Delaney Ruston
Filmmakers · Screenagers, Screenagers Podcast
Physician-filmmaker behind Screenagers, the documentary series screened for millions of families and students worldwide to spark conversation about kids and screens.
Delaney Ruston is a physician who turned to filmmaking to examine how screens affect children and families. Her Screenagers documentary series has been seen by more than 14 million viewers across screenings in 104 countries, distributed primarily through community and school screenings rather than traditional streaming or theatrical release. She also hosts the Screenagers Podcast, extending the series' conversations about screen time, mental health, and parenting into an ongoing format. Her perspective as a physician grounds the films in the everyday tensions families face over phones, social media, and gaming, rather than in statistics alone.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
VIDEOS
Delaney Ruston: Tech-Wise Summit
In this recorded conversation from the 2023 Tech-Wise Summit, hosted by parenting educator Susan Stiffelman, physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston discusses the day-to-day tension parents face between limiting children's screen time and recognizing technology's real place in kids' lives. Ruston, drawing on her Screenagers documentaries and her own parenting, talks through practical approaches for setting household tech boundaries, handling pushback from kids, and distinguishing screen use that supports learning or connection from use that crowds out sleep, homework, or family time. The conversation stays anecdotal and practice-focused rather than presenting new research findings. TechKids Foundation cites this talk as an example of Ruston's public-facing advocacy work translating her documentary research into direct parent coaching, distinct from her films and written materials.
Screen Time Parenting With Positive Discipline (The Screenagers Podcast)
In this Screenagers Podcast episode, host and physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston talks with Positive Discipline specialist Casey O'Roarty about handling screen-time conflict at home. The two discuss children sneaking extra screen time, the meltdowns that can follow when limits are enforced, and how a Positive Discipline approach — described as balancing firmness with connection — can reduce power struggles over phones, gaming, and streaming, illustrated with a parent's account of shifting her own household routines. The episode is a practice-oriented conversation rather than a presentation of new research, aimed at parents managing everyday screen-time friction with younger kids. TechKids Foundation cites this episode as an example of Ruston's ongoing podcast work extending her documentary-era screen-time advocacy into an interview format with outside parenting experts.
Raising Digitally Resilient Kids With Delaney Ruston
In this 2025 interview with parenting educator Susan Stiffelman, physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston discusses building what she calls digital resilience in children — the ability to handle setbacks, boredom, and social pressure that come with growing up around phones and social media, rather than avoiding screens altogether. Ruston draws on her Screenagers films and ongoing parent conversations to talk through specific tactics, including modeling her own tech habits out loud and coaching kids through frustration instead of removing every difficulty. The conversation is practice-focused, aimed at parents and educators, rather than a presentation of new research findings. TechKids Foundation cites this talk as a recent example of Ruston's public speaking translating her documentary-era research into a specific parenting framework for resilience.
STUDIES
Smartphones Aren't a Smart Choice in Middle School
In this opinion piece for CNN, physician and Screenagers filmmaker Delaney Ruston argues that U.S. middle schools should keep phones out of students' hands during the school day, pointing to France's then-new nationwide ban on in-school phone use for students 15 and under. Ruston cites a survey her own team ran of more than 1,200 U.S. middle-school parents, in which a majority reported their child's school allowed phone use throughout the day even though most parents said they preferred stricter limits. She also notes that the brain regions involved in impulse control are still developing in early adolescence, which she argues makes classroom self-regulation around phones especially hard for middle schoolers. TechKids Foundation cites this piece as an example of a physician-advocate translating her own survey data into a specific school-policy argument.
Away For The Day National Survey of Middle-School Cell Phone Policies
This is the original survey report behind Away For The Day, the phone-free-schools initiative that physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston and her Screenagers team launched after concluding there was no existing data describing actual U.S. middle-school cell phone policies. Between late May and mid-June 2017 the team surveyed more than 1,200 parents of middle-schoolers, drawn mainly from people who had seen or followed the Screenagers documentary. The survey found a majority of respondents' schools allowed students to carry phones throughout the day, while a much larger majority of parents said they would prefer schools kept phones stored away during class time, with public schools notably more permissive than private schools. TechKids Foundation cites this report as an example of an advocacy organization generating its own original data, rather than relying solely on outside research, to argue for stricter school phone policies.
FILMS
Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age
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.
Screenagers NEXT CHAPTER: Uncovering Skills for Stress Resilience
Screenagers NEXT CHAPTER: Uncovering Skills for Stress Resilience is physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston's sequel documentary, following her own teenagers and other families as she examines the emotional side of adolescence in a heavily digital environment. The film centers stress, anxiety, and depression among teens, gathering perspectives from psychologists, students, and school staff on how heavy phone and social-media use can be tangled up with mood, sleep, and coping, alongside profiles of schools and families building communication skills and stress-management routines. Like the original Screenagers, the film is distributed mainly through community and school screenings rather than streaming or theatrical release. TechKids Foundation cites NEXT CHAPTER as a widely screened documentary that treats teen anxiety and depression as outcomes associated with, among other things, digital-age pressures, while foregrounding coping skills as the intended takeaway rather than any single-cause explanation.
Screenagers Under the Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs, and Alcohol in the Digital Age
Screenagers Under the Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs, and Alcohol in the Digital Age is the third feature film in physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston's Screenagers series, examining how a heavily digital teen social life intersects with decisions about vaping, alcohol, and drugs. The film follows teens, parents, and school staff, pairing personal stories with input from researchers on adolescent decision-making, and emphasizes common, lower-severity situations over portrayals of severe substance dependence. It presents school and family strategies — clearer expectations, monitoring, and open conversation — as ways to support healthier decisions, rather than framing substance use as an inevitable consequence of phone or social-media use. TechKids Foundation cites this film as an example of the Screenagers series extending its screen-time framework into substance-use decision-making, again describing a link rather than a single cause.
Screenagers: Elementary School Age Edition
Screenagers: Elementary School Age Edition is the fourth film in physician-filmmaker Delaney Ruston's Screenagers series, co-directed with Lisa Tabb, adapting the franchise's focus to children in kindergarten through fifth grade. The film examines early exposure to online content, social pressures reaching down into elementary school, device distraction in classrooms, video-game habits, and what the filmmakers describe as rising sleep deprivation among younger children, again pairing family stories with input from psychologists and brain researchers. As with earlier Screenagers films, it is distributed mainly through school and community screenings alongside a shorter classroom cut. TechKids Foundation cites this film as evidence that the advocacy conversation Ruston's series popularized for teenagers has extended to elementary-age children, with sleep and classroom distraction highlighted as newer, younger-skewing concerns.