From pediatrician offices to courtrooms, concern about children and screens has reached a new decibel. But in homes and schools across the globe, digital media use isn’t a fringe risk but an apparent inevitability—one that’s so embedded into nearly every aspect of a child’s daily life that it makes it less a question of whether kids use screens than how. A major meta-analysis of existing evidence published in JAMA Pediatrics offers some of the most comprehensive evidence to date on how this reality is affecting young people. By synthesizing data from more than 150 longitudinal studies, researchers found that digital media use is consistently linked with modest yet measurable declines in children’s mental health and development—outcomes that were most pronounced for social media.