Jun 17, 2026 · 59 min · 13 segments
Doomscrolling wastes your time, makes you dumb and insecure, and teaches you nothing. But is that any different from Saturday morning cartoons from back in the day? Is it any different from adults…
David HsuHost
Stuart HarmanHost
The government is now sitting there trying to define, well, what is social media? Which apps would be included in the ban? And I can just see the people in these companies making up these arguments saying, Oh, we're not social media.
I'm sure it's a complicated place to be a pediatrician in this day and age because the technology has added so much new stuff for us to think about when we are seeing our patients, right? Certainly in primary care, maybe a little less in emergency room medicine, but I reckon that it affects your patients more than they let on.
I've had patients come in where the parents' real reason for coming to the emergency department was seeking guidance about their child who plays video games too much.
And you think, well, video games, does that even count as social media? It certainly counts as screen time, so I think it belongs in this episode.
But part of the challenge that the family – well, there's multiple families, but one of the challenges that some of the families have described is that – That the kid needs to play the video games to stay socially connected because they don't just play video games.
It's like you go on and you also chat and interact with people online while you're playing the video games.
Or the more than one case, oddly enough, of a parent saying that their child believes – from the parent's point of view, their child has a delusion that they're going to play video games for a living.
And that that's going to be like a lucrative future, which from the child's point of view, they're talking to people online who are saying like, oh, yeah, your age, I was never this good at this game.
And yeah, if you keep it up, you'll be like me making money playing video games.
And it's an actual possible future that people can have is making money playing video games.
So certainly not a problem we ever had to contend with, you know, in the 1980s.
And this is a topic that we have visited periodically over the years in the medical dads.
The government is now sitting there trying to define, well, what is social media? Which apps would be included in the ban? And I can just see the people in these companies making up these arguments saying, Oh, we're not social media.
I'm sure it's a complicated place to be a pediatrician in this day and age because the technology has added so much new stuff for us to think about when we are seeing our patients, right? Certainly in primary care, maybe a little less in emergency room medicine, but I reckon that it affects your patients more than they let on.
I've had patients come in where the parents' real reason for coming to the emergency department was seeking guidance about their child who plays video games too much.
And you think, well, video games, does that even count as social media? It certainly counts as screen time, so I think it belongs in this episode.
But part of the challenge that the family – well, there's multiple families, but one of the challenges that some of the families have described is that – That the kid needs to play the video games to stay socially connected because they don't just play video games.
It's like you go on and you also chat and interact with people online while you're playing the video games.
Or the more than one case, oddly enough, of a parent saying that their child believes – from the parent's point of view, their child has a delusion that they're going to play video games for a living.
And that that's going to be like a lucrative future, which from the child's point of view, they're talking to people online who are saying like, oh, yeah, your age, I was never this good at this game.
And yeah, if you keep it up, you'll be like me making money playing video games.
And it's an actual possible future that people can have is making money playing video games.
So certainly not a problem we ever had to contend with, you know, in the 1980s.
And this is a topic that we have visited periodically over the years in the medical dads.
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