Nah, screen time is the video games (1980s) of the 21st century, or the TV (1960s), or the radio (1930s), or the gin (1800s).
I’m on mobile now, but if I were on desktop I’d dig up Clay Shirky’s essay on gin and the Industrial Revolution. There has always been a moral panic about new forms of entertainment and time-wasting, because people look at these diversions and think “Why don’t people use all that time to benefit society (ie me)?” That’s just a refusal to admit that people don’t have any obligation to you or larger society, and fundamentally are out to make themselves feel good.
I don't disagree, but I think we often look at the past through rose-colored glasses of survivorship bias. Most parenting was bad by those standards.
If you look at how children have historically been parented across a wide range of pre-industrial cultures, it's alloparenting (care by someone other than the biological parent). You had a village of extended family, neighbors, tribewomen, clan members, whatever, and they would trade off care of large groups of village children. Or the kids would just run around and make up their own games. This is actually considered fairly healthy today - it's what daycares, preschools, schools, aftercares, etc. do in an institutionalized setting, but maintained through person-to-person relationships.
The nuclear family and industrial revolution was pathological from an anthropologic POV, and brought all sorts of other pathologies into child-rearing.
Or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons, Rock and Roll, Harry Potter and other things parents got hysterical about but turned out to not actually lead us into evil. The jury seems to be still out. We don't really know yet if "screens" are bad, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from pointing their fingers at them.
What we know about screens so far is that they're the perfect distraction and put processing of emotions on hold. That in turn creates a backlog which, as it grows, makes the person increasingly miserable.
Personally I use the amount of screen time as an indicator of how bad I'm doing mentally at the moment.
And therein lies the crux of the issue: we optimised ourselves out of downtime which traditionally allowed us to deal with emotions. Screens are just a side effect.
