Parents can take control of gaming. Screen time isn’t as bad as we fear and there are benefits to children playing online games
School’s almost starting and parents might be looking for strategies for their child to get the most out of their schooling. One thing I’d suggest is to perhaps let them play video games a little. Why, you ask?
Well, there’s been important recent research on the links between screen time and NAPLAN results by Drs Islam, Biswas, and Khanam, at UNSW and USQ.
Their somewhat surprising findings were that a small amount of video gaming on weekdays and weekends for children aged 11- 17 was associated with better reading and numeracy scores than no gaming at all.
Obviously, not endless amounts of time. More than four hours gaming a day was associated with poorer results. But one to two hours a day on school days, and two to four hours Saturday and Sunday, seemed to be the sweet spot.
These results didn’t astonish me. I know that many parents won’t let their child use computers for fun at all through the week, and sometimes weekends too. And I certainly understand the good intentions of these rules. But clinically, I see some benefit in children having access to internet games. Why? Four reasons.
Imagine you were heading to work tomorrow but had already been told that when your official workday is over, you have to come home, do more work, eat, shower and then go to bed. Feeling despondent? I don’t blame you.
It’s understandable that children want to have a bit of down time to look forward to. To have to finish their homework to be able to play games will give them a little bit of an incentive to do it all. Internet games also give them downtime from often busy days.
Computer games have a bad reputation but not all are bad.
Many teach or improve co-ordination, memory, speed, visuo-spatial and multi-tasking skills. Games also typically involve reading and understanding complex rules.
Of course, you have to monitor content. The government and some gaming providers have done the hard work of analysing and rating games, so parents can dictate what age children need to be to get particular rated games.
I know you’d prefer them to have the childhood you had, exploring the neighbourhood with the local kids in the afternoon. But things just aren’t like that anymore. Online gaming is how a lot of children communicate with their friends now. It’s never as good as in person, but it is a good way to stay in contact with peers occasionally.
Playing something for a time-limited period teaches children essential self-regulation skills – by stopping a current pleasure for future gain – which will help them in their studies.
Enabling them to learn this self-control will be better than not allowing them the opportunity. Some parents might be worried that once they let their child on, they will never get off.
I have to say, for these parents, the problem is not necessarily the game but more their child’s compliance skills.
You should be able to give an instruction and your child follow it. In these instances, I’d prefer parents to establish good control through using effective discipline rather than take away things that may cause trouble. Get professional help if this is an issue.
As one of the study’s authors noted, asking if the internet is good or bad is the wrong question, but instead we should consider “when, how, and how much young people are using technology”. Maybe 2021 is the year to do this.
Youths torch Dutch Covid testing centre and an effigy of Danish PM goes up in flames amid fiery anti-lockdown protests across Europe
Youths torched a Dutch Covid testing centre and an effigy of the Danish Prime Minister was set alight in fiery anti-lockdown protests sweeping across Europe.
The testing facility in the village of Urk in the Netherlands went up in flames on Saturday night with its burnt-out shell remaining cordoned off on Sunday.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Denmark, an effigy of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was set on fire in as anti-lockdown sentiment erupts across the continent.
The Netherlands appeared to be bearing the brunt of the unrest on Sunday as authorities use water cannons and dogs to quell demonstrations in Amsterdam. Hundreds of protesters gathered to demonstrate against a curfew that began on Saturday.
In Eindhoven in the country's south, police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of several hundred protesters while a number of vehicles were burned and businesses at the city's central train station looted, local media reports.
Police said there were at least 30 arrests.
It's John Brennan's Authoritarianism That Threatens Democracy
Every time former CIA Director John Brennan appears on cable news to warn America about some new “insidious threat to democracy,” I am reminded again that he deserves to be in federal prison. In this corrupt media environment, however, the official who oversaw an illegal domestic-spying operation on the legislative branch of the United States government, who tried to cover it up and blame innocent Senate staffers when discovered, and who then brazenly lied about it to legislators and the American people — this man is held up as a paragon of civic virtue.
We still don’t even know what role Brennan played in spying on his political opponents during the 2016 campaign. We do know he went on TV for years after, alleging to have insider knowledge of an unprecedented seditious criminal conspiracy against the United States. Never once was he challenged by his hosts. And when an independent multimillion-dollar investigation couldn’t pull together a single indictment related to those claims, Brennan shrugged it off by saying that he may have “received bad information.”
Brennan was back on MSNBC yesterday, contending that American intelligence agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
Even a former Communist such as Brennan surely understands that there is nothing prohibiting Americans from being religious extremists, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists or even libertarians. It’s definitely none of his business, or that of intelligence agencies, to define what those terms mean. (And the idea that libertarians, who can’t get a minyan to agree on anything libertarian, are marshaling forces for a national insurgency is nonsensical.)
