Anecdotal evidence, but as a kid I played the fuck out of edutainment games and not much else with a screen. Did not watch that much TV, did a lot of reading and playing outside and making really bad kid crafts… I think the edutainment games, my primary screen use, helped me in the long run. I say this as someone who definitely uses screens too much as an adult. Screens ≠ bad, as long as it’s an actual good use of time.

There is a big difference between passive mindless scrolling/consumption and using the screen to do something like learning, making art (thanks drawing programs, music making programs, video making programs, IDEs), communicating with people you value who happen to live far away… it’s really nice being able to enter my musical ideas with a computer, a little slower than I come up with them; than to have to write it out all by hand and take forever because my handwriting is crappy and hard to read unless I slow down and take my time. To modify my recipes on my phone quickly and wipe off the screen with no fuss if juices splash on it, as opposed to staining a recipe page forever (possibly even losing information if the stain is bad enough) and crying about it. To type to my friends overseas and it’s okay for them to reply whenever they wake up, instead of strictly scheduling calls because of timezone differences and schedules and maybe forgetting that thing you wanted to share with them because you had the thought 6 hours ago. To access a bunch of open free textbooks or learning resources and how-to articles without having to drive to the library first. If all my screen use was useful I’d still be using them a lot, because it honestly makes my life much easier to have easily searchable and quickly-createable information resources that I can back up on a device I can clean easily, instead of a bunch of physical documents I’ll inevitably lose or dirty and freak out about losing or dirtying especially given how much time I sunk into making them by hand.

Also, I’m forgetful and having reminders I set to go off at specific times or when I leave a specific location is so much more effective for managing this tendency than writing on my hand or asking someone else to remind me of whatever. If I didn’t have the internet I probably would not have figured out gay rights until actually meeting openly gay people in college in an environment that didn’t encourage them to hide, as opposed to figuring it out at ~13 and learning I’m not as straight as I thought I was thanks to the internet. That is a few extra years of less “do what you want in your house but keep it away from the rest of us”-brand homophobia thanks to the internet.

We’re talking about children whose brains are not yet fully developed, not teenagers or adults, and screens didn’t exist for children decades ago…

The problem is new, not old.

I don’t see the connection with the “weird guy”, I’m talking about health problems related to speech and intellectual abilities. It’s not a personality trait to have a mental delay, but a health issue…