Julie Scelfo
Parent Advocates · Mothers Against Media Addiction
Founded Mothers Against Media Addiction, a parent movement now organized in roughly 50 chapters across 23 states.
Julie Scelfo founded Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA), a U.S. parent organization that models itself on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, describing its mission as bringing that same organizing energy to children's media and device use. Since launching, MAMA says it has grown to roughly 50 chapters across 23 states, with parents meeting locally to share strategies for limiting kids' screen time and advocating for policy change. The organization positions itself as a grassroots counterweight to tech companies that market heavily to children, giving parents a structured, chapter-based way to organize rather than face the issue alone.
Suicide and self-harm are complex and never caused by one factor alone. Problematic screen use, cyberbullying, harmful content, and online exploitation may increase risk or intensify existing distress. If someone is in immediate danger or emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (12)
VIDEOS
Unplugging Our Kids: Julie Scelfo on Fighting Media Addiction
In this YouTube conversation hosted by author and parenting content creator Katherine Schwarzenegger, Julie Scelfo discusses her path from journalism to founding Mothers Against Media Addiction and the mental-health concerns she says are driving the movement. She offers parents concrete, practical suggestions for reducing children's daily screen time at home, argues for removing phones from classrooms during the school day, and describes MAMA's chapter-based model for organizing parents locally. The video is framed as a mother-to-mother conversation rather than a policy briefing, aimed at giving viewers accessible first steps rather than citing original research. TechKids Foundation includes it as a widely viewed, plain-language entry point to Scelfo's advocacy for a general audience.
Julie Scelfo, Founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA)
In this interview on WFMU's Techtonic with Mark Hurst, Julie Scelfo discusses MAMA's advocacy against platform design choices she characterizes as associated with directing children and teens toward harmful content, including material connected to self-harm. She cites reported data on Instagram's recommendation systems surfacing large numbers of flagged adult accounts to teen users as an example, and discusses newer concerns her organization is tracking, including AI chatbots marketed to or accessible by minors and schools' growing reliance on platforms like YouTube for instruction. The conversation also covers MAMA's practical tools, including a parent-facing 'House Rules' checklist, and touches on emerging state and local policy efforts such as Los Angeles-area school screen-time limits.
STUDIES
Your Brain on Computers: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In
This early entry in the New York Times' 'Your Brain on Computers' series looks at parents' own smartphone and laptop use rather than children's, reporting on emerging researcher interest in whether a parent's frequent device-checking during family time is associated with reduced attention to young children and altered parent-child interaction. Julie Scelfo, then a Times staff writer, surveys child-development researchers who were beginning to study constantly available email and social apps as competing for the same attention parenting moments require. TechKids Foundation includes this 2010 piece as an early mainstream signal — well before today's phone-ban debates — that adults' own screen habits, not only children's, were already drawing research attention as a family-wellbeing question worth tracking over time.
Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection
Reported by then-Times staff writer Julie Scelfo for the paper's Education Life section, this piece centers on a high-achieving high school student to examine how intense academic competition, near-constant online tracking of grades and test scores, and social comparison combine into pressures that counseling directors and researchers quoted in the piece link to rising stress and, in some cases, suicidal thinking among students. The article describes a school and college culture in which perfectionism and visible peer achievement are associated with elevated anxiety, without attributing suicide to any single cause. TechKids Foundation cites it as an early mainstream framing of social-comparison and academic-pressure risk factors that predates most of today's device-specific research.
How To Prevent Suicide Among Tweens
This HuffPost piece by Julie Scelfo argues that emotional and behavioral struggles once associated mainly with older teenagers are increasingly reported in children as young as 10, and links the shift to a combination of expanded screen time and a decline in in-person community and unstructured play. Scelfo profiles the Sky Center, a Santa Fe crisis-intervention program, as a model for reaching younger children before distress escalates, and cites survey data on tween social-media posts touching on depression and self-harm to illustrate how early these themes now surface online. The piece frames prevention as requiring stronger real-world connection and community support alongside — not instead of — clinical care, and does not attribute youth suicide to any single cause.
