Science Vs - Screens: Are They Ruining Our Brains and Mental Health and Eyes and

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Tons of us are spending waaaayyy more time using screens these days — and it’s freaking us out. We’ve got all kinds of worries. Like, is all this screen time rotting kids’ brains? Is social media destroying our mental health? And then there’s our eyes. Our eyes!! Are all these screens ruining them too?! To find out, we speak to psychologist Dr. Brenna Hassinger-Das, communication studies researcher Dr. Natalie Pennington and optical physicist Dr. Maitreyee Roy.   Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/2Rfp0I4 This episode was produced by Michelle Dang with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Nick DelRose and Taylor White. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Haley Shaw, Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Seang Mei Saw, Professor Mark Rosenfield, Dr. Cristian Talens Estarelles, Dr. Rebecca Brand, Professor Wallace Dixon and Dr. Deborah Kloska. And thanks to all of our wonderful listeners who sent us messages about their screen use! It was so lovely to hear from all of you! And special thanks to Khairi, KC, and Makai Williams, Christina Couch and Lillian Adams, and Connie and Sekwan Walker, Kendra Pierre-Louis, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Rose here. I'm a producer at Science Versus, and these days it seems like everybody is constantly asking me how they can help the show succeed and thrive. I get this question five or six times a day. I get it from the person who delivers the mail, the person who delivers packages, the traveling salespeople who show up at the door, even within my own family. Just listen to my dad. How can I help Science Versus succeed and thrive in my own words? Enough already. The answer is listen to us on Spotify. It's free. You can download the app, search for Science VS, and hit follow. That is going to be a big help to us. So you can

all quit asking me that now. Okay, on with the show. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against phones and computers and tablets. On today's episode, screen time. This past year, a lot of us have been freaking out over how much time we're spending staring at the glowing rectangles all around us. We asked you all to tell us about your screen time, and it didn't sound good. I feel like I have a screen in front of my face literally all day, like from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I have spent, jeez, at least 50 hours on devices and stuff over the last week.

People said it felt like screens were sucking the joy out of their lives and messing with their mental health. I find that I'm not actually connecting like I tell myself I am. I'm left so socially and emotionally and mentally drained. What am I doing? Like, have I really been scrolling aimlessly through social media for like eight hours today? So yeah, I hate it. With kids trapped inside too, parents got in touch to say, is all this screen time going to cause big problems later on? How much is too much? When would you know if it's too much?

And away from our minds, something else kept coming up. A lot of people were worried about what screens were doing to their eyes. Questions about whether this actually is bad for your eyesight, your vision. Your vision. Some figured by the end of this pandemic, they were going to need new peepers. Others were buying up blue light blocking glasses to help them feel better. But there was just a lot of confusion. So what does the science say about all of this?

On today's show, we're going to crack open our laptops to find out, should we close them back up again? And we're scrolling past three big questions here. One, how bad is screen time for kids? Is it actually turning their brains to mush? Two, are screens and particularly social media making us miserable? And three, is our 24-7 screen obsession actually ruining our eyes? When it comes to screens, there's a lot of, what am I doing? Then there's science. Science versus screen time is coming up to stop to the break. How do stop losses work on Kraken?

Let's say I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting Thursday morning. So sensible me pre-books a taxi for 10 p.m. with alerts. Voila. I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's stop loss orders on Kraken. An easy way to plan ahead. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be.

Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about

hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches.

Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team.

So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back.

So people are pretty worried about screens taking over our lives. And there's been a lot of hand-wringing recently about what screen time is doing to the kids. Some say it's ruining their attention span and language skills, like even messing with their ability to read. So how worried do we need to be here? And what's the right amount of screen time before it's time for the little ones to switch off?

