Friday, May 23
9 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Media and Child Health: Peril and Promise - Michael Rich, M.D., M.P.H.
Children spend more time using media than in school or with parents - how does this affect their physical, mental, and social health? Michael Rich, MD, MPH, the founder and director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston cuts through the hype and moralizing to examine the scientific research on how media influence our youth - violence, anxiety, substance use, sexual risk behaviors, body image distortion - but also how media can teach and empower them. Using the same critical lens through which he assesses children's nutrition or car seats, Dr. Rich places media in the context of other public health concerns, reveals what we know and what we need to know, and provides parents, clinicians, and others who work with children the strategies and tools for intervening on media's negative effects, promoting positive media applications, and illustrates how children and families can learn to protect themselves from what is arguably the most pervasive and universal environmental health risk in the Information Age.
Dr. Rich is Founder and Director of the Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH) at Children's Hospital Boston, a center of excellence committed to educating and empowering children and those who care for them to create and consume media in ways that optimize children's health and development. He is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Assistant Professor in Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard School of Public Health, and practices adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital Boston. Dr. Rich is a filmmaker and writer who worked in the film industry for 12 years, including two years in Japan as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa on Kagemusha, before attending medical school at Harvard.
For more than a decade, Dr. Rich has been a recognized international leader on the positive and negative effects of media on children's health. Routinely contacted by policymakers and news media, Dr. Rich has testified before city councils, state legislatures, and both the United States Senate and House of Representatives about the influence of media on child and adolescent health and development.
