Weve all seen the headlines about todays teen mental health crisis: Kids are struggling.

The CDCs Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report , which analyzed data collected from 2011-2021, found a steady increase over that time in the number of teens who experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, as well as in the number of kids who considered, made a plan for or attempted suicide. In 2021, the first survey done after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 22% of kids considered suicide, and 10% made an attempt. The numbers for queer youth were even higher.

These numbers are devastating, and they only scratch the surface of the pain that these kids and their families experience.

Hari Ravichandran is the founder and CEO of Aura, a digital security company. He is also the father of four children, one of whom struggled with depression, self-harming behaviors and an eating disorder, Ravichandran told HuffPost.

At the age of 14, she had to go to a community-based therapy center for a couple of weeks, and her phone was sort of left behind. So we went through it and it was fairly shocking to me, Ravichandran said. It was clear that the things his child was looking at online were, if not directly causing some of her struggles, at least making them worse.

These days, he sets strict limits on the amount of time his two teenage children spend online and provides them what he calls guardrails by setting parental controls. It wasnt hard to convince the younger children of the need to change the rules regarding screen time after watching their sister struggle, Ravichandran said.

While its unclear what the relationship is between kids mental health and their screen time does time online lead to mental health issues, or do kids with mental health issues gravitate to online spaces? the combination can be dangerous.

Dr. Jason Nagata, who cares for young people with eating disorders at the University of California, San Francisco Childrens Hospital, told HuffPost, During the pandemic, several of our adolescents with eating disorders had noted that while stuck at home, they spent countless hours browsing social media sites where they became lost in disordered eating content related to weight loss or muscle building.

He noted that hospitalizations for eating disorders doubled at his facility during this time.

Several of our patients while hospitalized would use social media to find and share tips on how to continue disordered eating behaviors in the hospital despite the severe medical complications of their eating disorder, he said.

These patients inspired Nagata to conduct research about adolescents screen time, and stories like theirs have led many parents to limit how many hours their kids spend on screens and the content they can access.

Why its so hard for kids to get off their screens

For parents who were kids in the 80s and 90s, there was really only one kind of screen at home: the TV. And many of us spent plenty of hours in its glow particularly during summer vacation.

But todays kids are spending an alarming amount of time online, to the potential detriment of their sleep, physical activity level and mental health. Aura analyzed data from 31,000 devices that had the parental controls they sell activated and found that kids spend, on average, an aggregate of three months of the year online.

Tim Estes, CEO of Angel AI, which is developing an AI-powered search engine designed for kids, has worked in the tech industry for many years and is wary of the way that todays apps elicit addictive behaviors in children. (He also keeps screens to a minimum for his own kids, ages 8 and 5.)

What makes todays devices different from the TV, Estes told HuffPost, is interactivity.

Its a lot more stimulation, he said, and for developing brains, that has a lot of addictiveness to it, literally driving a kind of dopamine feedback loop that makes kids just start to feel that if they dont get enough of it that somethings wrong much like a narcotic.