The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a U.S. surgeon general’s advisory on the harms of screen use.

It outlines potential harms to children and adolescents and provides recommendations for youth, families, schools, health care providers, researchers, policymakers, and technology companies.

The details:

Harmful content: The advisory notes that content that is designed to increase use or that promotes risky behaviors, such as substance use, is among the most likely to cause harm to children and adolescents. It highlights social media platforms as a top concern but also points to AI chatbots and gambling platforms as drivers of concerning levels of screen time.
Health impact: It outlines the negative impacts of screen time on young people’s cognitive and emotional development, physical and metabolic health, educational outcomes, and mental health and substance use.
Mental health and substance use outcomes: The advisory highlights several negative health outcomes related to mental health and substance use. It notes that greater screen use has been associated with higher depression, behavioral problems, self-injury, and substance use. It says that harmful screen use has been associated with worse mental health and that some forms of screen use, particularly social media, have been associated with increased likelihood of substance use. It claims that frequent use of social media is associated with current tobacco/nicotine use, alcohol use, and binge drinking and lifetime use of marijuana. Seeing a social media post about drugs or alcohol in the past 12 months was associated with greater likelihood of using alcohol, cannabis, or e-cigarettes.
Recommendations: The report encourages young people to “Live Real Life.” It calls for empowering caregivers and communities by providing them with evidence-based tools and strategies organized around the 5 Ds – discuss, do, delay, divert, and disconnect. Among others, recommendations include parents delaying screen time for children as long as possible and limiting device use, “bell-to-bell” phone restrictions in schools, health care providers asking about screen use at annual visits, policies that provide parents with robust controls, creating age requirements for some platforms and changing other features that may cause harm, funding research on the impacts of screen use, and bolstering community programs that offer in-person activities.

But: The report offers recommendations but stops short of prescriptive language or laying out plans to make those changes a reality.

Reminder: There is currently no Senate-confirmed nominee for surgeon general. But HHS Secretary Kennedy last week named Stephanie Haridopolos as interim surgeon general while nominee Nicole Saphier awaits a confirmation hearing.

Haridopolos is chief of staff to the surgeon general’s office and principal deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. She is a family medicine physician who joined HHS at the start of the Trump administration.