Digital technologies are drastically changing the lives of children and young people. For years, the default psychological approach to addressing questions about digital technology's effects on development was to try and establish evidence-based time use guidelines, that is, concrete amounts of time that children and adolescents are recommended to spend on digital technologies to avoid negative impacts. The implicit assumption of this research was that there is an informative and simple numerical relationship connecting the time spent using digital technologies and developmental outcomes. In this piece, I argue that this collective search for a unitary numerical value linking screen time with developmental outcomes was futile, primarily because such a value does not exist. To explain and expand on this reasoning, I introduce the digital diet approach: a thought experiment that challenges how we currently research and reason about digital technologies by drawing parallels to our established approach to understanding and reasoning about diet. I cover six conceptual starting-points, each describing a different conceptual angle of the digital diet approach and how it diverges from current practices in the psychological sciences.

中文翻译：

---

数字饮食：理解数字技术和发展的 21 世纪方法

数字技术正在极大地改变儿童和年轻人的生活。多年来，解决数字技术对发展影响问题的默认心理学方法是尝试建立基于证据的时间使用指南，即建议儿童和青少年花在数字技术上的具体时间，以避免负面影响. 这项研究的隐含假设是，使用数字技术所花费的时间与发展成果之间存在一种信息丰富且简单的数字关系。在这篇文章中，我认为这种集体寻找将屏幕时间与发展成果联系起来的单一数值是徒劳的，主要是因为这样的价值不存在。为了解释和扩展这个推理，我介绍了数字饮食方法：一个思想实验，通过与我们既定的饮食理解和推理方法相提并论，挑战我们目前对数字技术的研究和推理方式。我涵盖了六个概念出发点，每个出发点都描述了数字饮食方法的不同概念角度，以及它与心理科学当前实践的不同之处。