About

Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development is an international non-profit organization founded in 2013 to understand and address compelling questions regarding media’s impact on child development through interdisciplinary dialogue, public information, and rigorous, objective research bridging the medical, neuroscientific, social science, public health, educational, and academic communities.

At Children and Screens, we see an urgent need not only to advance research in the field, but also to more effectively share this research in ways that can positively influence policy and support families, educators, and others in making decisions about media with and for children.

We understand that it is not enough to look at questions of digital media use among children from a single perspective—whether medical, educational, or sociological. Rather, effective progress requires a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, “kaleidoscopic” approach. For this reason, Institute staff, partners, and colleagues represent a wide range of fields including pediatrics, child psychiatry, child psychology, neuroscience, communications, public health, education, and more. By bringing together experts from across both the medical and social sciences, the Institute seeks to broaden how the field is defined, the kind of questions that can be asked, and the diversity of impact that can be investigated.