Michael Rich
Clinicians & Public Health · Boston Children's Hospital, Digital Wellness Lab
"The Mediatrician," who directs Boston Children's Hospital's Digital Wellness Lab and its screen-use clinic.
Michael Rich, known as "The Mediatrician," directs Boston Children's Hospital's Digital Wellness Lab and its CIMAID clinic, which works with children and families navigating problematic interactive media use. His 2024 book, "The Mediatrician's Guide," distills that clinical experience into practical guidance for parents on screens, apps, and games. Rich's dual role as researcher and treating clinician gives him a close view of how heavy screen use shows up in real families, which he channels into both direct patient care and public research through the Digital Wellness Lab.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (11)
STUDIES
A Primary Care Pediatrician's Guide to Assessing Problematic Interactive Media Use
Published in Current Opinion in Pediatrics, this clinical guidance piece by Cameron Nereim, David Bickham, and Michael Rich walks general pediatricians through how to spot and evaluate problematic interactive media use (PIMU) during ordinary well-child visits. Drawing on existing research, the authors note that internet gaming disorder shows up in a small share of young people worldwide and is frequently seen alongside separately diagnosed anxiety, depression, or ADHD, rather than presenting as a stand-alone problem. Instead of a single test, the piece offers screening questions and functional-impairment markers — falling grades, withdrawal from family or friends, sleep disruption — clinicians can use to decide whether a family needs closer follow-up, and it summarizes the outpatient-therapy and, for severe cases, residential options available once a concern is confirmed. TechKids Foundation cites it as a look at how Rich's own field trains frontline pediatricians to approach these evaluations.
Indian Academy of Pediatrics Guidelines on Screen Time and Digital Wellness in Infants, Children and Adolescents
This is the Indian Academy of Pediatrics' national clinical practice guideline on screen time and digital wellness for infants, children, and adolescents, developed by a multi-author IAP committee with Michael Rich as a contributing international author. The guideline sets out age-banded recommendations — discouraging screen use for the youngest children and setting time boundaries for older ones — and links heavy or poorly supervised screen exposure to sleep disruption, reduced physical activity, and strain on family routines and schoolwork. It also gives pediatricians practical counseling points for talking with Indian families about household media rules. TechKids Foundation includes this as a documented example of Rich's guideline-writing work extending beyond the United States; per our own editorial policy, its India-specific recommendations and findings are kept separate from any of TechKids' U.S. program or impact claims, which are reported independently.
Media Influences on Children and Advice for Parents to Reduce Harmful Exposure to Firearm Violence in Media
In this Pediatric Clinics of North America review, Dan Romer, Brad J. Bushman, and Michael Rich examine how entertainment media, video games, and social platforms depict firearms and lay out guidance for pediatricians and parents on managing that exposure. The authors note that firearm-related deaths are a leading cause of youth fatality in the United States and summarize research associating repeated media depictions of guns with increased interest in and comfort around firearms among children and teens. Rather than assigning a single cause, the piece frames media firearm content as one factor among several — alongside household gun access and community violence exposure — worth discussing at well-child visits, and recommends specific counseling scripts pediatricians can use with families on both media choices and safe firearm storage. TechKids Foundation cites it as association-based clinical guidance, not a claim that media exposure alone drives firearm injury.
Use of Voice Assistants & Generative AI by Children and Families
This Digital Wellness Lab pulse-survey report, co-credited to Michael Rich along with a team of lab researchers, surveys parents of children ages 3 to 12 about how voice assistants (like Alexa or Siri) and early generative-AI tools show up in family life. It covers how often young children interact with these tools, what parents believe the tools are teaching their kids about asking questions and getting answers, and how families are — or are not — talking with children about the limits and unreliability of AI-generated responses. The report frames early, unsupervised reliance on conversational AI as an emerging area parents should be attentive to, particularly around children absorbing incorrect information or blurring the line between a tool's answers and a trusted adult's guidance, without treating any single pattern as proven harm. TechKids Foundation includes it as an early, lab-collected look at generative AI's entry into homes with young children.
