HOW THE HANDBOOK OF CHILDREN AND SCREENS (Springer, 2025) FAILS TO ADDRESS THE ECONOMIC CODES SHAPING MENTAL SUFFERING
Liviu Poenaru, June 22, 2025
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The missing dimension
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The Handbook of Children and Screens offers a thorough and clinically informed overview of the effects of digital media on children and adolescents, covering topics such as sleep, attention, cyberbullying, and developmental disorders. However, the volume largely remains at the level of observable behaviors and individual psychopathology, omitting the deeper systemic and ideological forces shaping the digital environment — particularly unconscious economic codes embedded in platforms, interfaces, and attention-driven algorithms.
In failing to account for these codes, the book overlooks how economic imperatives—profit maximization through engagement metrics—are embedded in the design of social media platforms, games, and apps. These mechanisms often exploit psychological vulnerabilities, particularly in youth, reinforcing patterns of compulsive use and generating psychological distress. There is no meaningful exploration of how such economic systems shape the formation of identity, self-worth, and affect regulation in children and adolescents.
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Neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and the consequences of digital immersion
Equally absent is a discussion of neuroplasticity and the lasting structural changes that screen-based media can induce in the developing brain. While some chapters mention screen time’s effects on attention and sleep, the handbook does not meaningfully address how economic attention-extraction strategies interact with the brain’s plastic development—especially in critical windows of emotional, cognitive, and moral formation.
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The emerging field of epigenetics, which studies how environmental factors such as chronic stress alter gene expression, is glaringly absent. This is particularly relevant in the context of screen-saturated environments where children are constantly exposed to idealized images, metrics of popularity, and social comparison. The stress induced by these dynamics—amplified by algorithmic curation—can trigger maladaptive epigenetic changes with long-term effects on emotion regulation, anxiety sensitivity, and depressive vulnerability. The book misses the opportunity to draw these connections, which are crucial in building a modern theory of screen-induced mental health deterioration.
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Technostress and the biopolitical environment
Technostress, the psychological stress related to overexposure and dependence on digital technologies, is not addressed with sufficient depth. Youths are not just "using" screens—they are immersed in environments designed to hijack attention and behavior, where constant notifications, performance metrics, and social validation loops become sources of chronic cognitive overload. While the book acknowledges that excessive screen use can be problematic, it does not theorize this as a new form of biopolitical stress rooted in economic logic: children are being trained to become optimal attention and data producers in a market-driven scopic regime.
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In this context, digital stress is not only psychological or behavioral—it is systemic and ideological. The absence of this macro-critical lens means the book risks reproducing the very blindness that sustains the normalization of these technologies in education, family life, and even therapeutic settings.
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A call for integrative and critical frameworks
To remain relevant, child and adolescent mental health research must integrate these dimensions. It is no longer enough to measure screen time or track behavioral symptoms; we must ask what values, what desires, and what unconscious codes are transmitted through these screens. How do they shape the inner lives of the youth, not merely through content, but through the very architecture of experience?
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An integrative model should include:
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Analysis of economic logics embedded in digital media design.
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Interdisciplinary models combining neuroscience, epigenetics, and systems theory.
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Consideration of economic and socio-environmental determinants and collective imaginaries.
At E.U.LABORATORY, we are gathering clear scientific and clinical evidence supporting the arguments outlined above. Our interdisciplinary research demonstrates the measurable impact of unconscious economic codes on mental health—especially in young populations—through mechanisms involving neuroplastic changes, stress-induced epigenetic modulation, and technostress syndromes. This body of work confirms that the digital environment is not neutral, and its influence on psychological development is far more systemic than acknowledged in mainstream clinical handbooks.
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