Screen Addiction Is Not a Family Failure

Screen addiction starts with design

Patrycja Krzeszowska: In your books, you write that we are living in an age of dopamine overload. Many parents worry that their children are becoming addicted to TikTok or Instagram, yet they often struggle to put their own phones away, even during family meals. In your view, are children primarily becoming addicted to the apps themselves, or to the culture and behavioral norms that adults unintentionally model for them?

Prof. Anna Lembke*: Great question. There’s no doubt in my mind that children are becoming addicted to the apps themselves. These platforms are designed to be addictive and they have accomplished that by engineering specific design features that hijack the brain’s reward pathway. But the fact that parents are modeling indiscriminate use of digital media, including at the dinner table, and that our culture normalizes phone use anywhere, anytime, only contributes to the problem. What we need is a new digital etiquette that makes it clear when and where digital devices and digital media should be used, and inherent in that digital etiquette should be the understanding that we should be off of our devices for the better part of the day.

When real life begins to feel less rewarding

Do you believe that the greatest danger of social media is not that it takes time away from children, but that it gradually diminishes their ability to experience ordinary everyday life as interesting, meaningful, and rewarding?

The harms of social media are incurred through several different mechanisms. One important mechanism of harm is the sheer amount of time kids are spending on their devices, which is often referred to as opportunity costs, that is, all the things children are not doing because they’re spending so much time online.

They’re not sleeping, they’re not exercising, they’re not studying, they’re not socializing in real life.

Another mechanism of harm is the ways in which, by hijacking our brain’s reward system, these devices make everything else less salient … less interesting, less meaningful, less rewarding.

Which also speaks to the collective nature of the problem: We are actually making real life less interesting because we’re not spending time there, not investing in it, and not inhabiting it.

It’s one thing to tell your child to go outside and play, but if, when they do go out, there are no other children there because they’re all inside on their devices, now we have a collective problem.

This is why solving this problem cannot be left up to individual families alone. We need to see sweeping societal changes, in schools, in community centers, through legislation, that limit the amount of time that kids are spending in the digital world and restore collective gathering spaces where kids can be together engaging in hands-on activities in real life where no one is connected to the Internet.

I think it’s also important to point out that social media in particular can cause depression and anxiety, and lead to negative social comparisons, wherein young people feel they will never measure up, after comparing themselves to millions of online curated images with beauty filters etc.

The developing brain faces addictive engineering

For many years, addiction was commonly perceived as a sign of personal weakness. Today, however, social media platforms are designed by teams of behavioral scientists, psychologists, and engineers whose explicit goal is to capture and retain our attention. When it comes to children and adolescents, can we genuinely speak of conscious choice, or are they navigating an environment intentionally engineered in ways that put the developing brain at a significant disadvantage?

The developing brain is a vulnerable brain, less able to put the brakes on consumption, more drawn to immediate rewards, and less likely to appreciate future consequences.

We know that the earlier a child is exposed to social media and/or has a personal digital device, the more likely they are to get addicted to social media and/or experience related harms, such as depression, anxiety, obesity, and sleep deprivation.

Many of these addictive social media platforms specifically target kids, not because it’s the most lucrative market, but because today’s youth users are tomorrow’s adult users.

These addictive platforms have been engineered to optimize for watch time, not well-being, and even a healthy young person with no co-occurring psychiatric problems and living in a supportive environment, can get addicted to these platforms because they are designed to be addictive.

What makes them addictive can be boiled down to the 3 P’s: Plentiful, Potent, and Personalized.

The video feeds are infinite. There is no end to the content and it can be accessed anywhere anytime.

The medium is highly reinforcing, through the use of short-form videos, likes, and a slot-machine effect that creates unpredictable rewards, which are like catnip for the human brain.

Through the algorithm, these platforms tailor the feed, personalizing the digital drug for each individual, which happens with almost no other drug on the planet, at least not in real time.

We are virtually helpless to the addictive engineering of these platforms.

Why willpower alone cannot solve digital addiction

Throughout your clinical work, you have treated young people struggling with behavioral addictions, including excessive social media use. Without revealing any identifying details, could you share one of the most severe or concerning cases of screen addiction or excessive social media use that you have encountered? What made that case particularly striking, and what lessons do you believe parents and educators should draw from it?

I often see severe cases of digital media addiction beginning in childhood and adolescence, which in some cases lead to severe depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.

These cases are very sad because the ‘drug’ is everywhere and parents are often helpless to effect any kind of change.

To effect any kind of change, I have learned that it is necessary to help the child understand the ways in which their digital media use is making them depressed, even if it feels good in the moment, and also that we cannot expect kids, or adults for that matter, to rely on willpower alone.

We need to create environments that make it more difficult to access these digital drugs, while providing in-real-life alternatives that are conducive to good mental health, like exercise/sports, family time playing board-games/cooking/engaged in worship, or being in nature, to name a few.

* Prof. Anna Lembke is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. As a clinician and researcher, she has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications, including peer-reviewed scientific articles, book chapters, and commentaries. Her best-known book in Poland, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, became a bestseller in the psychology self-help and popular science categories.

Read this article in Polish: Autorka „Niewolników dopaminy”: dzieci tracą przez telefon więcej niż czas