Jenny Radesky
Clinicians & Public Health · University of Michigan Medical School, American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media & Youth Mental Health
U-Michigan pediatrician who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics' guidance on media and young minds.
Jenny Radesky is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics' "Media and Young Minds" guidance, a widely used reference for clinicians and parents navigating children's media use. She co-directs the AAP's Center of Excellence on Social Media & Youth Mental Health, helping translate emerging research into practical clinical and parenting guidance, and testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021 on children's media use. Her work sits at the intersection of pediatric practice and public policy.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (11)
STUDIES
Media and Young Minds
Media and Young Minds is a policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics' Council on Communications and Media, with Jenny Radesky as lead author, reviewing research on how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers (ages 0–5) engage with television and mobile/interactive technology. The statement notes that evidence for educational benefit in this age group is limited outside of high-quality, co-viewed programming, and associates heavy or solo early-childhood media use with displacement of sleep, active play, and face-to-face interaction that support development. It does not claim media use causes developmental harm on its own, and instead recommends pediatricians counsel families toward shared, limited, age-appropriate use. The statement became a widely cited reference point for pediatric guidance on screens in early childhood and helped establish Radesky's role shaping AAP media policy.
Digital Advertising to Children
Digital Advertising to Children is an American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, with Jenny Radesky as lead author, reviewing how children and teenagers encounter marketing through sponsored content, influencer posts, data-driven targeting, and machine-learning-personalized ads across apps, games, and video platforms. It describes these newer formats as harder for young people to recognize as advertising than traditional commercials, and links exposure to persuasive digital marketing with associations reported elsewhere between advertising exposure and outcomes such as poor dietary choices and interest in age-restricted products. The statement raises particular concern that behavioral tracking of children's online activity for ad targeting could compound existing disparities. It recommends pediatricians build family digital-literacy skills and calls on policymakers and technology companies to adopt design and disclosure practices that support healthier decision-making rather than exploit developmental vulnerabilities.
Young Children's Use of Smartphones and Tablets
Radesky and colleagues at the University of Michigan used passive-sensing apps and device battery screenshots — rather than parent recall — to measure how 346 children aged 3–5 actually used smartphones and tablets. About a third of the children owned a personal device, and among those, average measured use ran to roughly two hours a day, with YouTube and YouTube Kids among the most-used apps. Comparing objective device logs to parents' own estimates, the study found parents commonly misjudged their child's use in either direction — underestimating or overestimating it by a similar margin — suggesting self-report screen-time measures used in much prior research may be unreliable. The authors present passive device sensing as a more accurate tool for researchers and clinicians going forward, without claiming any particular amount of use is itself harmful.
Data Collection Practices of Mobile Applications Played by Preschool-Aged Children
This study, with Radesky as senior author, examined the network traffic of 451 mobile apps played by 124 children aged 3–5 to see what data those apps sent to outside companies. Roughly two-thirds of the apps transmitted persistent device identifiers — the kind of data used to build cross-app advertising profiles — to as many as 33 different third-party domains, including ad networks and data brokers. Transmission rates were higher for apps used by older children within the sample and for children from households with lower parental education, but were not associated with household income. The authors describe this pattern as widespread apparent noncompliance with federal children's privacy law and argue it points to a need for stronger enforcement and more transparent data practices in children's app marketplaces, particularly given the disparity by parental education.
Young Kids and YouTube: How Ads, Toys, and Games Dominate Viewing
Radesky led this University of Michigan research team's report for Common Sense Media, which coded 1,639 YouTube videos that parents reported their children (ages 0–8) had actually watched on the main YouTube site. The team found advertising in the large majority of early-childhood videos, with ads sometimes running longer than the video itself, and reported that a meaningful share of ads shown even in age-appropriate videos featured content like violence or alcohol not suited to the audience. Nearly half of videos watched by young children featured or promoted a product for purchase, and roughly a quarter of videos children watched were made for older audiences, including gaming and prank content. Only about one in twenty videos showed high educational quality, while diverse representation and positive role modeling appeared in about a quarter of videos. The report closes with recommendations for platform design and policy changes.