To find out, we called up Brenna Hassinger-Dass. She's an assistant professor of psychology at Pace University, and Brenna studies how kids interact with these nasty beasts. Screens. Yes, screens. And Brenna doesn't just study this. She lives it. She's got a seven-year-old son

and they've been pandemic-ing together. I'm living the situation now. I'm at home. I have a child at home who's doing school. And if I need to get some work done and he's done with school, is he going to spend more time on a screen? Maybe. And yeah, Brenna says it can feel kind of icky to watch a kid getting sucked in by a screen. But is it really that bad? The first worry we're going to tackle is whether these screens are

screwing up kids' attention spans, making it harder for them to concentrate. Because looking at what's on screens these days, Brenna's like, it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't be great for your focus. A screen, you know, you go on a screen, you can watch whatever you want, you know, when you want it. And you can switch between all kinds of things. You know, you could go, you know, I'm tired of the show. I'm going to go play an app. They're looking for that, like, next hit. Now, even though fears around this have skyrocketed during the pandemic, the idea of screens ruining our attention span has actually been around for decades. Back when Apple was just a fruit, people were worried that television was

meddling with young minds. So a lot of the research that we have on screens comes from TV, including one study that made a huge splash in this space. So let's start here. It begins in 1990 when this big national survey asked parents, how much TV is your toddler watching? And then the survey checked in when the kids were seven and asked their parents about attention problems. Questions like, does your kid have difficulty concentrating? Are they easily confused or restless? In the 2000s, some other nerds ran the numbers

to basically see, did kids who watch a lot of TV when they were toddlers end up having more problems focusing? And they found, yeah, they did. The researchers said that for every hour of television that kids watched each day on average, it bumped up their risk of having attention problems by about 10%. And given how many kids were watching TV... You know, seemed kind of worrisome. Right. It's pretty huge. Exactly. I mean, it seemed like this is a big deal and, you know, it's something we really should be talking about.

And oh boy, did people talk about this. When the paper came out in 2004, there was tons of press with headlines screaming, toddler TV time can cause attention problems and watching TV is bad for children. Since then, we've just kept hearing more and more about how screens destroy the minds of our kids. It is time for toddlers and their parents to turn that TV off. This age group should not be watching any TV or videos at all. But since that original scary paper was published, other scientists have pored over it. And they realise that something didn't look good here.

The original authors of that paper had picked a cut off point for what counted as attention problems that looked kind of arbitrary. So it wasn't clear that a kid would actually have any problems in the real world. In fact, three different teams have since come along re-analysing this data, and none of them found that watching TV when you're little ultimately messes up your attention span. In the most recent paper, published just this year, the authors wrote that this claim, quote, is not robust and is unlikely to be true, end quote.

And for an academic, this is basically like saying, well, that paper is a dumpster fire. Well, Brenna put it like this. These data don't give compelling evidence that television is negatively affecting later attention. When we tried to go beyond TV to the screens that kids are glued to today, we also didn't find convincing evidence to suggest that screens were ruining attention spans. And so we took another route to try to figure out if kids these days are doing worse than yesterday's kids just generally. Like, is the on-demand screen

world where you can watch whatever you want when you want it, turning kids into impatient little rat bags. And to get to the bottom of this question, we found that some researchers have gotten rather creative. So just a few years ago, they repeated this really famous marshmallow study from the 1960s. Here's Brenna. Basically, you know, a child is in a room. They're put in a room by themselves and they're presented with, for example, like a marshmallow on a plate. And they're told they can eat it now

or they can wait until the researcher comes back in the room and then they can receive two marshmallows if they wait. I want two marshmallows if they wait. I want two marshmallows. You know, then the researcher leaves and all the while the kid is being videotaped to see what they do. And I smell the marshmallow.

You know, are they going to, like, pick up the marshmallow? Are they going to touch it? Are they going to lick it? Are they going to nibble it? And what the researchers wanted to know is, can today's kids, the screen generation, wait as long as kids in the 1960s for their marshmallows? They actually ran a survey asking about 350 randos. Do you think kids these days will do better or worse at this marshmallow test? And 75% of them said, oh, kids these days, they'll have less self-control.

Even the researchers were basically thinking, oh, we think that the, you know, it's going to be a shorter time that kids can wait. And some of this will have to do with the instant gratification that comes from screens. But actually they found that this wasn't the case. So the kids these days who did the study were not eating their marshmallows as quickly on average? Right. Yep. Yep. And they averaged, I think it's like two minutes longer wait. Wow.

