The Department of Health and Human Services has a challenge for American parents and children: “Live real life.”
As I noted in an article yesterday, for far too long, parents — even conservative parents — have been allowing screens, schools, celebrities, and politicians to raise their children. Now, all of a sudden, parents are realizing that their teenage or grown-up children have none of the work ethic, faith, moral standards, or patriotism that they expected. It is time for parents to take charge of raising their children, cutting the screen time and putting a lot more effort into family and outdoor activities.
Our children get one childhood, and we cannot allow screens to replace the real-world experiences they need to grow and thrive. Through the Office of the Surgeon General’s Live Real Life initiative, we are giving families practical tools to put technology in its proper place and get children back to playing, exploring, connecting, and experiencing the world around them.
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) September 13, 2026
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exclaimed, “Today, adolescents — a 16-year-old spends an average of 8.5 hours a day on screens. Even toddlers spend two, three hours on screens every day. Only one in four high school students has at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day.” No wonder kids are unhealthier, lonelier, and more dysfunctional than ever.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator, pointed out, “This is the first generation of young people in America who are not growing up living just with their screens. They're living through their screens.”
Health Resources and Services Administrator Thomas J. Engels highlighted the importance of human interaction. “The live real life campaign is grounded in an important idea: children need opportunities to engage, [meet] people, make activities, and, frankly, to get outside.” Dr. Alex J. Adams agreed, “We've known for a long time that social media and excessive screen time are harming our nation's children. But we've never seen leadership take such a strong and comprehensive stance to combat these harms until now,” he said.
Dr. Stephanie Haridopolis, who works for the Surgeon General’s Office, explained, “Just this past May, we put out an advisory and a toolkit. …It's a toolkit that also tells you what do we do about it? We need to take action and get kids to live real life now.”
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Kennedy reflected on his own experience in childhood. “You know, when I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in the woods, and walking in creeks, and outside playing with my brothers and sisters playing sports in the yard, getting scrapes, climbing trees, catching animals, and that connected me to something larger than myself.”
Such an experience, Kennedy noted, “was shared by 10,000 generations of human beings that lived before there were laptops, before there were smartphones, and we have responsibility as parents, and as a government health agency. to do everything we can to get our children out into those experiences again, and prepare them for life.” This is how we transform the future.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to renew America in this 250th birthday year.
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