China Looks To Limit Children To Two Hours a Day On Their Phones (reuters.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's cyberspace regulator said on Wednesday children under the age of 18 should be limited to a maximum of two hours a day on their smartphones, sending shares in tech companies tumbling. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said it wanted providers of smart devices to introduce so-called minor mode programs that would bar users under 18 from accessing the internet on mobile devices from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Providers would also have to set time limits under the proposed reforms, the CAC said. Users aged 16 to 18 would be allowed two hours a day, children aged eight to 16 would get one hour while children under eight would be allowed just eight minutes. But the CAC said service providers should allow parents to opt out of the time limits for their youngsters. Xia Hailong, a lawyer at the Shanghai Shenlun law firm, said it'll take "a lot of effort and additional costs" for internet companies to implement these new regulatory requirements. "And the risk of non-compliance will also be very high. So I believe that many internet companies may consider directly prohibiting minors from using their services."
big brother (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think most minors would benefit from having a responsible older brother.
From a random article [mayoclinic.org] I found.
The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages media use, except for video chatting, by children younger than 18 months. If you introduce digital media to children ages 18 to 24 months, make sure it's high quality and avoid solo media use. For children ages 2 to 5, limit screen time to one hour a day of high-quality programming.
If American doctors were asked to design legislation in the US, we'd have more extreme laws than China in order to protect the health and wellbeing of children.
Why should we care what excessive screen time does to children? Well the harm it causes is measurable, and each of these represents a cost that parents or society ends up paying in the long run.
From the same random article.
Too much screen time and regular exposure to poor-quality programming has been linked to:
* Obesity
* Inadequate sleep schedules and insufficient sleep
* Behavior problems
* Delays in language and social skills development
* Violence
* Attention problems
* Less time learning
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Do you find it awkward to bring up children's genitals so often in conversation? Or is this just part of your edge lord shtick?
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They said the same thing about television. For my parents' generation, it was rock music and comic books. Some newfangled thing is always supposedly corrupting our youth.
Parents should be the ones to decide how to raise their kids, period, end of discussion. But hey, we're talking about China here, where they're not too big on the concept of rights for adults.
Re:big brother (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually people were right about the harm television causes [livescience.com]. Just people people naturally react negatively to changes to society doesn't mean some of those changes aren't harmful to individuals. And AAP has been pretty consistent on moderating children's access to television and other media [aap.org]. It should be no surprise that allowing a child to passively peer into a fictional world to the exclusion of reality has a big impact on their development.
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This is called micro-managing a nation. It removes the responsibility from the parent to the state. It can never, ever end well. China communist party is at height of its power in the current decade, after having gained complete control over the internet inside China and its population with massive surveillance and reporting.
Like all things. That is going to come to an end with a massive collapse inside China when their power structure starts to collapse from the inside. That trigger is possibly going to be
Re:big brother (Score:4)
Nobody calls it that, you made up that term.
As for the government eliminate a parent's freedom to raise a child how their choose. That's normal evereywhere and throughout time. In ancient cultures, ones where there simply was no central authority, the community and social rules enforced a parent's role in child rearing and put limits on what was and was not allowed.
In these times, you can look at any country that has the rule of law, and you can find some aspects where a parent loses some perceived freedom to do as they please with their child. Here in the US we can't assault children, lock them in cages, or withhold food as a form of punishment. The government steps in and removes a child from a parent in situations that are generally accepted to be abusive and put the child in danger.
China is just a little further along on the authoritarian spectrum than the US. It's a matter of degrees. I'm sure in some countries at some period in history parents were allowed to sell their children as property. That's maximum freedom for parents, but it steps on the rights of children. And it took the world a very long time to figure out that children have basic human rights.
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The crisis which is very real is that China has
* a quickly decreasing ratio of workforce/total population (one child policy)
* brain drain
* imbalance in male/female population
all at the same time.
The only thing they could do is to invite Indians.....
