Jenny Radesky
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Phones, tablets and gaming consoles now fill family life, and research has not kept up with how they shape children's development. Unhealthy media use in childhood has become more common over the past 20 years.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
digital media
screen time
problematic media use
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Test whether Problem-Solving Education for parents, help with device parental controls, or both reduce mood dysregulation and problematic media use in 300 children aged 6–10, compared with standard pediatric resources, in a 2x2 randomized trial.
- Measure intervention effects on children's daily screen time, age-inappropriate content, bedtime media use, parent-child communication about media and parent stress, plus outdoor play and family routines.
- Evaluate the reach, adoption and fidelity of the interventions with the RE-AIM framework to judge how they could be sustained in pediatric primary care.
- Examine two-way links between parents' mobile media use and toddlers' executive functioning from age 2 to 4 in 400 families, using structural equation models, surveys, mobile sampling and video-recorded assessments.
- Test whether children's own mobile media use, including use to calm them down, predicts executive functioning, and whether child sex and family stress change these links.
More about the research
It has been linked to poorer sleep, less physical activity, less in-person socializing, and strained emotional health and family relationships. Two projects address this from different angles. One follows toddlers to see how parent and child mobile media use relates to early self-control skills. The other tests practical ways for families to build healthier media habits in school-aged children.
Why it matters
No evidence-based interventions exist to help families keep children's technology use healthy. These projects could give pediatricians tested tools, such as parent problem-solving coaching and device-settings help. They could also inform media guidelines, app design and policy that better fit the needs of families with young children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rachel Barr
Georgetown University, DC·Psychology
Track how media use in context, content and problematic use changes in 1,200 children aged 1–7, using a cohort sequential design with three overlapping age groups and the CAFE Toolkit.
Jude Cassidy
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Test whether adding the Circle of Security – Parenting intervention to Early Head Start services reduces insecure attachment, physiological dysregulation and behavior problems, in a randomized trial of 249 parent-child pairs.
Jamie M Ostrov
University at Buffalo, NY·Psychology
Test whether a teacher-implemented, coached version of the Early Childhood Friendship Project reduces aggression and peer victimization and increases prosocial behavior, in a randomized trial of 600 children in 30 preschool classrooms.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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