Dr. Kushlev Speaks at Surgeon General's Symposium on Kids and Screens

Dr. Kostadin Kushlev spoke at the Live Real Life Symposium convened by the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Kushlev joined the opening panel, "A Pediatric and Adolescent Health Perspective," moderated by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health. Also on the panel were Dr. Dimitri Christakis, Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Pediatrics, Dr. Marc DiSabella of Children's National Hospital, Dr. David Cockrell of Keplr Vision, and Dr. Rachel Hanebutt, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and Holt Family Rising Professor at the Thrive Center for Children, Families, and Communities.

The symposium followed the Office of the Surgeon General's May 2026 advisory, Surgeon General's Warning on the Harms of Screen Use. It brought together dozens of leaders from government, public health, science, and research advocacy, among them Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health, and Rear Admiral Paul Jung, Acting Deputy Surgeon General, along with representatives of Meta and Snapchat. 

Dr. Kushlev studies how digital technology shapes attention, relationships, and well-being.

On the panel, he laid out several priorities for strengthening the evidence base on youth screen use. Chief among them was measurement. Much of the research still relies on self-report scales too coarse to distinguish two hours of use from twenty, and it treats screen time as a single exposure rather than distinguishing specific apps, patterns of use, and the harms that follow from each. He called for investment in causal research and in objective, device-level measures, and for measurement to be built into the legislation now restricting adolescent access so that we can tell whether those laws work as intended. His own ongoing study, funded by a National Institute of Mental Health R01, randomizes whether adolescents have social media on a new phone and tracks their use through passive sensing over six months. The study is still recruiting participants. 

He also argued that young people themselves belong in this research, and are seldom consulted about policies written for them. In focus groups his lab has conducted on adolescents' views of social media legislation, teenagers said they did not think restrictions would work and described wanting what several of them called a learner's permit: a gradual, age-appropriate expansion of access, with guardrails, as they build the skills to manage it. This research is generously funded through the Technology and Public Policy program at the McCourt School and led by Grace Falgoust, a PhD student. 

For parents and caregivers, Dr. Kushlev emphasized building offline environments that are genuinely engaging for adolescents, and modeling healthy technology habits at home.

The deeper problem, he argued, sits with design. Screen time limits treat the symptom. The condition is that these products are built to hold attention and are getting better at it, and no thirteen-year-old should be expected to out-discipline a system engineered to keep them scrolling. The question worth putting to the companies in the room is how difficult it would actually be to build an age-appropriate algorithm that is less addictive, that surfaces useful and educational content, and that ranks for what young people get out of it instead of how long it keeps them there.

Watch the symposium here.

Happy Tech Lab Researchers Publish in Nature Human Behaviour

Happy Tech Lab researchers Kostadin Kushlev and Kibum Moon, who share first authorship, have published a five-wave panel study of 1,966 US adults in Nature Human Behaviour. Moon led the statistical work, fitting Bayesian and frequentist random-intercept cross-lagged panel models that separate a person's own change over time from stable differences between people. Across ten common social technologies reported every three months, the models found little credible evidence that earlier use predicted later life satisfaction. In the reverse direction, increases in life satisfaction predicted only modest increases in (video) calling among select demographic groups. Comparing different people, texting frequency was associated with higher life satisfaction, whereas YouTube and TikTok use were associated with lower life satisfaction. The paper is co-authored with Matt Motyl and Nathanael J. Fast of the University of Southern California and Juliana Schroeder of the University of California, Berkeley. Read the full paper here.

Vox Article on Phone-Free Events

Dr. Kushlev was featured in a Vox article about the increasingly prevalence of device-free spaces and events: “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,’ Kushlev told Vox, ‘it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.’ Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.” Read the full article here.

Dr. Kushlev Featured In The Atlantic

Dr. Kushlev was featured in an Atlantic article on how the improvement in airplane Wi-Fi is eliminating one of the last remaining refuges from the online world. Historically, airplanes were one of the few places where it was generally acceptable to be unreachable, but that may be changing as it becomes increasingly easier to access the internet in the sky. Dr. Kushlev discusses the possible implications of this trend on our well-being and recounts his own formative experience journaling on an airplane, the kind of deep reflection that is harder to do the more online distractions there are. Read the full article here.

The "Summer of Ludd"

In the wake of technology’s increasing influence in our lives, there is a growing movement of young people seeking out device-free social interaction. A Washington Post article featuring Dr. Kushlev explores one manifestation of this movement, a New York festival called “Summer of Ludd.” In the article, Dr. Kushlev discusses how social connection can be a critical aspect of moving away from our devices and back to the real world. Read the full story here.