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I know that the one Child policy was abandoned - too little too late. It seems you are not aware that turning around a population dynamics takes 30 years (if it works at all), and even if you would ramp up births very quickly, that would make the economic effect worse.
I think we should look for Japan since the 80s to see a potential/likely (optimistic) trajectory of China in the next 40 years.
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Obesity, Inadequate sleep schedules and insufficient sleep, Behavior problems, Delays in language and social skills development, Violence, Attention Problems, Less time learning
Wait... is that for kids? Because I think that's for... everybody. An hour a day cap on social media might be a pretty decent panacea.
Steve jobs (Score:3)
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and other powerful people in the tech world also restrict the use of tables and smartphones for their children.
The sad part of this news is not that it is happening, it is that it is happening first in China, while the rest of the western world just let their children get dumb and dumber. All because "they want to steal our freeeeedoooom!".
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They do want to steal our freedom. More alarming is all of the CPC paid trolls supporting everything China does. More and more of them these days. I hope you got a raise from 50 cents a post. Because who would do this for free?
Strong in that one, the conspiracy theory is.
Breaking news for you though: you sold your freedom away decades ago, for the convenience of buying cheap stuffs. And you keep selling it away by not seeing the big picture and choosing instead to label everything China does as evil (there are things that they do that are evil though, just not that one).
Yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? And how many hours at work?
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minor miners (Score:2)
Ah, I see we're trying a similar pilot program to keep our children off of smart phones in Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, and Ohio!
Re: Yeah? (Score:2)
As much as needed for testing.
Oh wait, they don't do any
Boy! I would love to watch that (Score:1)
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Anytime I'm on a college campus doing work during a class switch, it's like watching the night of the living dead.
Perhaps a little introspection is in order as to why you're overly concerned regarding how other people choose to spend their free time between classes? Just sayin'.
Damn kids!!!! Gen X is so much better! (Score:2)
In the USA! Teens would be jumping off bridges, crying hissy fits to their parents. Anytime I'm on a college campus doing work during a class switch, it's like watching the night of the living dead. You could come right up behind some of these without them knowing it because the ear buds are shoved into their skulls & take their phone, backpack or what not. It's almost like an addiction...they can't put them down. In some cases, it's the parents fault. How many times have you been at a restaurant or what not and see an adult give their CHILD a phone to "shut them up.
What a novel and compelling story?!?....old guy doesn't understand kids these days and laments how things were better in his day!!!
I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty old...and most kids do what they think is fun. Gen X certainly didn't have things figured out any better. We were certainly far dumber than most kids I meet today.
When I was in college, no one had a cell phone, let alone a smart phone...and so my peers all did drugs instead. I have a lifelong phobia of intoxication, so I was
Makes sense (Score:3)
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Time spent on their phones is probably cutting into their productivity in the factories.
And the U.S. is moving [usatoday.com] in the same direcionA. [theguardian.com]
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Middle-class children in China attend school, 9 hours a day. So, there won't be any tolerance for internet addiction.
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Well in the USA schools are shut for 3 months every year...
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
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The issue lies not in "staring at iPads," but rather in what one is actually looking at.
If children were using iPads solely for educational purposes, it wouldn't be a significant concern. However, in my opinion, it cannot fully replace the experience of a traditional classroom with real interactions between students and teachers, but that's a separate matter.
The reality is that today's teenagers primarily use their phones for stupid activities (screen smashing phone games, watching social media "influencers
Raises hand (Score:2)
China Looks To Limit Children To Two Hours a Day On Their Phones
Does that apply to the children making the phones?
'Cause I think their shifts are longer than two hours a day.
So (Score:2)
Time limits (Score:1)
Mobile devices only? (Score:2)
"[...] bar users under 18 from accessing the internet on mobile devices from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m."
So desktop devices are ok then?
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The "law" of unintended consequences is in play... (Score:2)
When you make it more difficult to simply live life without somehow breaking the law, the obvious unintended consequence is that you turn everybody into lawbreakers.