Clive Thompson Quotes

Some researchers sensibly suggest that rather than worrying too much about which programs our children are watching, we should concentrate on trying to reduce the total amount of time they spend in front of the screen.

Unless you have kids, you actually have no idea what kids are watching on TV these days.

I have a 6-year-old daughter, and we never look through magazines. But when we're on a plane, that's the one time we have screen-time and magazine-time sometimes. And I do not open a magazine with her without saying: 'Now remind me, are these real pictures?'

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.

I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.

Being a lazy parent and letting your kid watch stuff that's not appropriate for their age is one of the bigger mistakes you can make.

TV is not a baby sitter.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

It's very important that children learn to use technology - it's part of life - but also that they learn when to put it down.

'Screen time' is meaningless - what matters is what you do while on the screen. The good, the bad, and the ugly faces of screen time will all have to do with which activities you engage into.

People just don't sit down and just watch TV at night. Between cellphones, television, video games, the Internet and instant messaging, people are just spending their time in different places.

I would let my kids watch this stuff way before I'd let them watch something like 'Full House' that I think would make them stupid.

In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.

I think it's up to the parents to discern what their child is watching on television.

Every parent knows this moment in a child's age when he or she needs your attention in a very specific way because it's the beginning and ending of the early life of imagination. It's such a responsibility.

I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do.

Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.

The average family spends 30 hours in front of a television, and they say they don't have the time to have a balanced, integrated life.

I think that sometimes kids use the show as a jumping off point for talking about things with their parents.

Kids aren't growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas.

I think a lot of the problem is that at 8 o'clock there's nothing on for kids.

I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them.

My kids don't watch any TV, but they watch videos and films. I'm sure they watch it at friends' houses.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

Children from like 8 and even up to the college age - Spider-Man appeals to a fairly broad demographic but, like I said, a mean age probably of 12 is a good mark - they process information so quickly and it's not because of attention deficit or short attention span.