Board of Advisors Spotlight: Stephanie Reich, PhD

Throughout her career, Dr. Reich has researched a variety of contextual relationships in families, with peers, at schools, and within healthcare, with a particular eye toward family ecologies. This has included how structural and contextual factors influence child development at various stages. During her undergraduate studies, she witnessed first-hand the potential influence of contextual and systemic inequalities on early childhood education. Following this experience, she pursued her doctorate at Vanderbilt University with a focus on community and developmental psychology. Dr. Reich notes, “I realized what I really wanted to do was to better design and evaluate interventions that would be scalable.”

During her postdoc as a visiting scholar at the Children’s Digital Media Lab at UCLA, the influence of digital media use on youth became another factor she would research. In particular, Dr. Reich became aware of the increasing importance of Myspace and Facebook in the social landscape of adolescence, which, she explains, led to her eventual focus on the intersection of development and technology and media.

Soon, Dr. Reich began researching the effects of social media in adolescence (a focus she has continued to this day, most recently with her January 2025 article  Understanding the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Wellbeing in the journal Childhood Education), while also expanding her focus across developmental ages and stages.

“I was already doing parenting intervention work and working with family systems, and in early childhood, so it was a natural inclusion to have media and parenting and family systems,” said Dr. Reich.

Along with the interest in social media and youth, her research has included examinations of a wide range of topics tied to digital media use across ages. These include concerns with the design of digital spaces in the context of youth developmental needs, the intersection of different developmental stages and digital media use, the effects of parental media use on their children, the intersection of digital media and children’s learning, and much more.

Dr. Reich has made significant contributions to key Institute initiatives — both before and after joining the National Scientific Advisory Board in 2022. Dr. Reich was a panelist for two notable #AskTheExperts webinars, “Looking Back and Moving Forward: Children’s Pandemic Experiences So Far and Where to Go From Here” (2021) and, earlier this month, “Technical Interference: Screens and the Parent-Child Relationship.” Additionally, Dr. Reich co-authored the Introduction to the Section on Parenting in the Digital Age and was a contributing author to the chapter Media and Parenting: Current Findings and Future Directions in the recently-published Handbook of Children and Screens, In 2020-2021, Dr. Reich and co-investigator Natasha Cabrera were recipients of an Institute Interdisciplinary Research Grant  for their project, “Media Use and Young Children’s Development.” She has also participated in all of the Institute’s Congresses. She served on the planning committee for and spoke at the 2023 Digital Media and Developing Minds International Scientific Congress, and will act again in both capacities for the 2025 Congress.

Discussing her involvement with Children and Screens, Dr. Reich emphasized the importance of the Institute’s Congresses and research retreats. In her view, the Institute’s earlier Congresses and research retreats addressed a need for creating spaces for interdisciplinary researchers to discuss the growing research on digital media impacts on children from a developmental angle. “I was excited that Children and Screens was filling this much needed gap in the [United States] for doing this kind of research and having a space that brought people together.”

By 2022, Dr. Reich formally joined the Advisory Board, describing it as a natural progression: “I already had one foot in,” but at this time she “jumped in all the way.”

She continues to value the shared mission and collegial spirit of the Children and Screens community. “It’s such a great group of people who are really passionate about supporting children, with very diverse backgrounds and interests.”

Dr. Reich’s current research includes a focus on understanding the intersection of children’s online and offline experiences in the context of family lives and the influence of varying socioeconomic, identity and other factors.

“We haven’t gotten to a place where we understand the ecology of families’ uses of media for the diverse array of families, structures, resources, identities, processes in our country.” Dr. Reich emphasized the importance of  future research that reflects the full range of children’s experiences, noting that media effects “all children’s lives” and that research must “speak to all different types of kids and families to best support them.”