# A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times

<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html>

- Host: [nytimes.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/nytimes.com/)
- Saved: October 27, 2018 (2018-10-27T10:25:52Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d251d21b2edf/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d251d21b2edf.json

## What Jamie wrote

This is such a hard issue. I feel very conflicted about it. I used to spend a lot of time on my Apple //c back in the day, but what you could do was so different. Now I find my son sitting on his iPad and in reality all he's doing is watching TV. No brain stimulation.

> “I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”

It is perhaps too nuanced, but I think you have to move beyond just "screen time" and really look at the activity. What is your child doing on the device? Are they programming? Diving into the tarpits of social media disgust? Watching TV mindlessly? Reading a book? Reading the largest encyclopedia in the world? Learning how to build a robot?

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT78: Weekly Thing #78 / Nov 3, 2018](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/78/), Featured Links 🏅

## Same host

- [Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/bf4eb6c45d3e/) (nytimes.com, October 9, 2018)
- [How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’ - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d1bcc1e969c1/) (nytimes.com, October 25, 2018)
- [I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/7ea2a709fd78/) (nytimes.com, November 4, 2018)
- [Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/ba619eaf2737/) (nytimes.com, November 15, 2018)
- [Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret - The New York Times](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/745b5cd3eeb3/) (nytimes.com, December 12, 2018)

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html