My wife, our soon nine-year-old daughter, and I are Finns living in Finland. Our daughter's screen time has usually exceeded the recommended amount. She likes to play games and watch mostly English language videos on YouTube. While I have always had lingering doubts about letting her use the Internet as much as she does, I have allowed it because the pros seem to far outweigh the cons. A lot of this has to do with the type of videos she watches (I have set up all the accounts myself I and I know exactly what she watches). Apart from kiddie stuff, she's into popular science. She watches mostly English language content. When she was in first grade last year, she'd often come up to me and ask what this or that word meant. Now she knows how to use online dictionaries. I have measured her passive English vocabulary using testyourvocab.com and the latest result from March was 4,400. She likes to tell me about interesting topics she has watched videos about. Once at breakfast she explained to me how DNA works, how telomere depletion causes cells to stop dividing and how that prevents them from becoming cancerous, germ line cells being an exception. So, I'm not going to curtail her Internet use just because some guideline says that 1,5 hours a day is the maximum allowed time online for kids her age. She does have IRL friends and attends school normally.
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