A simple Google search about screen addiction will take you down a rabbit hole of finger-pointing at whichever generation is leading the charge that week. Gen Z is often the pin cushion of these debates, with the occasional eye roll reserved for boomers. But the best research comes from standing on a crowded subway car as it screeches into a station. You’re hot, you overslept, you’re late for work, and the cluster of commuters standing between you, the door, and the two minutes you need to catch your transfer are unmoved by the train’s chime. Glance at their hands. I’ll put my money on a small, glowing rectangle being the culprit.
That was a common theme at a session during Worth’s Living Well summit, where Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, the clinician and author who coined the term “Digital Heroin,” told a story that stuck with me and with the audience. After he published “Glow Kids” in 2016, he began receiving thousands of emails from parents asking for help, including one from a mother whose 9-year-old son, a gamer, had become violent enough that she’d hospitalized him twice trying to separate him from his games. When she finally found a therapist willing to see him, she was told, ‘This is just gaming. It’s not a big deal.’ She knew better. She just didn’t have the language for it yet, because in 2016, almost no one did. Hers wasn’t an isolated case. It was one of thousands of emails Kardaras received, evidence of a problem too big for any single family to solve alone, and a preview of the research he’d build his career on.
The iPhone Is the New Cigarette
The real cost isn’t just our attention spans or work-life balance. According to a 2023 report from the Journal of Education and Health Promotion, titled “The Hazards of Excessive Screen Time: Impacts on Physical Health, Mental Health, and Overall Well-Being,” excessive screen time has been linked to physical complaints like neck, shoulder, and back soreness, along with mental health effects including depression and anxiety. A 2024 article from Stanford Lifestyle Medicine, “What Excessive Screen Time Does to the Adult Brain,” cited research finding that increased screen use among adults, particularly ages 18-25, can cause the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that processes memory and handles higher-order thinking like weighing decisions and solving problems, to thin. Adults who watch five-plus hours of TV daily face an elevated risk of stroke, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.
Screens don’t wait for us to grow up before they sink their teeth in. If phone use has crept into every corner of adult life, the meetings, the subway platforms, the bedside table, it’s because we built the habit first, and our kids are inheriting it younger than we ever did. “The phone has become the new smoking. It’s the new whenever there’s any time or pause, you reach for the phone. There’s an anxiety reducer,” said Dr. Nicholas Kardaras.
The numbers make the timeline uncomfortably clear. According to a 2025 survey from The Common Sense Census: “Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight,” children ages 2-4 average two hours and eight minutes of media use a day, before most of them can tie their shoes. By ages 5-8, that number climbs to three hours and 38 minutes. It keeps climbing from there: a 2021 Common Sense Media report found kids ages 8-12 average about five and a half hours of screen use daily, and by the time they’re teenagers, the Common Sense Census: “Media Use by Tweens and Teens,” puts that figure at eight hours and 39 minutes a day for ages 13-18, nearly a full workday before they’ve even started one.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras has spent his career watching that trajectory up close. As founder, CEO, and chief clinical officer of Omega Recovery LLC, he was one of the first clinicians to name what he was seeing in his own patients as more than just heavy use. “This new way of living was affecting our lives, and it was not just a social lubricant, and it was not just a fun way to find information, it was profoundly impacting the way we are as a species, the way we interact, the way we think, the way we process information,” said Kardaras.
Kardaras first put a name to it in a 2016 New York Post piece called “Digital Heroin,” which drew 6 million views. He analogized screen addiction to having the same diagnostic features as heroin addiction.
Nearly a decade later, he believes it’s actually worse. “I’ve come to believe that it’s actually quite a bit worse than heroin addiction… fentanyl doesn’t have predatory, predictive algorithms that target psychologically vulnerable people and then can drive them to do things like commit suicide… And heroin isn’t in our pockets. Well, it might be in your pockets right now,” said Kardaras.
It’s a diagnosis, not just a complaint, and it raises the obvious next question: if the habit starts this early and climbs this steadily, what determines whether a family gets swallowed by it, or learns to live alongside it?
What Resilient Families Do Differently
As is the case for all forms of addiction, treatment looks different depending on the needs of the patient. Worth sat down with Dr. Dale Atkins, licensed psychologist, author, and relationship expert, to discuss combatting screen time with green time.
Dr. Atkins advocates for rewriting the script we pass to our children about the relationships we have with our own screens. “If we’re afraid of it, and if we are driven by fear, then we’re probably going to be that way with our children… we get punitive right off the bat because we’re really working out of fear and we don’t know what we should do,” said Dr. Atkins.
That fear tends to build a household defined by rules rather than curiosity, one where kids feel monitored rather than understood. It’s also not limited to how parents police their children’s screens. It’s just as much about what parents model with a phone in their own hand. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry on parental phone use around children found a negative correlation between the amount of time parents spend on their screens and how much they interact with their kids. Children of parents who were frequently distracted by screens were more likely to act out, growing more prone to frustration and emotional outbursts. The study also found that when parents are absorbed in a screen and cut back on talking and gesturing to their kids, it can slow language development over time.
Children imitate the behaviors we model, whether we mean them to or not, the same current running under Atkins’s next point: “What we have are relationships with our devices rather than relationships with each other,” she said. It’s not just about kids and their relationships with screens. It’s about what we model.
For Atkins, the fix isn’t more restriction. It’s more attention. “If we are concerned about time management but not attention management, how do we really address what it means to be attentive?” she asked. Her answer is simple: put the devices down before bed and use that reclaimed time for actual conversation. “The main point is that in my view, you don’t want to lose your kid. You don’t want to have a relationship where you’re constantly on them to say ‘get off this device,’” she said.
Presence isn’t something you schedule around your screens. It’s something you actively choose over them, again and again, at the dinner table, before bed, or riding in the car. “When you have a child whose device is constantly telling them and curating whatever they’re looking at that it’s about them and their needs, this is not the real world,” said Dr. Atkins.
Green Time as the Antidote
The best way to ‘break up’ with the toxic relationship we have with our screens is more accessible than almost any therapeutic remedy. Those eight-plus hours a day spent scrolling social media, answering emails that could wait until nine, and watching just one more episode are often the only things standing between us and the outdoors. More time on screens means less time outdoors, regulating our bodies the way they were built to.
The Children & Nature Network’s research digest reviewed 186 studies and found a clear pattern: kids who spent more time on screens showed higher rates of depression, anxiety, and difficulty regulating their emotions. Kids who spent more time in nature trended the opposite direction, showing stronger mental health and sharper cognitive function.
Dr. Atkins has watched this digital transition compound across decades of clinical work, and the toll has stayed with her.
“I have never been more worried, never in my entire professional life. I’m 78 years old. I have never been more worried about the next generation than I am now,” said Dr. Atkins.
