Q: The book speaks directly to teens. Why did you feel that was important to do?

Too often, the issue of screen time becomes a conflict between parents and teens over how much time their kids spend on screens. Some parents think it’s too much. Other parents think it’s WAAAAAAY too much. This battle over screen time shifts the responsibility for maintaining a healthy screen scene away from teens and onto parents, turning digital health into a power struggle. I believe teens should take responsibility for their digital lives. And that they will once they learn more about the extent to which they are being tracked, manipulated, and influenced without their knowledge or consent by Big Tech, and the potential negative consequences of too much or the wrong kind of online activity.

Q: Is that realistic? What makes you think teens will be receptive to such a message?

Teens recognize that the digital world can be an unhealthy environment.

• Between 40% and 50% of teens say they “feel addicted” to their phones.

• 90% of teens say too much screen time is a problem for people their age.

• 72% of teens believe tech companies manipulate them to spend more time on their devices.

• 43% of teens wish they could sometimes “unplug” from their phones.

• 57% of teens agree that social media distracts them when they should be doing homework.

Teens want to lead healthy lives. They want to feel confident, skilled, and socially adept. They know in their gut that excessive, or the wrong kind of screen time can be harmful. I believe that if provided with knowledge and tools, and approached with honesty and respect, teens will want to create a healthy screen scene for themselves. The key to “getting through” is recognizing that for teens, online life is real life. So, I don’t judge, preach, or assume. I use humor, validation, empathy, and wacky challenges to encourage self-awareness and healthy decision-making.

Q: How do you differentiate between good screen time and bad? 

Screen time is tricky. Adults tend to focus on how much time teens spend on their screens: More = bad. Less = good. But it’s not just how much time you spend, it’s how you spend that time: 

• Are you creating or vegetating?

• Are you a passive spectator, or are you digging deep into yourself to learn, connect, and create?

• Is your screen time a healthy balance of homework, friends, education, and entertainment—or are you spending eight hours a day killing space invaders and mining Obsidian blocks?

• Does being online make you feel happy, productive, and socially connected, or depressed, lonely, guilty, or inadequate?

• Is your screen time focused, or does it assault you with a cacophony of attention-grabbing “gotchas”?

• When you’re not staring at a screen, are you physically active, seeing friends, spending time with your family, and keeping up with your responsibilities?

• Is moss growing on you?

You have to consider the entire picture to determine whether screen time is “good” or “bad.”

Q: How can a teen and/or their parents know when they have a healthy online-offline balance?

Teens thrive by maintaining healthy proportions between elements that nourish growth and fulfillment—family/friends; work/play; solitary/social; physical/mental, online/offline. While some imbalance can be nourishing or necessary— pursuing a passion, flourishing on TikTok, cramming for exams—in general, positive life balance is threatened if any on- or offline activity crowds out others essential for healthy development.

The best protection against this is knowing the warning signs that suggest one’s life balance is out of whack. Besides obvious signs such as thumbs the size of cantaloupes from too much texting, or walking into street lamps because you’re buried in your phone, Slaying Digital Dragons contains zany research-based challenges that encourage teens to explore their screen scene by examining the impact of their digital life on their physical, psychological, emotional, cognitive, and social health.

If teens identify aspects of their screen scene they’d like to change, the book provides a guided self-intervention for resetting their life balance—a process I call “giving yourself an App-endectomy.”

Q: What’s the most impactful thing you would tell a teenager who was getting swallowed up by the digital world?

Recognize that along with all the wonderful, positive things smartphones, social media, and the internet have made possible, there’s another side to them: 

This goes far beyond the risks you hear about such as cyberbullying, sexting, identity theft, ransomware, sexual predators, and fake news. Big Tech, special interests, and social media are stalking you—trying to manipulate your emotions, influence your thinking, steal your data, monetize your life, and get you addicted to their site. Too much, or the wrong kind of screen time can harm your body, brain, relationships, psyche, reputation, and future opportunities. To protect yourself: 

• Join the resistance against Big Tech. Take charge of your digital life.

• Stay away from platforms that make you feel bad.

• Reject the shallow, nasty, and judgmental aspects of social media. 

• Lead an examined life. Be aware of what you do online, how you use your devices, and how it affects you (for good or bad).

• Your online presence is your “brand.” Curate it with care.

• Be alert to the lies, misinformation, and biases found online that can destroy serenity, truth, trust, and the foundations of civilization.

