Boston | May 11, 2026

Dr. Michael Rich has spent decades exploring the way that media affects our minds — first as a screenwriter and filmmaker who trained under Akira Kurosawa, then as a pediatrician who became one of the field’s leading voices on how screens shape children’s health. As founder of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, he’s moved beyond sounding the alarm to driving change: studying how young people use technology, pushing the tech industry toward healthier design, and equipping kids themselves with the tools to navigate an increasingly complex digital world. Earlier this year, he joined us for a workshop and conversation on wellbeing in the digital age with the IBSA foundation for scientific research.

We sat down with Michael to talk social media, screen time myths, bans that backfire, and what AI means for the next generation.

Could you tell us a bit about the Digital Wellness Lab? Where did the idea come from, and what do you do?

Becoming a pediatrician after twelve years as a screenwriter and filmmaker, I was instrumental in the early concern from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) about the health effects of screen use — which, in the 1990s, was only television. In developing policy for the AAP, I realized that there was limited research evidence on how screen use influenced children’s health, development, and learning. So I founded the first dedicated academic center of excellence, the Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH) at Boston Children’s Hospital, where we conducted research and published our findings in medical and public health journals. While this work advanced our knowledge of how screen media affects physical and mental health, it wasn’t actually changing the media that kids were using, or how they used them. So in 2021, we morphed CMCH into the Digital Wellness Lab, broadening our outreach beyond medical professionals to those who could really change the way the digital ecosystem is built and used — the tech companies and the users themselves. In addition to our long-term studies, we conduct pulse surveys on interactive media usage and provide the findings to companies and customers, bringing market forces to bear on improving the environment. We also educate youth through school and community programs, empowering them to change their media use in healthy ways and enabling them to bring pressure to the tech industry, as we did with the Inspired Internet Pledge, which was developed with youth input.

You mentioned that before entering medicine, you worked in the film industry. How does this background inform your perspective on media and your work at the DWL?

Screen media are powerful tools for changing the hearts and minds of individuals and reshaping societal norms. My mentor in cinema, Akira Kurosawa, was a master at this — “Rashomon” is an exploration of the nature of truth, “The Seven Samurai” is both the greatest action film and the greatest anti-war film ever, and “Ikiru” examines what it means to live. I went into film to pursue that goal, but when I returned from Japan, I quickly became disillusioned with the US film industry which, at the time, was offering only horror films that terrified audiences and taught that violence was the only way to prevail. I went into pediatrics to make media that educates and empowers, and to guide healthy use of these powerful tools.

There’s been considerable debate about the link between social media use and rising rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents. What does the research actually tell us?

The research is extremely mixed. A few studies show a small increase in anxiety and depression among some adolescents, while others show no effects or even slight decreases. However, both our research and our clinical experience at the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders (CIMAID) indicate that the relationships among interactive media use and affective disorders like anxiety and depression are much more complex. Many young people who present with Problematic Interactive Media Use (PIMU) seek comfort from their pre-existing anxiety or depression in social media, which instead amplifies and accelerates their underlying affective disorder.

Despite the ambiguity you describe, there’s enormous pressure to limit children’s access to digital media. Parents agonize over screen time, and some countries have introduced outright bans on social media for minors. Is that the right approach, and if not, what would be more productive?

Screen time is virtually impossible to measure now, because of the way we move seamlessly between screens and the physical world. It’s what young people are doing on screens — and what they are not doing because they’re on a screen — that most powerfully affects their wellness. Bans and other top-down restrictions fail because kids hack around them in a variety of ways, some of which take them to even more concerning online spaces, like the dark web. We must move from a discourse of “right vs. wrong,” to one of “healthy vs. unhealthy.” As we did with tobacco, we will succeed by shifting peer norms — building a majority of youth who are media-literate and who move away from constant doomscrolling out of respect for their own health and that of others.

The media landscape is in the midst of another profound transformation with the emergence of AI. How should our thinking about digital wellness evolve to keep pace?

AI is not going away and, as with interactive media, we must learn how to use it in productive and healthy ways to avoid cognitive stunting and moral passivity. It’s a powerful knowledge tool when used with reflective and critical thinking, but I’m concerned that it can be a frictionless avenue to superficial thinking and ersatz intimacy. Because AI promises an easy connection to an uncritical, ever-agreeable companion, it can offer an alternative to more complicated but more interesting human relationships. Companion AI can be even more powerful than social media at capturing our attention because it engages the limbic (emotional) system which, especially in adolescents, can overpower all logic.