Michael Regilio

The sedentary recreational part, because that's what you're talking about.

It's not the educational part.

It's not the interactive.

It's just the sitting there watching for the fun of watching.

And a systemic review and meta-analysis in 2023 found that increased screens in early childhood is associated with poor cognitive and psychosocial outcomes.

Not because screens are just straight brain poison, but because passive viewing replaces conversation, play, and sleep.

That is such a good point.

That is a super sharp observation.

And you're hitting on what researchers call the confounding variable problem.

And it's definitely something they're trying to consider when looking at this data.

The honest answer from the research is probably both, like you just said, but it's genuinely hard to untangle.

Some studies try to control for parenting quality, socioeconomic factors, and home environment, but you can't perfectly isolate the screen variable from the parenting.

So parenting is kind of an X factor.

Unless the researchers can go into the home 24 hours a day for some number of days and judge the parents, they just don't have an indication one way or the other of how much that's playing into it.

But what is known is passive viewing replaces, like I said, important stuff, conversation, play, and sleep.

Yeah, no, you're exactly right.

In Professor Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation has done a lot to forward the notion that smartphones are really, really bad for childhood development.

He argues that once you remove play, social interactions, adventure, and what we used to just call childhood, you predictably get weaker language skills, shorter attention spans, and less social connection.

Yes, most famously, there's Dr. John S. Hutton, who published a study that found that higher screen time was associated with lower microstructural integrity of white matter tracks.

And you would be correct.