• Post to share your life. Don’t let posting become your life. 

• Use your screen time to do good things for yourself and others.

• Seek a healthy balance between your online and offline lives.

• Always remember that the most powerful app is your brain. Take good care of it.

Q: Are teens addicted to their phones?

I try to avoid the term “addiction,” since people get so hung up about it. But, given my definition of addiction—the psychological and/or physical inability to stop compulsive behavior despite harmful consequences—I do believe teens can be addicted to their devices and online activities. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Tech companies knowingly design their games, user experiences, and platforms to be addictive. Your eyeballs = their profit. So, they employ sophisticated knowledge of neurochemistry, reward systems, and human nature to maximize your engagement. These often hidden and manipulative techniques, if they find a susceptible teen (or adult), can result in addictive behaviors.

The most telling answer to this question is that surveys show roughly 40%-50% of teens saying that they “feel addicted” to their phones. That’s good enough for me to suggest that many teens recognize that their relationship to screens is an unhealthy force in their lives over which they feel powerless.

Q: What does the research say about teens and excessive screen time?

Social scientists have studied whether “excessive” screen time affects kids in negative ways. The research is all over the map. Some studies suggest “yes,” that too much or the wrong kind of screen time can lead to kids having difficulty concentrating, remembering information, solving problems, regulating emotions, expressing themselves, learning new skills, making good decisions, and/or setting and achieving goals.

Other research suggests no negative consequences from screen time. It may take decades to know for sure, since certain effects can only be identified through long-term studies. My message to teens is that it doesn’t matter what the research says about millions of kids. It doesn’t matter if 10% or 80% of kids experience certain negative (or positive) outcomes. What matters is what YOU experience, whether you have an “allergic” reaction to certain aspects of the digital world.

We should focus more on the nature of a teen’s screen time, rather than the number of hours spent. Is the teen creating or consuming? Connecting or isolating? Learning or vegetating? These types of questions may prove more significant in predicting negative consequences than whether a teen is spending two hours or seven hours a day online. That said, even if screen time is “healthy,” kids are still experiencing life electronically through a device for many hours each day. This is not a recipe for optimal human functioning and fulfillment, and can have negative physical, social, mental, and emotional consequences no matter how productive, uplifting or enjoyable that time is. It’s not just a question of what kids are doing online. It’s also a question of what they’re not doing offline.

Q: What happens to the brains of adolescents when they spend too much time on screens, and in particular, on social media?

The brain’s prefrontal cortex experiences dynamic growth during the teen years. If anything were to weaken this development, it could lead to heightened distractibility; irresponsible behavior; lack of motivation; poor academic performance and social skills; impaired reasoning, judgment, memory, and impulse control; and diminished future options.

The relentless visual and auditory assault teens experience online, designed to capture their attention, bulks up, not the prefrontal cortex, but more primitive “fight-or-flight” areas of the brain. This, along with rapid-fire task switching between apps, creates a state of heightened nervous system arousal that can cause chronic stress. 

Social media hijacks teens’ psyches. It exploits FOMO and adolescents’ healthy desires for approval, connection, and belonging to create a Pavlovian ensnarement of “likes” and notifications that demand constant engagement. For some teens, this artificial “reality,” relentless social scorekeeping, and pressure to post can lead to depression, loneliness, anxiety, low self-esteem, and unrealistic expectations for themselves.

Q: Is big tech the unambiguous enemy in this? Is it possible that they could become part of the solution to the problem they helped engineer?

Asking Big Tech to solve the problem would be like asking the alcohol industry to solve abusive drinking. It’s not going to happen since, for both industries, more consumption equals more profit.

Big Tech’s business model is based on keeping you engaged and, better yet, addicted. This requires tracking you, manipulating your emotions, invading your privacy, and using everything they learn to target you with products, posts, and provocations they predict will best grab your eyeballs and empty your wallet.

Research shows that fake news—designed to arouse emotions and prejudices—spreads roughly six times faster on social media than do factually-based posts. Since engagement is the goal, Big Tech doesn’t care whether, to get it, their algorithms incite violence, deny reality, weaken democracies, or push hate, lies, and conspiracy theories. (But don’t get me started!)

So, no, I don’t see Big Tech creating solutions unless and until federal regulation, legal jeopardy, public pressure, and users voting with their “uninstall” buttons threaten their bottom line.