Yeah. That is very surprising. I agree. I agree. When this study was done in the 1960s, on average, kids could wait five minutes before they went for their marshmallow. Now, on average, they were waiting seven minutes. It is snack time now. I wait, I wait. He gave me two marshmallows. Now, we should say that the guys who did the original marshmallow study later tried to argue that waiting for your marshmallow meant you'd be more successful later in life, which is very controversial.

But even now, lots and lots of researchers still use their marshmallow tests to measure instant gratification and self-control in kids. And in fact, recently, one review paper analysed 30 marshmallow tests that were done over the years. Just imagine all those kids waiting for their marshmallows. And they confirmed that yes, kids are waiting longer and longer for their candy. Now, this marshmallow finding is pretty sweet. At least it looks like kids these days aren't turning into greedy little tyrants. But what about the other stuff that people are freaking out about?

Like whether screen time can mess up how kids talk or understand language. Well, we dove through tons of studies about this. We were surprised, but the research was all over the map. Like one study would say, yes, there's a link between screen time and language problems. Another study would say, no, and even that screens are great and kids can actually learn from screens. Yeah, you can find research showing that kids can learn from iPads and e-readers, but also just good old-fashioned television. I mean, I know that I learned a lot of new words from watching Sesame Street. What words or things do you remember learning from Sesame Street?

Well, I actually remember learning Spanish words from watching- Oh my God, I was just thinking that. Wait, what? You go first. Just the count sequence. That's what I really remember is learning like uno, dos, tres, like learning to count to 10 in Spanish. I learned, there was that song that was like, tú me gustas, that means I like you. And it's like, I really like you. And then it's like, me gustas tú.

So you learned that from Sesame Street. So what is going on here? How come Brenner and I are Spanish, como se dice, wunderkids, thanks to Sesame Street? But yet, some studies show that screens can be bad for kids and their language skills. Well, the answer is brought to you by the letter C. C!

For caregiver. Because studies are finding that what really matters here is what caregivers are doing through all this. If you just leave kids to stare at screens on their own, they tend to do worse with language compared to if a caregiver, say, is talking them through what's happening, either on the telly or on an e-book. It's like a back and forth, back and forth. You know, if I'm reading a storybook with my son and I say like, hey, look, there's a bear on that page.

Do you remember when, you know, in the before times we went to the zoo and saw a bear? And that kind of talk, screens or not screens, that's important. And just overall, we're not seeing evidence that with all these screens around, kids' brains are going to potty. Are we getting stupider? No. I mean, I don't think we are. I don't think that we are getting stupider. When it comes to IQ, in fact, in the US, kids' IQ scores have kept climbing up and up in past decades.

Brenna gets asked a lot about the max amount of screen time that kids can have before their brains teeter-totter into soup. And top dogs in this space have tried to come up with some kind of cut-off point. But if you're asking for a magic number here, it's kind of the wrong question. Because more and more, the research is finding that it's not really

about how much time your kid is spending staring at a screen, but rather what it's replacing, like would your kid otherwise be running around outside or playing with other kids, but also what your kid is actually doing on the screen. You know, like screen media, they're not inherently good or bad. It's all about how they're used. It's okay that kids use screens and they're going to use them. So when it comes to the charge of screens rotting kids' brains, we're going to say not guilty.

But does this change as we grow up? Because then our fears around screens start to shift. We're hearing that screens are giving us depression and making us lonely. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, this is the giant experiment. Coming up after the break. After the break. Welcome back. We just found out that screens probably aren't turning little kids brains into goo. Great news there. The next fear is that they're crapping all over our mental health and making us miserable,

particularly when we go on social media. To get a ruling on this, we called up Natalie Pennington. She's an assistant professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, and she's been studying social media basically ever since we've had social media. So we're talking 15 years this year, yeah. And Natalie's been hearing the panic around screens ratchet up during this pandemic. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That kind of wave of, oh, my gosh, everything is online. What does this do to my life? Natalie says, for sure, being forced to do everything on screens and not seeing people in real life can suck. Even video chat just doesn't cut it. It almost creates that uncanny valley effect of like,

