Screen Time extensions are Intermittent Reinforcement

(The following observation/structure is mine but the text/references came from Kagi's Research Assistant per this specific prompting.)

Your child's iPhone or iPad locks. They look up at you. "Can I just have a little more time?"

You say yes. Or maybe no. Next time, you say the opposite. It feels like parenting. It isn't. It is one of the most powerful addiction triggers in psychology, and Apple has built it directly into Screen Time.

Psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement. The concept is simple. When a behavior is rewarded sometimes, but not always, that behavior becomes more persistent, not less. The uncertainty is the point. As one introduction to the subject puts it, "unpredictability can create a stronger association between the behavior and the reward, making it more compelling and often more difficult to extinguish." [1] This is why slot machines work. You keep pulling the lever because this time might be the one. The reward doesn't have to come often. It just has to come sometimes.

Apple's Screen Time feature is marketed as a parental control tool. It lets parents set daily limits on how long a child can use an app or a device. When a child hits that limit, the iPhone or iPad locks. Apple describes what happens next on its own child safety page: the child "can ask parents for more time." [2] CNET, reviewing the feature approvingly, puts it plainly: "your child can send a request for more time if more time is needed." [3] The parent then decides. Yes, no, or no answer at all. The child never knows which it will be.

That uncertainty is not a minor flaw. It is the mechanism. The behavior is using the phone until the limit hits, then sending the request. The reward is more screen time. The schedule is unpredictable. That is a textbook variable-ratio reinforcement schedule. It is the same structure that makes gambling compulsive. [1] The child is not being taught that the phone has limits. The child is being taught that the phone has a lever. Pull it enough times and it pays out. The parent, intending to set a boundary, has instead become the slot machine.

The fix is not complicated. Set the limit. Hold it. Every time. No exceptions. A limit that bends is not a limit. It is a reward on a variable schedule. The parent who always says no to extension requests is not being cruel. They are being consistent. And consistency is the one thing that intermittent reinforcement cannot survive. [1] Your child does not need more time on their phone. They need a parent who means what they say. Do not use time extensions.

References

1. "The Power of Intermittent Reinforcement in Psychology." Unplugged Psych. https://www.unpluggedpsych.com/the-power-of-intermittent-reinforcement-in-psychology/
2. "Child Safety." Apple. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
3. "Apple's Screen Time Feature Saves Parents from Being the Bad Guy." CNET. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apples-screen-time-feature-saves-parents-from-being-the-bad-guy/

Tinkering on old projects

Over the past year I've dusted off several projects hosted at https://github.com/RhysU/:

RhysU/ar

Autoregressive process modeling tools in header-only C++.

RhysU/ESIO

Parallel-HDF5 library for high-throughput I/O of structured turbulence simulation data.

RhysU/suzerain

Spectral, direct numerical simulation of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations for turbulence research.

RhysU/c99sh

Shebang interpreter that runs single C99, C11, and C++ files with rcfile support.

RhysU/jobserver

Nestable Python jobserver with thread-safe futures, callbacks, and type hints.

RhysU/droll

Command-line implementation of the Dungeon Roll dice game.

RhysU/tuna

Lightweight autotuner that picks the fastest among interchangeable code chunks at runtime.

RhysU/war

Simulation of the card game War.

Underling

Thirteen years ago, while working on the dissertation, I put together a 3D pencil transform library atop FFTW MPI called underling. It looked great in isolation. It never integrated correctly with my dissertation code. I eventually ran away because spending time on it wasn't time spend graduating

In the last couple of days I learned that there was no problem with the library from a correctness perspective. Instead, the mysterious problem was MKL exposes an incomplete FFTW implementation that simply returns NULL for a lot of methods. After some linking tinkering in my dissertation's primary codebase, my little pencil decomposition library snapped right into place.

This is both immensely satisfying (it worked after all!) and frustratingly painful (would have loved to benchmark/publish during the grad school days!). Alas.

Two Sons

Written back in August 2020

I have two different sons. However, at the West End Suprette each one chose the same Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar. Something with dark chocolate. I chose a Nestle Crunch ice cream bar from another part of the freezer. I paid while they continuously touched things that I asked them not to touch.

We three walked a block south to a tiny park, Septuagesimo Uno, and plunked ourselves on some benches. I handed the Häagen-Dazs bars, which came boxed-then-wrapped, to the boys. They tore open the boxes but the wrappers stymied them. I chuckled and wondered if, sufficiently motivated, they'd get the packaging open by themselves. They endeavored.

I opened my Crunch bar, lifted it by the popsicle stick, caught half a bite, and the whole bar fell away from the stick and onto the nasty city ground. Evidently the Crunch bar had passed its days in a warmer freezer spot. The old Eddie Murphy ice cream man skit, where a kid loses a whole cone, ran through my head while I debated if anything could be salvaged. My wife would rightly kill me if she heard I taught the kids that food could be eaten off the nasty city ground. And the kids would certainly tell her. I sighed, shook my head, and then looked up into two pairs of wide eyes.

Each boy gazed into my disappointed face while still ineffectively fumbling with a wrapper. I got out “Too bad” before twice “Dad, would you please help me open this?” arrived. I held out my hand, the little one handed me his package, I opened it, and I handed back an unmelted ice cream bar. A pause, then into the mouth. I held out my hand, the bigger one handed me his package, I opened it without looking, and I passed back a second bar. Turning down again, I couldn't resist a tiny bit of the chocolate coating. Perhaps, adequately distracted, the kids wouldn't report me to their mother.

“Dad, would you like some of mine?” spoken softly startled me. A dark chocolate Häagen-Dazs bar floated into my gaze attached to a popsicle stick attached to an outstretched arm attached to my nine-year-old son. He had offered me his very first bite. I choked up briefly, politely declined, told him how kind that was, and hugged the boy. He blinked, stepped back, and then launched into his bar.

Fortunately, neither kid made so much of a mess that their not-yet-broken tendency to wipe their mouths on their shirts didn't solve said mess. I collected then threw away the two boxes, three wrappers, and three sticks. Starting home, I hugged the big one again. He ran ahead maybe twenty feet.

The six-year-old generally lags behind me on the street. Now, however, he kept pace as we walked in silence. Halfway home he says “Dad, I would have offered you mine but I knew you wouldn't eat it so I didn't offer it.” And I tell him thank you and I hug him too. Quickly thereafter, we enter our building lobby and call the elevator.