Candice Odgers

And so I wasn't specifically interested in the digital world at that time.

I was interested in the settings where young people grow and develop.

And we were using mobile phones as a better way to measure those settings.

And it's one of the reasons I started to get interested in the effects of tech, because we were bringing at that point young people into the lab who we'd recruited from schools and communities.

And we were setting them up with mobile devices to get them to report on what they were doing and how they're spending their time.

And parents had a ton of questions for us about what the kinds of things we're still asking today.

So what's the age at which my child should be given a phone?

Are children losing their communication skills?

Is this harmful for them to be spending time online?

And so I set out with one of my graduate students at the time, Maddie George, to review all of the surveys of parents and all of the research we knew on the effects of digital media on children's development.

And we were really shocked because what we found was that there wasn't this overly negative story in the research at that time.

So we started to add questions.

This is now almost 20 years ago.

about what young people were doing online.

And so we started to add these measures of children's digital experiences alongside all the other things that we typically measure, which is, you know, stress at school and family conflict and how much exercise they're getting in a day, for example.

Yeah, but what turned out is we had a front row seat to the rise of it, right?

Everyone's talking about this period of time.

But, you know, we were sitting there on teenagers' phones and talking to them about digital technology as it rolled out.

And so that was a bit of a unique vantage point.

So at that time, we were really ending our panic over video games, right?