we're there, but we're not. And then you feel worse afterwards. AKA people want face-to-face. Nothing's going to meet those needs. FaceTime, more like fake time. But of course, the pandemic has been an anomaly here in all kinds of ways. So let's zoom out and ask, in general, are phones and screens bad for our mental health? Now, there is some evidence that since we've started connecting more and more through screens,

say since the mid 2000s, there's been higher and higher rates of anxiety and depression. And there are also a few big studies with tens of thousands of folks showing that people, and particularly teenagers, who spend more time on screens have more symptoms of depression and loneliness. And these findings, they tend to get a ton of attention. Social media has transpired to make us feel lonely, disconnected, and even depressed.

And what is it that has made people so lonely? It's their stupid phone. Every time I saw the social media makes me lonely, I kind of cringed because I knew there were nuances. Nuances. The big one is that when you look at these studies, a bunch of them run smack into a big science bugbear. Correlation versus causation. And by the way, you see this in a lot of the research into screen time in kids too. Natalie says, think about it like this. If you're somebody who already is inclined towards loneliness,

who already is feeling depressed. You might find yourself turning to social media. So then studies would find this link between loads of Facebook time and loneliness. But it's not necessarily that the screens are causing that or making you lonely. Some studies are doing clever stuff that could help us get a clearer picture of what's going on here. Like, one of them checked in with a group of teenagers six times a day over the course of a week

to see how happy they were feeling after hanging out on social media. Most of the teens, about 90%, said they felt the same or better after flipping through their feeds. About 10% said they felt worse. Other research on this is pretty mixed, like some studies suggest that social media is making people feel crappy, but other research doesn't find this. What's important though is that when studies do see an effect here, it tends to be really small. That is, on average, people don't feel a lot worse after being buried in their phones.

So the truth is that we don't know exactly why rates of depression and loneliness are going up these days, but it seems a bit too simple to be blaming screens. Still, though, one thing is for sure. Many of us have had moments where we just felt really bad after being on social media for too long. So what's going on here? And why can't you clearly see that in the data?

Well, Natalie reckons that the different ways we're using social media is what matters here, and that's often not captured in these studies. Like, it's not all doom scrolling. Think about messaging an old mate out of the blue. Research has overwhelmingly found that when you send a private message, when you comment on the wallpost to say hey to someone and engage in that one-to-one communication, that that can be really productive for relationships. Natalie and her colleagues have a fun analogy for this. They call it social snacking. So when I'm hungry, I go and I eat a snack, right? And then that snack helps me feel full and I'm good and I go about my day. But we

know from a nutrition standpoint that some things make us feel fuller longer than other things, right? So some things are what we call empty calories. That one is mindless scrolling. It's like eating the stale bag of potato chips. And at the moment, I might feel like, oh, wow, you know, I got to see this person's cat or this person's baby or this person took a trip. That's cool. But I didn't actually talk to anyone. And so, you know, a few hours later, the next day, I'm back to feeling lonely. I haven't actually gotten my needs met because I haven't actually talked to anyone. And so it's that empty calories. Empty social calories. Yeah. So just making smarter choices on snacks. You need to bite the apple.

You need to text your mom and not scroll Twitter. Yes. Yes, exactly. Because that is, now it's kind of like dawning on me. If the scrolling is the bad part of social media, like that is a huge part of social media. Like, that is a huge part of social media. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was, like, very strategic by social media companies, right?

