“Never get in between a drug addict and their drug”.

When parents attempt to take devices away from kids, what might follow is an extreme emotional meltdown — the dreaded “tech tantrum”. Children are screaming, raging, smashing things (including expensive devices they are addicted to), threatening parents with property damage and bodily harm, and even assaulting them physically. All hell breaks loose when it’s time to transition to some normal human activity: sleep, family dinner, or homework.

What happens when an addict loses access to his drug? They get violent. When the object of addiction is taken away, drug addicts hurl verbal and physical abuse toward loved ones who are…

“Sleep is our competition” (CEO of Netflix).

Sleep is essential to children’s health and development. Electronic devices — especially smartphones in their bedrooms — rob kids of their sleep.

And the outcome is not good.

A friend shared a story about her son who was constantly tired, and could not keep up with his schoolwork. The parents were seriously concerned and planned to take him in for a medical evaluation, when they discovered the truth: the boy was secretly setting his alarm for the middle of the night to sneak downstairs and play video games while the family were sleeping. …

Use It or Lose It

We are prewired for social connection. Our social skills form in childhood and adolescence: a child deprived of interpersonal experiences during critical developmental windows will grow up socially impaired.

That’s exactly what’s happening to entire generations of young people whose social life migrated to the screens.

According to psychologist Nicholas Kardaras, the author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids, normal brain development is disrupted when real-life sensory inputs are replaced by overstimulating screens. The result is children growing up with broken brains.

Kids develop areas of the brain that are being USED. When face-to-face communication is…

Digital media profits from our anger.

Outrage is intentionally engineered and algorithmically promoted because it drives user ENGAGEMENT.

And it’s destroying our minds.

Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers

Filter bubbles and echo chambers are not just Internet slang — they are actual industry terms from the science of social network analysis.

Filter bubble means you only see what you want to see. The algorithm correctly predicts what information the user will click on based on their digital footprint. Which is usually the information that confirms our existing biases, effectively isolating us from different points of view.

Echo chamber means you only discuss what you already…

Social media kills young people. It is responsible for teen suicide epidemic.

The shocking truth is that we knew about this since the 18th century.

Every time there is another heart-breaking teenage suicide in our area, I get a lengthy email from the school along the lines “how to talk about it with your children”. The implication is that young and vulnerable children need to be thoroughly informed about the self-inflicted death of somebody just like them.

Let me ask a controversial question — do they really need to know?

As a mother, I say — NO.

When my kids are not anxious, I do not volunteer to stress them out.

They…

Artificial Intelligence is getting smarter.

While a human brain stays the same.

Not a fair fight.

AI and human weaknesses

To influence someone, you have to find their weaknesses: this has always been the unfortunate law of human psychology.

Only now it’s not some devious creepy character that found out what our pressure points are, but an impartial algorithm sifting through tens of thousands of variables collected about us. Finding unique relationships within our data — invisible to the human eye, but obvious to the processing power of the machine.

Of these variables the machine builds an Algorithm of You that attacks the brain…

Do you know that Facebook knows you better than you know yourself?

It’s a fact. If you are like most users, you have given a lot of “likes” over the years, haven’t you? How many? A few thousand? Bad news. You handed over your free will to the devil of algorithmic behavior modification.

Behind every piece of content we see is a manipulative AI algorithm that seeks to modify our behavior in some way.

The Algorithm of You can program your behavior for any outcome.

A study on the predictive power of Facebook Likes found out that “Likes” are enough to accurately predict extremely sensitive personal information that the users might…

Screen time moderation

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that most of the stress that teens experience today originates from their many digital activities. Social comparison, cyberbullying, anxiety, depression, and sheer sense of being overwhelmed trying to keep up correspond directly to the amount of time young people spend on their screens. Yet, parents sometimes go to the extremes when it comes to regulating screen time use: it’s either all or nothing.

Neither abstinence nor binging is the solution.

A much better alternative is moderation. Balance.

As multiple studies have found, smartphone or Internet use of up to an hour or two a…