Time Is Ticking for TikTok Tics: A Retrospective Follow-Up Study in the Post-COVID-19 Isolation Era
Published in the open-access journal Brain and Behavior, this retrospective study by Kinga Tomczak, Michael Rich, and Boston Children's Hospital colleagues followed 56 adolescents, ages 10 to 18, who developed sudden tic-like movements and vocalizations during COVID-19 isolation — nicknamed 'TikTok tics' in media coverage because many patients had been heavy short-form-video viewers at onset. The sample was overwhelmingly female with very high rates of co-occurring anxiety and depression diagnoses. At follow-up, roughly four in five patients had improved regardless of treatment approach, including some who received no tic-specific therapy, leading the authors to describe these episodes as functionally different from classic tic disorders and more closely tied to underlying anxiety and stress than to video consumption itself. TechKids Foundation cites this as evidence that abrupt symptom clusters associated with heavy social-video use are complex and multi-factored, not a simple, isolated screen effect.
Going Beyond Video Game Consumption When Considering Internet Gaming Disorder
In this Comprehensive Psychiatry study, Sezen Cekic, Michael Rich, and co-authors from the University of Geneva and Boston Children's Hospital test a common assumption: that simply playing video games for long hours predicts Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). Studying League of Legends players using self-reported habits and objective in-game data alongside mental-health assessments, the team found no consistent link between hours played — even among people gaming 30-plus hours a week — and IGD status. Instead, pre-existing anxiety, depression, and ADHD emerged as the strongest predictors of which heavy players met IGD criteria. The authors argue screen-time limits alone are an incomplete response to gaming-related distress, and that clinicians and parents should weigh a young person's underlying mental health alongside how much they play, rather than treating hours logged as the central warning sign. TechKids Foundation cites it as a caution against relying on time-spent alone as a marker of harm.
Optimism and Uncertainty: How Teens View and Use Artificial Intelligence
This Digital Wellness Lab pulse-survey report, credited in part to Michael Rich, surveyed more than 1,400 U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17 about how they use AI tools such as chatbots and generative-AI apps, what they believe those tools can and can't do, and what guidance — if any — they've received about using them responsibly. The report describes teens as broadly curious about and willing to use these tools for schoolwork, creative projects, and everyday questions, while also expressing real uncertainty about the accuracy of AI-generated answers. It highlights a gap between how much teens already rely on these tools and how much explicit guidance most report receiving on evaluating AI output critically or protecting personal data. TechKids Foundation cites it as an early, survey-based read on how quickly generative AI has entered teen life, and how far adult guidance has lagged behind that adoption.
Placing Problematic Media Use in Context: A Research Synthesis, Person-Centric Framework, and Chart Review Among a Clinical Sample of US Youth
In this Frontiers in Psychiatry paper, Michael Carter, Michael Rich, and Digital Wellness Lab colleagues review 205 patient charts from the lab's own clinic for problematic interactive media use to build a person-context-process-outcome-time (PC-POT) framework. Rather than defining problematic media use as any one behavior — gaming, pornography, social media, or general internet use — the model treats it as a pattern that develops gradually, shaped by a young person's individual traits, their surrounding context (family, school, peers), and life transitions, and that can affect functioning across several life domains at once. The authors present this as a more clinically useful lens than screen-time thresholds alone, intended to help clinicians identify which co-occurring factors are driving a given case. TechKids Foundation cites it as a direct look inside the clinical population Rich's lab treats and the framework it uses to make sense of those cases.
Who They Play With Matters: An Exploration of Behavioral Pathways Linking Loneliness, Social Anxiety, and Problematic Gaming
This Journal of Adolescent Health study by Zhiying Yue, Michael Rich, and Digital Wellness Lab colleagues surveyed 1,468 U.S. adolescents to examine how loneliness and social anxiety separately shape the way teens game, and how that relates to problematic gaming. Lonelier teens were more likely to play alongside strangers or casual peers — a pattern the study links to a higher chance of problematic gaming — while socially anxious teens tended toward solo play instead. Gaming while communicating with real-life friends was associated with a lower likelihood of problematic gaming, whereas gaming while communicating mainly with strangers was associated with a higher likelihood. The authors conclude that who a teen plays with, and why, matters as much as how long they play, and that prevention should weigh a teen's social motivations and relationships alongside screen time. TechKids Foundation cites it as evidence that gaming's social context shapes its risks.