Digital Addiction and Young Children

[Dr. Dimitri Christakis] And then finally, I want to talk about digital addiction. And we normally think of this as a problem affecting older children, adolescents and adults. But the truth is that I think, and I hope I can convince you, that it really begins in early childhood. And the media habits you develop with your young children are really essential to their long term development. When we think of addiction, we think of it as an interaction between nature and nurture, like most things in life. And I think the problem with media is that the nurture is ubiquitous, which is to say if your child has any predisposition to develop digital addiction, they’re very likely to be at high risk for it if not to actually develop it, because we immerse children and be in media from a very, very young age.