That's how you sneak those ads in. That's how you get people to stay online longer. And it's not always good for us. But even though these apps might be designed to hook you in, Natalie says you can still quit. She's even run a small study on it. And she found that for people who wanted to quit the apps, they had a little bit of FOMO at first,

but then actually felt good about their decision. Have you ever wanted to quit social media before completely? You know, it's funny you say that because I've quit bits and pieces here and there. I'm currently taking breaks from Instagram and Facebook and I like it. But Natalie, she says it was sucking up too much of her time and she wasn't getting much out of it. So overall, while social media might make you feel a bit crap if you've been mindlessly scrolling it for too long, it doesn't look like it's the supervillain here that people claim it is. It just seems like every time there is a screens are bad study, it gets so much more attention than a screens are just fine study. We do kind of fall

into this moral panic of, oh, technology is ruining our lives and making everything worse, when it's really not. Now we're going to travel away from the brain, to the little balls of jelly stuck in our face. That's right, our eyes. With all the gazing at screens that we're doing these days, are they about to turn our eyes into jelly for real? Our final guest today is Dr. Maitrey Roy. She's at the University of New South Wales in Australia. And recently, she's been studying how the light from our screens might affect our eyes. And Maitri got into this line of work because when she was little, her dad gave her a kaleidoscope. She took it apart to see how it worked and ended up making her own kaleidoscope

using these glass bangles that she had. I saw beautiful images, beautiful colour of light. How old were you when you pulled apart the kaleidoscope? Yeah, I was seven years old. Oh, you were seven! Oh, wow! So then I said, okay, this is what I wanted to know more about what is light, how we can see things, you know. Little Maytree grew up and started studying how we see. And her love of what the eye can do hasn't gone away. She says that the eye... It is such a beautiful, God-gifted instrument. We can see far things and near things easily, you know.

But Maitreyi has been noticing that more and more people can't see far away things so easily. This is called myopia, or being nearsighted. And rates of it have been going up. These days, around 40% of school kids in Europe and North America are nearsighted. It's even higher in parts of Asia. So today, over two and a half billion people in the world are nearsighted. And some predictions say that by 2050, that will almost double.

And some five billion people will need glasses. So many kids will be wearing them. It is getting really, really bad. So much so that some researchers are calling this a myopia epidemic. And all eyes are on screens as the culprit here. But are they really to blame? Are they ruining our eyes? Well, curiously, the so-called myopia epidemic started long before we were hunched over iPads. So for most people who have myopia, it starts when they're young. And in parts of Asia, researchers started noticing that more and more kids were needing glasses in the 60s and 70s.

That's true elsewhere as well. If the myopia epidemic starts in the 60s and 70s, that suggests it can't be screens to blame, right? Because it's too early. Yeah, it's too early because that was not a screen error. In those days, we did not have, for example, the laptop, all these different gadgets. One big review published last year pulled together a handful of studies on this, involving more than 20,000 kids.

And they couldn't find a clear link between kids spending more time on screens and having crap eyesight. So what else might be driving this myopia epidemic? Well, in the 60s and 70s in Asia, but also in the US, more and more kids were spending more time studying, which brought on two things that researchers now think might be to blame for all these glasses. The first was that kids were now doing a lot more work that was right up close to their eyeballs.

Reading, writing, drawing. All this stuff is called near work. Now, the second thing is that kids were spending less time playing outdoors. So why might this stuff mess with your vision? Well, the reason that some people get nearsighted is because their eyeball actually grows too long and oval shaped. And this can make it hard for the eye to focus on images that are far away. So stuff ends up looking blurry. And one idea here is that near work can actually reshape your eye, making it a bit longer. And it does it possibly through this quite bizarre phenomenon.

So when your eyes focus on something near you, things look blurry in the periphery. You can actually try it now. Just stare at your finger and your finger will be clear, but the stuff around it will be blurry. Now, it turns out that your eye doesn't like it when things are blurry and it tries to fix what's going on. And if this happens a lot while you're a kid, one way that your eye tries to deal with it is to literally change its shape. And this blurriness thing, it doesn't really happen when we're looking at things that are far away, like say a bird in a tree. Going outside and getting some sunlight could also do some other things for your eyes, like it can trigger the release of dopamine, which might protect your eyes by stopping them from growing too long.