As Brennan is a congenital liar, this may well be another one of his convenient fictions. Yet, considering his history of abusing power — Samantha Power, no lightweight on this front herself, once warned that it wasn’t a “good idea to piss off John Brennan” — we shouldn’t entirely dismiss the idea that his allies are ferreting out thoughtcrimes.
Finding those who illegally threaten others with violence is well within the bailiwick of the government. But the Capitol riot has given authoritarians such as Brennan the pretext to advocate the chilling of speech and censorship. It has become normalized, even celebrated. Networks such as CNN employ full-time anti-speech advocates who pump out cynical content meant to shame tech carriers into taking their competition off the air.
“Extremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts on Apple, Google,” reports Tali Arbel at the Associated Press. Are Americans who express their political views on the internet really abusing a “loophole,” or are Big Tech companies who censor them at the behest of the powerful abusing a “loophole” in the First Amendment? Only in the kicker of the fearmongering piece does Arbel quote Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who warns that the tide of censorship “is against the speech of right-wing extremists … but tomorrow the tide might be against opposition activists.” The problem is that censors never believe they’ll lose power, and maybe this time they’re right.
Those who rationalize state censorship almost always expand their definition of “extremist” to include their political opponents. The Washington Post’s columnist Max Boot, for instance, welcomed regime change by imploring the Biden administration to regulate those who supposedly incite radicalism, including Fox News.
Yesterday, Nicolle Wallace, Brennan’s MSNBC colleague, called for forcing Republicans to offer “the truth” before they are “allowed” to say anything else. As we protect people from “counterfeit bills,” she explained, we can protect them against “fake news.” What made Wallace’s comment especially surreal — aside from the fact that’s she apparently never read the Constitution — was that her guest was Ben Rhodes, the former Obama administration official who once bragged to The New York Times that he’d duped a bunch of dimwitted reporters into becoming his disinformation operation. Now Rhodes, too, seems interested in importing Iranian-style censorship with a “firm and brutal” “detox” of bad ideas, achieved through the “national security” and “Homeland Security” officials.
I’m old-fashioned. I’d rather have a bunch of nuts ranting on podcasts all day than one John Brennan deciding what we can say. To my ears, Rhodes, Brennan, Wallace and Boot are the ones who sound like a threat to “democracy.”
Progressive group riots resume in major cities despite Biden inauguration
Fox News contributors Ari Fleischer and Donna Brazile weigh in on illegal immigration policy in the Biden administration and the National Guard deployment to Washington, D.C. ahead of the inauguration.
President Biden was officially sworn in on Wednesday, but riots of the kind that had been blamed on Trump erupted anyway, damaging property and federal buildings.
Police departments in Portland and Seattle reported damage as a result of gatherings near federal buildings, while anti-fascist protesters burned American flags in Denver.
The riots took place on the same day as Biden’s Inauguration, which bore an "America United" theme.
Trump has been accused of inflaming divisiveness throughout the U.S., a narrative that Biden recognized during his campaign for the presidency.
During the lead-up to the 2020 election, then-candidate Biden released an ad that said he would be looking to "lower the temperature in this country, not raise it" like Trump had.
Biden has previously condemned violence of any kind, whether it is perpetrated by people identifying with the left or the right.
He has suggested that Trump’s unwillingness to do the same put lives in jeopardy.
"Donald Trump has been president for almost four years," Biden said in response to deadly violence in Portland over the summer. "The temperature in the country is higher, tensions run stronger, divisions run deeper. And all of us are less safe because Donald Trump can’t do the job of the American president."
But even after Election Day, violence and protests have continued.
On Jan. 6, a group of pro-Trump extremists stormed Capitol Hill and laid siege on Capitol buildings, an insurrection that resulted in fatalities. It was undertaken in protest of the election results, encouraged by a baseless narrative woven by Trump that the election had been "stolen" from him.
More recently, progressive protesters who appear to be frustrated with the Democratic Party have taken action.
As previously reported by Fox News, about 150 rioters in Portland damaged the Democratic Party headquarters on Wednesday.
Some in the group of about 150 people smashed windows and spray-painted anarchist symbols at the political party building. Police said eight arrests were made in the area. Some demonstrators carried a sign reading, "We don’t want Biden, we want revenge!" in response to "police murders" and "imperialist wars." Others carried a banner declaring "We Are Ungovernable."
Portland has been the site of frequent protests, many involving violent clashes between officers and demonstrators, ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Over the summer, there were demonstrations for more than 100 straight days.
In Seattle, the local police department posted pictures of a courthouse with shattered doors. People were also reportedly throwing objects at cars and reporters said demonstrators were protesting against President Biden and law enforcement, and carried a sign reading, "Abolish ICE."
A small "anti-fascist" crowd gathered in Denver where American flags were burned and two people were arrested for weapons violations. Those demonstrations were against Trump, Biden, police violence and racial injustice, according to The Denver Post.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-trump-left-wing-riots
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