Better Than Real Life

The Secret Science Addicting Kids to Screens—And How to Save Childhood

De: Richard Freed

Narrado por: Richard Freed

The hidden science addicting kids... stealing childhood

“It’s just a game”… “Social media is how kids talk today”… “Online video is just like TV”

If these claims are true, why can’t kids look up from their screens? Why are children and teens turning their backs on family, school, the outdoors, and all things real world to live on phones and video game players?

Richard Freed, a child and adolescent psychologist, reveals why in his book Better Than Real Life, as he unveils Silicon Valley’s secret science of persuasive design. The psychological science is so powerful that it is able to persuade youth, at a genetic level, that sitting sedentary on playtime screens is better than running and playing, better than engaging with school, better than spending time with family. The result is a tragic public health crisis for kids.

Dr. Freed—who has devoted his career to exposing what’s hiding behind kids’ screens and who has been featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—asks a crucial question: “Who’s protecting the kids?” He shows that leading “health based” institutions, which claim to shield children, are actually funded by industry and promote unsafe screens.

Parents and others who care for youth need the truth about the impact of consumer tech on kids and how to provide them healthy and happy lives. Freed uncovers how a small group of tech-involved parents is rejecting the push to put kids on screens to instead provide their own children a science-based childhood focused on real-life activities.

Better Than Real Life shows how you can provide your kids the healthy lives they need—in the real world. Get the book today.

©2025 Richard Freed (P)2025 Richard Freed

Oddly Captivating,

I picked up Better Than Real Life because I’ve been watching what screens are doing to children—especially teenagers—and wanted something that went beyond the usual hand-wringing. In that respect, the book delivers. There is enough research, testimony, and Silicon Valley insider material here to get anyone started on the topic. Freeman clearly understands the way the tech world designs for compulsion, and the book connects many dots about how “attention engineering” has quietly become the business model for everything children touch online.

But I have to mention the one thing that completely dominates the audiobook experience: the narration. I have never heard anything like it. Instead of reading sentences, the narrator breaks the text into these sharp, staccato fragments—almost like the left side of a newspaper column was lifted out and read straight downward. Words. Short phrases. Pauses. More fragments. Like reading through broken glass. Almost nothing sounds like a complete sentence. At first I thought it was an error in the recording. Then I wondered if it was a stylistic choice. Either way, it takes some getting used to.

Oddly enough, once the shock wears off, the style does become interesting. It forces you to think about the information instead of letting it wash over you. Or imagine a tsunami of margin notes. But it also means you can never quite settle into a story rhythm. You’re always catching up, stitching the fragments back into meaning. I can’t say if that was intentional by the producer or a quirk of the narrator — it could be breaking new ground, it might even be brilliant. And it becomes part of the book whether you want it to or not.

What kept me listening, though, was the subject itself. Freeman describes something that many parents and teachers feel but have trouble articulating: that Silicon Valley didn’t just stumble into addicting children to screens — they refined it, optimized it, and then exported it globally. And in the middle of all of this, it’s teenage girls who often paid the sharpest price. The book touches (sometimes indirectly, but unmistakably) on the rise of anxiety, body-image issues, late-night doom-scrolling, self-harm ideation, and the way a phone can quietly become a teenager’s entire world… and their captor.

Freeman doesn’t sensationalize it, but he doesn’t soften it either. You hear story after story—young girls who weren’t sleeping, who were comparing themselves endlessly to invisible online standards, who were being manipulated by algorithms that had no interest in their well-being. When you put all the pieces together, it becomes a blunt picture: these platforms were designed to capture their attention, and in many cases, they captured far more than that.

So in the end, the audiobook is an unusual experience. The narration is strange, sometimes frustrating, sometimes oddly compelling. But the content is important. And if you can push through the choppy delivery, you’ll come away with a clearer understanding of what is really happening to children in a world where the brightest engineers dedicate their talent to keeping kids online, no matter the cost.

Strange narration, powerful message — carrying the imperative that childhood be defended.