I realize the study is preliminary, but there are some very alarming things. Among them are the facts that the kids would not give electronics with certain features to the researcher, and that the kids were unable to duplicate certain on line skills in real life. I think a lot of parents comfort themselves (delude themselves?) with the philosophy that "It's an educational game." That lead to the next step: Define "educational." Is it educational because the manufacturer says so? Because it has numbers or colors?
My son is in his late 20s so we missed a lot of this, but he certainly complained that he always lost at video games when he went to friends' houses. In college, he and his roommate bought an XBox, and I was fine with that (not that I had a vote in the decision!). He sold is a few years back - he got bored. But we still had to turn off the TV and watch the amount of time spent on videos, so the idea was the same.
We were really big on hands-on toys - blocks and Legos and marble towers and puzzles and so on. We gave our son a big table in the basement where stuff didn't have to be cleaned up, and he built elaborate set-ups with cars and trains and Legos and so on, combining totally different items in new ways. There was a ton of outdoor play - unstructured, free play ("Find a kid or two in the neighborhood and do something") and, again, they invented games using household objects or stuff they found in nature. We took walks, usually with a bucket for collecting treasures.
So I do think screen time is like dessert, as mentioned below. My big concern is anything that is too isolating from others – if they’re interacting with a game vs. a kid or family member, if they’re texting friends rather than talking to them, it’s limiting. My other concerns, whether it’s video games or overscheduled kids in organized sports or dance or whatever, is the lack of creative play and the idea that kids cannot entertain themselves or be comfortable in their own skin. I think it’s okay for kids to be bored, to have to create activity for themselves, to lie in the grass and contemplate the clouds, and to not have parents or others solve all their problems. Critical thinking comes from having to evaluate a situation and figure their own way out of it. So I think screen time is a part of this much bigger issue.