So Maitri says that if you're worried about your kids needing glasses, tell them, Get outside, get some sun, get some light. In fact, one study found that getting kids outside for 40 extra minutes a day during school dropped the rates of myopia. And other studies have found this kind of thing too. And as we're realizing that this myopia epidemic is way more complicated than just big bad screen, a new fear around our eyes was born about blue light. It sits on the blue part of the visible light spectrum,

and you can find it in sunlight but also beaming out of our screens. And it is the latest in a long line of fears around screens. People are worried that blue light is wrecking our eyes and even mucking up our sleep. But when Maitrey and other scientists looked into this, they found that only a teeny tiny amount of blue light is being beamed from our screens. Like if you're outside, you are exposed to more blue light

than what you are getting from the screen. Oh, so the screen's just not, it's just not emitting that much blue light? It's not emitting that much of blue light. It is significantly less than the level of blue light exposure from the natural light. And just quickly, as for this claim that blue light can affect your sleep, well, we tackled this in our sleep episode, but spoiler alert, while blue light from your screens might keep you awake a little bit, if you're using your screens just before nighty-night time and finding that it's a bit hard to get to sleep,

it could also be that the internet is just full of stuff that is waking you up way more than the blue light is. One of the world's biggest container ships blocking the Suez Canal. Can you hear me, Judge? I can hear you. I think it's a filter. I'm here live. I'm not a cat. If you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I go, no.

Well, that's incorrect. Bottom line for Maitri, do you spend your time worrying about the blue light being emitted from screens? Absolutely not. Right. Yeah, because if you have time and if you don't have anything to do,

you can worry about that. And bottom line, after all that research, did you buy blue blocking glasses for you? I don't have them now. I don't use them. So when it comes to screens, what are they doing to us? Well, for little kids, the latest science seems to be showing that screens aren't guilty of turning their brains to mush.

And as we grow up, we don't have good evidence that screens are driving up rates of depression or loneliness. But being more mindful about what you or your kids are doing on your screens and how it's making you feel, that is a good idea. And if you feel like you need to quit social media, quit. Don't worry. People's cats will still be there when you log back on.

Screens also aren't solely to blame for ruining our eyes. So since screens really aren't the root of all of our problems, I asked Brenna, why do you think we just keep coming back to blaming screens for basically all of society's ills? Like, why screens? Well, I think because they're so pervasive, for one thing. I mean, especially now in that, you know, you've got a phone, you've got a tablet, you can have a screen with you all the

time. But then Brenna says there's probably something else going on here too. Throughout history, we've always seemed to blame new technology for whatever's going wrong in the world. Socrates was worried about the evils of writing. There were concerns about the radio, refrigerators. And yet, through it all, we've just kept trucking along. I think that there's always a concern, especially from like older generations to younger generations, because things change so much over the decades. And I think sometimes there is a, you know, nostalgia for way things used to be. And I just keep thinking about all the horrible things that humans have done in human

history. And I was like, we didn't really like back when kids didn't have screens and played with tires and blocks, like we did some really horrible things as a society. That is very true. And, you know, we continue to do terrible things. So I probably, we probably have not changed, you know, it's not, I don't think totally changing the human condition. That's Science Versus. Hello. Hello. Hello. Michelle Dang, producer at Science Versus.

How many citations in this week's episode? There are 153 citations. 153 citations. And if people want to see all of this work, where should they go? They should head over to our show notes and click on a link to our transcript. Great. Is there anything on Instagram this week? Instagram.

No, because. We got to get our screens. Well, be mindful of your screen use. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have fun stuff on Instagram all the time. So if you ever need to relax or, you know, hear some good jokes, come over to our Instagram. Our Instagram is science underscore VS.

Yes, exactly. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Wendy. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Michelle Dang with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Nick Delrose and Taylor White.

We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Hayley Shaw, Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all of the researchers that we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Siang-Mei So, Professor Mark Rosenfield, Dr. Christian Talens-Estarrez,

Dr. Rebecca Brand, Professor Wallace Dixon, and Dr. Deborah Kloska. Plus, a huge thanks to all of our wonderful listeners who sent us messages about their screen use. It was so lovely to hear from you. A special thanks to Kyrie, Casey and Makai Williams, Christina Couch and Lillian Adams, and Connie and Sequan Walker. Thanks for all of your Cs. Plus, Kendra Pierre-Lewis, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.

Thank you so much. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.