The Trump administration official behind a major new government health initiative told the Daily Caller News Foundation that excessive screen time is causing vision damage, cognitive delays, and addiction in American children — and the problem couldn’t wait any longer to address.
Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, called the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on screen use harms released in May “a great success” and “the capstone of my career.”
She’s currently performing some of the Surgeon General’s duties while the office sits vacant pending Senate action on President Donald Trump’s nominee, Dr. Nicole Saphier.
“We searched all of the body of evidence, compiled it all in one place. Pretty much ubiquitously, we are seeing consensus approval on this document where people are like, ‘Yes, this is a problem. Please let us know what we can do about it.'”
The advisory focuses on physical harms from increased screen use by children — obesity, nearsightedness — as well as mental health and behavioral issues.
Nearly 40% of the world’s children and adolescents will be nearsighted by 2050 if current trends continue, Haridopolos said, citing research estimates. Young people “unfortunately are having close screens and not getting outside, getting the sunlight in their eyes,” she told the DCNF.
Children need one to two hours of sunlight on their eyes daily, looking at the horizon at least 20 feet away, not straining at close screens.
Myopia will be a “big problem” for “future public health initiatives” because the condition often carries comorbidities like macular degeneration, which affects the part of the retina controlling sharp, straight-ahead vision.
The screen proliferation also caused “poor academic outcomes,” Haridopolos said. Introducing tech devices to classrooms “actually backfired.”
“They thought that tech education was going to be a good thing,” she told the DCNF. “And we’re seeing that now we have problems with neurocognitive delays, language delays, speech issues … executive function. So, I think that we need to roll back, especially with the very young. Giving them these interactive screens that keep their attention, unfortunately get their brains wired in the wrong way and then get them addicted to the hits with the short-form videos.”
The May advisory came with a toolkit for parents, educators, policymakers, researchers, tech companies, and providers.
“We describe the harms, but then we also say, ‘This is what you could do about it,'” she said. “What could you do to fix the problem with best-practice evidence guidelines right now?”
HHS will hold a Sept. 1 symposium with experts to discuss the advisory. Haridopolos teased that HHS will “be making some announcements that day, which will be great.”
For parents hesitant to take away iPads and other devices from a generation obsessed with them, Haridopolos — a mother of three — said parents want what’s best for their children when they understand the harms.
“Maybe they just don’t know that they’re increasing the problems of academia. Maybe they don’t know that it’s going to cause problems with their eyesight. If they did, maybe they would think twice.”
“We are not willing to wait—and that’s why we did this.”
Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos, Director of National Communications for the Office of the Surgeon General, speaks at the Great American State Fair about the Surgeon General’s latest Advisory on the harms of screen use and the… pic.twitter.com/j7IzCjpRXD
— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) July 24, 2026
Haridopolos emphasized that the younger a child, the more critical parental monitoring becomes.
Infants and toddlers under 18 months should have zero access to screen devices. Children under six years of age should have a maximum of one hour of screen time daily outside educational use. That daily non-educational maximum only increases to two hours for children ages six to 18.
“There’s a difference between looking something up for purpose versus not having a purpose and doomscrolling for no intent,” Haridopolos stressed.
Hand-held devices are “slightly different” from television because TV is typically watched at a distance, not up close. Children today primarily use hand-held devices to watch short-form videos that cause dopamine hits, decreasing attention span and memory capacity.
“And there’s so many harms outside of just the development of the brain that kids are being exposed to online,” Haridopolos continued. “They have higher risk of drugs, cyberbullying. Unfortunately, sexploitation, the viral challenges, the teen takeovers, the just bad behavior associated with it. And the mental health, their depression and anxiety and possibly suicide.”
“We’re not saying technology shouldn’t be embraced. We should do it in a responsible way with digital citizenship,” she added. “We should do it in a way where we’re learning, we’re using it to our advantage, but it’s not consuming us and crowding out normal activities in life.”
When asked what the MAHA movement led by her boss, Kennedy, meant to her, Haridopolos told the DCNF it’s all about “thinking preventative.”
“As a family medicine physician, mother of three, I always thought about ‘How do I prevent disease?’ And so that was empowering patients with knowledge to live a healthy lifestyle and not just a knee-jerk reaction to prescription medication,” she said. “Of course, it’s necessary sometimes, but I’d much rather give you the tools for success by educating you on the best practices of a healthy lifestyle and then you making those decisions.”
“If someone came into my office and had a really high triglyceride level, I would say first, instead of just giving them a prescription for gemfibrozil, which would lower their triglycerides, I’d say, ‘What are you eating in the day?’ Let’s talk about that.”
She pointed to Kennedy’s HHS flipping the food pyramid “upside down” in January to emphasize more protein over carbohydrates and deemphasize ultra-processed foods.
Haridopolos told the DCNF that this, along with the screen use advisory and Kennedy’s June decision to restore the Presidential Fitness Test for children, all “will equal, hopefully in the future, us having less chronic disease, a healthier nation that has increased lifespan, but more importantly, health span, disease free.”
This, she says, “will then help our economy with spending less on chronic diseases and sick care, and focusing more on actually investing in upstream healthcare.”
