Kids And Screen Time: Cutting Through The Static

NPR:

The walls are lined with robots and movie posters for Star Wars and Back to the Future. But this is no 1980s nerd den. It’s the technology lab at Westside Neighborhood School in Los Angeles, and the domain of its ed-tech coordinator, Don Fitz-Roy.

“So we’re gonna be talking about digital citizenship today.”

Fitz-Roy is a mountain of a man, bald with just the hint of a goatee. Of the half-dozen students sitting in small, plastic chairs around him, any three could easily fit inside his shirt. And he’s trying to keep them safe — from the Internet.

He’s talking about the laundry list of athletes and actors these kids have seen, of late, making fools of themselves using social media.

…

“It’s all about how things are used. And how much they’re used. And what they’re used for,” says Patricia Greenfield, who co-authored that screen-time study we mentioned earlier. She’s a professor of psychology at UCLA and has been writing about screen time for 30 years.

Read the whole story: NPR