Book

Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance

Jan 2016 🇺🇸 St. Martin's Press

Glow Kids is addiction psychologist Nicholas Kardaras's 2016 book, drawing on his clinical work treating young people, arguing that heavy, compulsive use of screens, video games, and tablets can develop into a pattern he compares to substance dependency. Kardaras describes screens as capable of overstimulating dopamine-driven reward circuits in ways he likens to how the brain responds to certain drugs, and associates heavy gaming and device use in children with warning signs including irritability, withdrawal-like reactions when devices are removed, attention problems, anxiety, and low mood. The book proposes structured device-free periods and stricter household limits, particularly for young children, as a response. TechKids Foundation includes Glow Kids as an early, widely discussed clinical framing of compulsive screen use in children — a characterization from within the addiction field, not a diagnostic claim TechKids itself makes.

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CITATION

Kardaras, Nicholas. Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. St. Martin's Press, 2016.

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