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loup-vaillant comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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Comments (257)
I like the summary given by one reviewer:
Certainly "love your kids and have fun with them, the rest will work itself out" is an attractive message. It contradicts my anecdotal short-term observations, but they don't claim any short-term effects, only long-term.
I've seen recently a kenote (french) on the effects of TV on people. While this sentence seems reasonable, I would say (if the keynote is as solid as it looks) that you should go real easy on TV. 1 hour a day is already much too much. During the very first years of development, this would be a catastrophe. (To name just one example, we have reasons to believe TV is almost entirely responsible for the recent 10% drop in SAT scores — from the 60s to the 80s. I don't know how many IQ points that would be.)
(Now the effects of TV do not all come from the screen itself. There are priming effects (smoking, violence, food), there are attentional effects, there are sedentary effects… Those different effects can be addressed differently.)
But if you're already a "good enough" parent, you probably cut TV for quality time anyway.
I heard a horror story (anecdote from a book, for what it's worth) of a child basically raised in front of a TV, who learned from it both language and a general rule that the world (and social interaction) is non-interactive. If you could get his attention, he'd cheerfully recite some memorized lines then zone out.
Was the book "The boy who was raised as a dog?" Because I remember reading the same story in that book.
It certainly could be - I read the anecdote from a book I picked idly off a shelf in a bookstore, and I retained the vague impression that it was from a book about the importance of social factors and the effects of technology on our social/psychological development, but I could have been conflating it with another such book. After reading an excerpt from "The Boy who was Raised as a Dog", the style matches, so that probably was the one I read. Would you recommend it?
Yes yes yes! An awesome book!
Well! I may have to take a more in-depth look at it sometime this summer.