By: Emily Wang
How should a child’s screen time be managed?
Managing how your child uses their screens is a difficult task for parents, and many stress about how they will handle it as their child gets older and more independent. But there are multiple ways to handle it.
Before your child begins to go online, discuss the situation with your partner or another parental unit. Brooke Shannon, executive director and founder of Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents to avoid buying smartphones for children until they are at least in 8th grade, suggests to say “In our family, we are waiting for a smartphone until 8th grade so we can [blank].” This trick may help you refrain from giving your child a smartphone any earlier.
Your toddler might experiment with tablets and watch movies, but it’ll be a long time before they should be able to own their own smartphone. It can be easy to let your child do whatever they like on their smartphone at an early age. But you should wait until a child is older, so they can learn to enjoy things outside of the screen, such as sports or music. It’s also important to talk about time limits and screen time with another parental unit so you can be prepared for what’s to come.
Shannon has a few rules in the household to regulate her children’s screen time. There are no devices in the bedrooms, and no tablets or devices for toddlers, pre-schoolers, or elementary kids unless they are on a road trip. And finally, no “educational” app or game is an exception.
During the pandemic, screen time rules have definitely become looser, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t do a good job. Sometimes, extra technology is fine to have. Using these tips might make life with a child a little bit easier.
Why is cancelling an order from Amazon so tedious?
Many Amazon customers have noticed how hard it is to cancel any Amazon purchase. You have to go through six various pages, each trying to persuade you to turn around and buy the product anyways.
This method is meant to manipulate your brain to consider not canceling the purchase. It’s called a dark pattern. You’ve probably noticed the discounts on websites usually include some type of “no, I don’t want to save money” phrase? Or what about the icons on a product that show how many people are “currently viewing” the item? These are all examples of a “dark pattern,” an deceptive online trick used to try and make consumers do things they never meant to do.
“It is not that consumers are stupid or that they have no technology literacy skills,” says Collin Gray, an associate professor of computer graphics technology at Purdue University. “There are people on the other end that are actually engineering these situations to make Collin them as tricky as possible. So you have to fight back against this really concerted effort by many in the technology industry.”
After being called out countless times, Amazon finally changed the cancellation process for all of the European Union. But the U.S. might also get the change. The Federal Trade Commission said it plans to “ramp up” enforcement laws to prevent any companies who use “dark patterns” to gain more purchases.
Links: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/991684518/confused-when-online-shopping-it-might-be-a-dark-pattern#:~:text=Press-,Dark%20Patterns%20User%20Interface%20Lure%20In%20Online%20Customers%20%3A%20The%20Indicator,becoming%20more%20and%20more%20common.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/toddlers-technology/