N.J. Is About to Make Kids More Media-Savvy. Every State Should Follow Suit.
In this op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Julie Scelfo endorses a bipartisan New Jersey bill requiring K-12 media-literacy instruction and urges other states to pass similar legislation. She argues children are especially susceptible to social-media algorithms and online misinformation because their capacity for self-regulation and critical evaluation is still developing, and cites rising diagnosis rates for childhood anxiety and depression and elevated suicide rates among 10-to-14-year-olds as context for treating media literacy as a public-health measure rather than an optional elective. The piece proposes a curriculum teaching students to evaluate sources, distinguish fact from opinion, and recognize manipulative design, framing education — not blanket bans — as her preferred near-term policy lever.
The Surgeon General Warns That Social Media Is Dangerous for Kids. Why Aren't Medical Professional Associations?
Published days after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's May 2023 advisory describing social media as a potential risk to adolescent mental health, this San Francisco Chronicle op-ed by Julie Scelfo asks why major medical professional associations had not followed with their own practice guidance or public statements. Scelfo argues the advisory reflects a position she says "a growing number of pediatricians, parents and scientists" already held, and contends that organized medicine's comparative silence leaves parents and pediatric clinicians without the kind of coordinated guidance that has accompanied other public-health advisories. The piece calls on pediatric and psychiatric associations to translate the Surgeon General's warning into concrete clinical and policy recommendations for member physicians and families.
Fear of School Shootings Is Keeping Cellphones in School. Our Kids Will Pay the Price
In this San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Julie Scelfo argues that parents' fear of school shootings — specifically, wanting children reachable by phone during an emergency — is one of the main reasons full school cellphone bans face resistance, even as she says evidence of phone-related harm to students' attention, sleep, and social wellbeing keeps mounting. She cites a then-pending multistate lawsuit against Meta as a sign that concern about compulsive platform use had moved from advocacy circles into formal legal action, and argues the safety benefit of in-class phone access during a crisis is unproven relative to the documented daily costs of classroom phone use. The piece calls for policies that address both goals rather than treating them as a strict tradeoff.
How Social Media Companies Are Weaponizing the First Amendment at the Expense of Our Kids
This San Francisco Chronicle op-ed argues that a gap exists between technology executives' public statements about protecting children — including sworn congressional testimony — and their companies' lobbying practices. Julie Scelfo names trade associations including NetChoice, TechNet, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association as recipients of tech-industry funding that she says is used to oppose state and federal bills on youth privacy protections and limits on attention-holding product design. She frames the industry's free-speech arguments against such legislation as a strategic use of First Amendment claims to block regulation rather than a principled objection, and calls on lawmakers to weigh those claims against the design choices she says the same companies decline to change voluntarily.
These 'Toys' Are Killing Our Kids
Writing in The Hill, Julie Scelfo uses the word 'toys' to describe smartphones and social apps that children use constantly, arguing that despite executives' public assurances about child safety, their companies underinvest in protective design relative to other spending. She contrasts reporting on the scale of Mark Zuckerberg's personal security investment with a cited $270-per-child figure tied to Meta's child-safety-related spending, and repeats her recurring argument that tech trade groups lobby against legislation on attention-holding design, data collection from minors, and privacy protections. The piece calls for the same product-safety standards applied to physical children's toys to apply to the apps and devices children now spend the most time with.
The Woman With a Plan to Fight Screen Addiction
This Hello Gloria profile traces Julie Scelfo's path from reporting on youth mental health — including what she describes as rising suicide rates among tweens — to founding Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) in 2023. The piece lays out MAMA's three-part approach: helping parents understand platform design and its associated risks, pushing for phone-free school days, and lobbying for regulation comparable to safety standards for other consumer products aimed at children, modeled explicitly on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It also covers Scelfo's response to a common counterargument — that some LGBTQ+ youth rely on online community — by distinguishing regulation of harmful design from access itself, and notes her stated 2024 goal of expanding MAMA to ten states.