Prevalence and Characteristics of Manipulative Design in Mobile Applications Used by Children
Radesky and colleagues built a coding system for "dark patterns" — manipulative design features long documented in gambling and adult-directed apps — and applied it to 480 apps that 160 children aged 3–5 actually used. They grouped manipulative features into four types: pressure to maintain a relationship with a character, time pressure, navigation constraints that make an app hard to exit, and visually attractive lures. Nearly half of the apps contained navigation constraints or attractive lures, and apps used by children from lower-education households scored significantly higher on manipulative design overall and specifically on features that encourage purchases. The study associates monetization-oriented app design with disproportionate exposure among children from lower-socioeconomic households, and frames the pattern as a design and marketplace issue rather than a fault of individual children or parents.
Longitudinal Associations Between Use of Mobile Devices for Calming and Emotional Reactivity and Executive Functioning in Children Aged 3 to 5 Years
Radesky's team followed 422 children (average age about 3.8) and their parents over six months to look at what happens when parents regularly hand a child a phone or tablet specifically to calm them down during a tantrum or upset moment. They found that, among boys, more frequent device use for calming at an early check-in was associated with greater emotional reactivity three months later, and for children with an already high-energy temperament, calming-device use and later emotional reactivity appeared to reinforce each other over time. The authors frame this as consistent with the idea that leaning on a screen to soothe a child may, for some children, displace opportunities to practice their own emotion-regulation skills, rather than as proof that devices themselves damage a child's emotional development. They suggest pediatricians discuss alternative calming strategies with parents of temperamentally reactive young children.
Algorithmic Content Recommendations on a Video-Sharing Platform Used by Children
Radesky's team analyzed 2,880 YouTube video thumbnails surfaced across 20 sequential algorithmic recommendations, starting from search terms popular with school-aged children such as Roblox, memes, and well-known creators. Coders flagged thumbnails for features like visual loudness, drama and intrigue, lavish wealth or wish-fulfillment imagery, disturbing or creepy content, violence or pranks, and gender stereotypes. These attention-grabbing features were common from the very first recommendation and stayed roughly as common through later recommendations, while thumbnails using gender-stereotyped imagery became significantly more frequent as the recommendation chain continued. The authors describe this as evidence that creators competing for algorithmic visibility gravitate toward provocative thumbnail imagery, and that the recommendation system does not filter this out for child-initiated searches, associating the platform's incentive structure with children's routine exposure to this kind of content rather than claiming any single video causes harm.
Benefits and Harms of Proposed Social Media Legislation
In this JAMA Pediatrics viewpoint, Radesky and co-author Megan Moreno weigh the likely benefits and drawbacks of legislative proposals aimed at reducing social media's association with adolescent wellbeing concerns, including age-verification mandates, parental-consent requirements, and blanket age restrictions. The authors caution against rushing to adopt some of the most popular proposals — particularly parental-permission systems and hard age cutoffs — arguing these can create privacy trade-offs, push younger users toward less-moderated platforms, or fail to address the underlying design features driving compulsive-feeling use. Instead, they point toward design-focused and enforcement-focused alternatives as more promising levers. The piece is explicitly framed as policy analysis and professional judgment rather than new data, positioning Radesky as a clinical voice weighing in directly on pending state and federal legislation.
From Moral Panic to Systemic Change: Making Child-Centered Design the Default
In this vision article, Radesky and human-computer-interaction researcher Alexis Hiniker argue that framing children's technology problems around individual "screen time" limits places an unfair burden on families and does little to change the underlying products. They contend that app stores, streaming services, and other platform-level chokepoints are the more effective place to intervene, because that is where design decisions about defaults, monetization, and engagement features actually get made. The piece proposes that making child-centered design the default setting — rather than an opt-in feature families must seek out — would reduce the burden on parental gatekeeping and create more equitable experiences across income levels. It closes with a research agenda for studying how platform-level design changes affect children's wellbeing and how to move industry toward adopting them, positioning Radesky's applied work within a broader argument for structural rather than individual solutions.