Rachel Barr
Georgetown University, DC·Psychology
Young children now grow up surrounded by phones, tablets and screens. Little is known about how the content and family setting of this media use shape their social and emotional growth.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
digital media
screen time
early childhood
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Track how media use in context, content and problematic use changes in 1,200 children aged 1–7, using a cohort sequential design with three overlapping age groups and the CAFE Toolkit.
- Test how media use patterns relate over time to children's emotion regulation and social competence, to identify early signs of problematic use and habits that support development.
- Build infrastructure that speeds up coding the quality of children's media content, a major bottleneck in a fast-changing media environment.
- Create a shared analytic hub to clean, integrate, visualize and reuse longitudinal data from the three cohort studies.
More about the research
Parents and policymakers want answers, but research has been held back for three reasons. Good measurement tools have been lacking. Large, long-term datasets are rare. And rating the quality of ever-changing media content is slow, manual work.
Why it matters
Parents, pediatric clinicians and regulators face open questions about young children's screen use. These findings could inform evidence-based family media guidelines and interventions tailored to individual families. They could also feed into policy debates about regulating children's media content and about child-centered design of digital products, with the goal of supporting healthy social and emotional development.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jenny Radesky
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether Problem-Solving Education for parents, help with device parental controls, or both reduce mood dysregulation and problematic media use in 300 children aged 6–10, compared with standard pediatric resources, in a 2x2 randomized trial.
Ashley Nielsen
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience·Early-career
Code parent-child interaction videos at age 1 to measure unpredictability in parents' sensory signals (visual, auditory, touch) and in their emotional signals (inconsistent nurturing or support).
Jamie M Ostrov
University at Buffalo, NY·Psychology
Test whether a teacher-implemented, coached version of the Early Childhood Friendship Project reduces aggression and peer victimization and increases prosocial behavior, in a randomized trial of 600 children in 30 preschool classrooms.
The school
Georgetown University: 14 labs on PI Pages, $377M a year on research, 206 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.