saying, though, that as with the sort of stranger danger panic in physical spaces, often the way that people talk about the threat of predators in spaces like Roblox is perhaps a little bit overblown.

The data still suggests that most of the times when kids are approached inappropriately on these platforms, it's very often from someone they know, as is the case in physical space.

So in some ways, the danger is often the same and I think misconstrued in kind of the same way.

Well, I think we've done quite a lot to keep our kids safe at this point, right?

But one, I think, perspective here is a tradeoff between short-term safety and long-term ability to flourish as an adult.

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