Rob Figueiredo

These are so nicely done. If you have kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews, this is a fantastic set of books to add to their library.

Every additional minute your toddler spends on a screen, they hear about 7 fewer words from you. By age 3, they also make 5 fewer attempts to talk back and lose one back-and-forth exchange with a parent. That’s from a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study that put speech-recognition recorders inside actual homes across Australia. The 49% stat in this tweet is real. It comes from a 2017 study at SickKids Hospital in Toronto that tracked 894 children aged 6 to 24 months. For every 30 minutes of handheld screen time per day, the risk of a child being slow to form words and sentences increased by 49%. But only the speech output was affected. Gestures, body language, and social interaction were all fine. The mechanism is displacement. A toddler’s brain learns language through something researchers call “serve and return”: baby babbles, parent responds, baby tries again. That loop is how the brain’s language wiring gets built. When a screen is on, that exchange drops off. And we can now see it on brain scans. A 2020 JAMA Pediatrics study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital scanned the brains of 47 kids aged 3 to 5. Kids with more screen time had weaker white matter, the insulation around nerve fibers that helps different parts of the brain talk to each other. The weak spots were in the exact areas that control language and early reading. A 2023 study at Tohoku University in Japan followed 7,097 children from birth. More screen time at age 1 was associated with higher rates of communication delays at ages 2 and 4. Each additional hour widened the gap. The AAP recommends zero screen time for children under 18 months, except for video calls. The average child under 2 already gets over an hour a day. But a 2023 systematic review found that when kids with speech delays stopped using devices for six months, 36.7% showed measurable improvement. The word in the tweet is “destroys.” The data says it’s closer to “delays,” and in many cases, delays that respond when the screens come off.

a few friends are trying polyphasic sleep so they can supervise their coding agents 24/7

The word 'adolescent' was coined in the 20th century. The word 'teenager' was invented in the 20th century. These categories didn't exist before. In the 1800s and earlier, there was childhood and there was adulthood. The transition happened around twelve or thirteen when you started taking on adult responsibilities. Andrew Carnegie had a job at thirteen. Thomas Edison was working at thirteen. Ben Franklin was apprenticed at twelve. If you're working and contributing and earning, you don't have time to rebel against anything. The whole concept of teenage rebellion is an artifact of forced schooling. We created the problem by inventing the category.