Resources

The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that has hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s.

He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.

He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Parental Control: A Guide to Raising Balanced Kids in the Digital Era

Titania Jordan, a renowned internet and social media safety specialist, tackles the urgent dilemmas of modern parenting head-on. As technology increasingly engulfs the lives of our children, this book emerges as a beacon for those looking to guide, protect, and connect with them in meaningful ways.

Navigating the complex digital landscape, Jordan delves into the effects of social media and the internet on our kids. She uncovers the challenges of balancing screen time with real-life interactions and the erosion of offline social skills due to digital immersion.

Better Than Real Life

Child and adolescent psychologist Richard Freed reveals how Silicon Valley’s secret science of persuasive design is pulling a generation of kids away from the real world to live on social media, video games, and online video. The psychological science is so powerful that it is able to persuade youth, at a genetic level, that sitting sedentary on playtime screens is better than running and playing, better than engaging with school, better than spending time with family. He shows how social media exploit girls’ DNA-driven instincts with tragic consequences for their mental health, while video games take advantage of boys’ Stone Age impulses, increasing the risks of academic struggles and gaming addiction.

Freed has devoted his career to shedding light on how Silicon Valley industry is using psychology—a discipline that we associate with healing—as a weapon against children. He uncovers in this book a dangerous double standard: a very small group of tech-involved parents are making fundamentally different choices about how their own kids use technology as compared to what their organizations preach is beneficial for other kids. The result is a shameful example of a small privileged group of parents being able to provide their kids a science-based childhood while the remainder of kids are pushed toward a screen-centered existence.

Be the Parent Please is a must-read for any parent fumbling around in this digital world of parenting.

Toddlers on tablets. Pre-teens on Tumblr. Thanks to a variety of factors—from tech companies hungry for new audiences, to school dministrations bent on making education digital, to a culture that promotes everyone as the star of their own reality shows— echnology is irrevocably a part of childhood, and parents are struggling to keep up. What should be allowed? What should be denied? And, given the ubiquity of technology and its inherent usefulness, what do sensible boundaries even look like?

A noted columnist and mother of three, Naomi Schaefer Riley fully understands the seductive nature of screens. Riley gives parents a wakeup call to put healthy boundaries in place when it comes to technology and kids.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.

The way we use i-technology is affecting our health and happiness. While programs, devices, information, and constant connectivity can offer us ease, liberation, and efficiency, they can also rewire our brains to feel restless, disconnected, unable to sleep, anxious, and depressed, with new illnesses like FOMO (fear of missing out), and electro sensitivities appearing.

i-Minds comprehensively explores an era of screen-based technology's assimilation into our lives, pondering it as both godsend and plague. Addressing theory, popular media, and industry hype, i-Minds demonstrates:

How constant connectivity is changing our brains
The dangers of unchecked connectivity
Positive steps to embrace new technologies while protecting our well-being and steering our future in a more human direction.
i-Minds is a must-read for anyone interested in fostering health and happiness, or who is struggling with the role of screened technology in our lives.

Wired Child a practical guide to building your child’s bond with family and fostering school success amid the allure of digital screens. Kids’ obsessive use of video games, social media, and texting is eclipsing their connections with family and school—the two most important contributors to their well-being. The result: a generation of kids who suffer from soaring rates of emotional and academic problems, with many falling prey to an epidemic of video game and internet addictions.



Wired Child gives you the confidence and skills you need to safely navigate your children through a rapidly shifting media landscape. Dr. Freed offers concrete parenting strategies that will help you create the strong family kids need and encourage their school success. You’ll also learn how to protect kids from destructive tech addictions, and instead guide them to use technology productively as a positive force for their future.

In iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us, Dr. Jean Twenge offers am alarming portrait of a new generation. Born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and later, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. These kids had an instagram account before high school and do not remember a time before the internet. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults.

In The Big Disconnect In The Big Disconnect, clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair takes an in-depth look at how the Internet and the digital revolution are profoundly changing childhood and family dynamics and offers solutions parents can use to successfully shepherd their children through the technological wilderness. Families are in crisis as they face this issue, and even more so than they realize. Not only do chronic tech distractions have deep and lasting effects but children also desperately need parents to provide what tech cannot: close, significant interactions with the adults in their lives. Drawing on real-life stories from her clinical work with children and parents and her consulting work with educators and experts across the country, Steiner-Adair offers insights and advice that can help parents achieve greater understanding, authority, and confidence as they engage with the tech revolution unfolding in their living rooms.

Recupera tu mente, reconquista tu vida - Vivimos en la era de la gratificación instantánea, en la cultura de la inmediatez y las recompensas y buscamos la felicidad a golpe de clic. Llevamos una vida agitada e intensa, y con el modo fast activado. Sin darnos cuenta nos hemos convertido en drogodependientes emocionales inundados de múltiples distracciones. Todo esto tiene un impacto en nuestra capacidad de prestar atención a lo importante, de profundizar y de concentrarnos.

La buena noticia es que podemos rescatar la atención perdida, volver a reconectar con nosotros mismos y con todo lo maravilloso que nos rodea para encontrar ese equilibrio emocional que tanto ansiamos.

La doctora Marian Rojas Estapé, con su estilo divulgativo y científico, ahonda en estas y en otras cuestiones. Te presenta a la dopamina, la hormona del placer, y cómo afecta en la búsqueda de las recompensas inmediatas que están a la orden del día, en la percepción del dolor, del aburrimiento y del malestar. Recupera tu mente, reconquista tu vida te ayuda a pensar qué conductas muestras cuando te ves envuelto en emociones que no sabes gestionar y te proporciona herramientas para que te comprendas mejor, y así recuperar el control de tu vida.