Ten years ago, I knew I was ready for a change from the classroom. I had been teaching a part-time curriculum of my own design– called The Connection Project– based on the work of Rosalind Wisemen (author of Queen Bees and Wanabes, which later inspired the movie, Mean Girls). Working with 7th and 8th graders, I talked with them about how popular culture and media often shaped our relationships with one another and empowered them to reclaim some control over that pressure. 

It was 2014, and a new form of pop culture and media was on the rise: Social Media.

While I invited my students to think about how they showed up online and what kind of person they wanted to be, they pushed back and said their parents were “texting and driving,” “scrolling through Facebook,” and “ignoring me when I talk to them.” 

We sometimes forget that screen overuse was really an adult problem ten years ago – kids, for the most part, didn’t yet have their own devices. And this parental use of screens was very clearly impacting my students.

I wanted to take my work with young people, my growing interest in media and social dynamics, and how the two intersected and turn it into a business. I even had a great name for it: “Empathedia: Where Empathy Meets Media.” I envisioned teaching workshops, doing parent education, and building curricula around the issues brought up by media, and to consider how our consumption of it influenced how we treated one another. I hired a designer to build me a logo, and I launched my new website on April 21, 2014.

Just three days later, on April 24, 2014, as we drove to the local children’s theater for a family outing, we were hit by a speeding car that tore through an uncontrolled intersection in our neighborhood, failing to yield to us. Our car spun quickly around, hitting a curb, and I felt my head hitting both the side curtain airbag and the door frame above my head. (Later, we would find smears of my tinted moisturizer on the gray plastic). 

I fought to stay conscious, primarily concerned with my two young children (just six and almost three) sitting in the backseat. 

I heard their cries and reminded myself that “crying was breathing.” 

The car was now still and silent, but the lyrics from the “Frozen” soundtrack continued playing on the stereo. 

In spite of the sun in the sky, the wind was bitingly cold. 

A fire truck with first responders arrived. 

A neighbor put an ice pack on my neck. 

My aunt and uncle came to get the kids so Ben could ride with me in the ambulance. 

Kindness abounded.

Bruised and sore, I was diagnosed with a concussion. The thing about head injuries is that while the visible black eye and sore muscles healed, my brain took much longer. I couldn’t read books to my three-year-old at night because of splitting headaches; groups of people or loud noises exhausted me at a new level; bolt-like flashing lights in the corner of my visual field were the first thing I noticed upon waking every morning.

I saw several doctors in the weeks following and told them about these symptoms, and all of them said the same thing: “You need to rest your brain. Vision is how your brain processes what you see. That means stopping your use of screens.” 

Wait– what!? I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that vision is actually about my brain. But, of course. That’s why reading books or looking at my phone triggered headaches.

And then– I realized– what are we doing giving smartphones and laptops to children…especially in the name of education and learning!?! Weren’t their brains still developing?

In 2014, this was my aha moment. I knew that not only were there social and emotional implications for children and screentime and social media, but there had to also be impacts on brain development and learning. In the meantime, schools began handing out laptops and parents were giving their kids smartphones at younger and younger ages.

Oh dear.

Ten years ago, the screentime landscape was still being shaped. In the middle school classroom, we relied on laptop carts when we wanted to use the school computers, but as a teacher, I was also being asked to input my grades into an online program, and high school students were now “1:1” (each bringing their own laptop to school). 

My students were starting to use social media, and every year, more and more students were coming to school with their own smartphones– not just old school flip phones. And of course, social media of 2014 was not the social media of 2024: today’s algorithms push us highly-curated content designed to hook and hold us there for as long as possible.

My head injury took over a year to heal. It changed my life in so many ways. I couldn’t return to teaching for the rest of the school year. One day, in an attempt to go back, I stood in the middle of the hallway at passing time, and the cacophony nearly broke me. A colleague pulled me aside and ordered me to go home and rest. 

I had to put Empathedia on hold– I couldn’t focus on the bare essentials, let alone starting a new business. I worked for months with a vision therapy clinic that truly changed my life (P.T. for the brain, really!). I’m mostly back to normal now, but even today, a decade later, when I’m really tired, I still occasionally see the lightning bolts.

As I approach the ten-year anniversary of the accident, I am grateful for the way in which it created awareness of the brain-vision-screen connection. The accident made me realize that our brains are affected by the world around us. We have to think about our brain health like we think about our heart health and our physical health and our mental health. And of course, they’re all connected.

Screen-based devices affect our brains, and if this is a challenge for all of us adults (doomscrolling before bed, anyone?)... then how on earth can we expect this isn’t also impacting children? (Spoiler alert: It is.) 

What can we do about this? 

Educating ourselves is the first step, of course. Knowing that vision is how our brain processes what we see was a huge lightbulb moment for me. But also asking questions of those who put these devices in the hands of children in the first place. Yes, parents, but schools too. It might be “better” for standardizing education, but children aren’t standardized. 

Is it better for thinking? For relationships? For building a better understanding of our world? 

I have yet to see evidence that more is better, that technologists should be the ones making decisions about education, that a screen-based option is always better than an analog one. 

It’s not our fault that things have gotten this bad. But it is our responsibility to attend to these issues. To be better role models for our children; to prioritize independent free play; to let our children feel frustrated and bored and not automatically hand over a screen. 

We have work to do too. It’s hard, I know. But we’ll get there. 

We’re already making progress. 

It took a knock to the head for me to make changes in my own life, but I remain convinced, more than ever, that this work is a fight to protect children– their youth, their hearts, their minds, and yes, their brains.