Richard Freed, PhD, is a child and adolescent psychologist, author, and his insights have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. He is a leading expert on how our kids’ increasingly screen-focused lives affect their physical and mental health as well as academic success. Freed has devoted his career to revealing how Silicon Valley is using psychology—a discipline that we associate with healing—as a weapon against kids in order to pull them online and keep them there. This is achieved by consumer tech corporations joining forces with world-leading psychology experts to create the virtually unknown science of persuasive design used in social media, video games, and online video. Freed is determined to bring knowledge of this science—which now exists among a handful of tech elite—to all of those who care for kids in his newly released book, Better Than Real Life: How Silicon Valley’s Secret Science of Persuasive Design Is Stealing Childhood. Freed speaks nationally to groups of parents, teachers, and health care providers. Receiving his professional training at Cambridge Hospital / Harvard Medical School and the California School of Professional Psychology, he is on the advisory boards of the Screen Time Action Network at Fairplay, Families Managing Media, and Wait Until 8th. Freed lives in Walnut Creek, California and is the proud father of two daughters.