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If you've ever tried to Google "is social media bad for my kid," you know the problem. You get a flood of scary headlines, hot takes, and advice that often contradicts itself. It's hard to know who to trust.
So here's a list I've put together of free, research-backed resources I genuinely return to. These are built by researchers and organizations that take the evidence seriously, listen to young people directly, and don't make a living off of making parents feel panicked.
Videos
Harvard Center for Digital Thriving Videos and Resources
The Center for Digital Thriving transforms research into easy-to-use materials, with a collection of videos, printouts, and classroom resources designed for parents and educators. Their framing is refreshingly balanced: tech can be great, it can be hard, and young people deserve adults who approach it with curiosity rather than panic. A few of their short videos are genuinely worth sharing with your teen too.
Browse them: https://digitalthriving.gse.harvard.edu/resources
Blogs and Reading
Parenting for a Digital Future, LSE
Run by Professor Sonia Livingstone and her team at the London School of Economics, this blog has been one of the most grounded research-informed voices in this space for years. Livingstone has called for conversations about children's growing device use to move beyond the fixation on screen time, noting that these measures can be faulty and mean different things depending on who is doing the counting. Posts are readable, not academic, and genuinely useful.
Read it: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture
NetFamilyNews.org, Anne Collier
NetFamilyNews has been documenting developments at the intersection of youth and digital tech and media since 1999. Anne Collier is a writer and youth advocate who does not deal in moral panic, and her site reflects that. If you want someone who takes both risks and opportunities seriously, this is a reliable bookmark.
Read it: https://www.netfamilynews.org
Research Translated for Real Life
ConnectSafely
ConnectSafely is a nonprofit that has been a leading voice for rational, research-informed approaches when it comes to challenges brought about by emerging technologies. Their library of parent guides covers everything from social media and gaming to AI and privacy, and they're written in plain language. Genuinely practical.
Guides: https://connectsafely.org
Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab
Based at Boston Children's Hospital, this lab publishes free family guides and research briefs written for real people. They offer a Family Digital Wellness Guide to help parents and caregivers build healthy tech habits, and their Teen Voices blog series gives high school students a platform to share their own perspectives on how digital media affects them.
Resources: https://digitalwellnesslab.org
For the Parents Who Want to Go Deeper
Candice Odgers, Greater Good Magazine article: "Seven Insights From Teens About Social Media and Mental Health"
If you've been absorbing a lot of alarming headlines lately, this is a good counterweight. Odgers, a professor at UC Irvine, points out that the science to date does not support widespread panic around social media and mental health, noting that an expert committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences found only small effects and weak associations in the available research.That doesn't mean there's nothing to pay attention to, but it does mean the full picture is more complicated than what you usually see in your newsfeed.
Pete Etchells, Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time
If you prefer a book, Pete Etchells is a psychologist and science writer who has written about the real science of screen time and how to spend it better. He's careful with evidence in a way that most popular writing on this topic is not, and he's honest about what we still don't know.
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