Documentary

Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age

Jan 2016 🇺🇸 Screenagers / MyDoc Productions

Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age is the debut documentary from physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston, built around her own family's disagreements over her daughter's first smartphone. Ruston interviews neuroscientists, teachers, and teenagers to examine how heavy phone, social media, and gaming use can become tangled up with distraction, family conflict, and academic struggle, and profiles families and schools experimenting with limits and screen-free routines. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the film has circulated almost entirely through community, school, and workplace screenings, which the filmmaker's team credits with helping start conversations between parents and kids about tech habits. TechKids Foundation cites Screenagers as an early, influential entry in the popular-media record documenting parent and educator concern about excessive screen use in children, framed here as patterns filmmakers and families observed rather than a controlled scientific finding.

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CITATION

Ruston, Delaney (director). Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age. MyDoc Productions, released Jan. 25, 2016. screenagersmovie.com.

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