Count me among the advocates for screens here. And the reason I'm confident I'm not having the same effect on my child as has been documented in large studies is because they're not studying my kid. If DD7 spent 7-8 hours in front of a screen and 20 minutes reading each day, she'd be MISERABLE. It's a rare day that she spends more than 2 hours in a day in front of a screen of any kind. My DD spent maybe a total of 4.5 hours of combined time in front of a screen from Friday - Sunday, and a good portion of that was spent on a homework assignment she didn't have to do on a computer, but she chose to anyway.
In fact, I'm guilty of redirecting her from a book to a screen this past weekend. I came home from work Friday and found her settled on the couch with a book she had picked up at our last library sale. She wanted to talk about what she was reading, because she found it so fascinating, and she showed me how it was talking about how crayons are made in the factory. I told her about the show "How It's Made," she expressed an interest, and I pulled up the TV menus to set a recording... only to find out there was some kind of marathon running right then.
That show accounted for nearly two hours of that 4.5 hour figure I presented, though not all on the same day. The overwhelming bulk of her weekend was spent in unstructured play time with her peers... with a few hours of unstructured play time with her daddy mixed in.
So yeah, I reject the findings of the Kaiser Permanente study as having anything to do with my kid, because how the AVERAGE kid consumes these things is not how my DD does it. My kid is exceptional, zero surprises there. I do not limit her screen time because she has displayed no desire to abuse it.
Furthermore, I reject false dichotomies as false. My kid has unstructured play time, my kid experiences multimedia, and she enjoys the benefits of both.
Sure, handling a well-crafted chess board is a pleasant sensory experience. You know what else is a pleasant sensory experience? A beautifully-rendered chess board in which the rook morphs into a rock troll, thuds his way to the queen, hoists her up, and stuffs her into his mouth. Then the bishop responding by strolling over, swinging his staff, and smashing the rock troll into a pile of bricks. Pretty soon you find yourself entertained by the various ways different pieces can destroy each other, and the game moves away from the structured pursuit of victory according to standard chess rules, and into the unstructured play of creating as much mayhem as possible. Try doing THAT with a well-crafted chess set, and you'll quickly discover how limiting real-life can be to the human imagination.
Of course, choosing one exclusively over the other would be a false dichotomy. They're both great, so enjoy.
