Screen Time vs. Happy Time

I read an article years ago that screen time can make your kid moody, angry, crazy, lazy (Dunkley, 2015). And today, we have no option but to have everything online, even for the kids (and teens alike). From 8 a.m. up to 1.30 p.m. their time are filled with classes - online meet, YouTube videos for lessons, Google forms, Telegrams, WhatsApp, etc. At first, since it was a new experience, my kids were thrilled! No school. Yeay! Online learning. Double yeay!

But now things have turned ugly (well, sort of). They are beginning to show less and less interest to learning online and school work. They've becoming more 'attached' to gaming online (since that's the only way they can connect with their friends). How I wish things are safer now. Until then, we have no choice but to embrace the new norm and try to make the best out of it. How I wish...

As a researcher in IxD and HCI, I wonder if we could purposely design computer behaviour to really encapsulate that 'less is more'; that we could deliberately design something to be less attractive, less addictive over a certain period of time depending on the appropriate time a child is 'safe' to be online and on screen time (age appropriate screen time). I also wonder if we could re-think on the design of the interaction between a child and a computer to achieve such aim. Just as Professor Janet Read, University of Central Lancashire, did mentioned in one of her speech - child-like computing, where computers are designed to behave like a child; this idea was put forth in 2018 (Read et al., 2018) and hopefully efforts have been made to pursue this intriguing work.

Would it be able to reduce screen time and hence lowering the risk of a child to develop digital addiction - to be addicted the Internet, to gadgets, to screen time, to social media, to online gaming - that is just as harmful as drugs. Would it then somehow let the kids finally be kids again and run around happily? How I wish...

Sources:

Dunkley, V. L. (2015). Screentime is Making Kids Moody, Crazy and Lazy. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-wealth/201508/screentime-is-making-kids-moody-crazy-and-lazy

Read, J., Sharma, S., Parsonage, G. (2018). Childlike computing: Systems that think like human and act like a child. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience in Indonesia, CHIuXiD '18March 2018, pp. 109–112. https://doi.org/10.1145/3205946.3205966