What happens when a psychiatrist, educator, mother, and Catholic asks a simple question: What does it mean to be fully human in a digital age? Dr. Adriana Stacey brings together medicine, neuroscience, education, lived experience, and Catholic faith to help families and communities navigate some of the most pressing challenges facing children and adolescents today. A board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Stacey speaks about technology and mental health, but also about the deeper questions beneath the screen: human dignity, authentic relationship, suffering, grief, hope, and what children need to truly flourish. Her work is ultimately about helping families create lives in which technology serves the human person, not the other way around.
Featured Speaking Topics
What Kind of Childhood Helps Our Children Flourish?
Moving beyond screen time to what children truly need. Parents often ask, “How much screen time is too much?” Dr. Stacey invites families to consider a more important question: What kind of childhood best helps our children flourish? Drawing from developmental science, psychiatry, neuroscience, and Catholic anthropology, this talk explores the importance of relationships, play, community, responsibility, wonder, faith, and meaningful human connection, and how families can protect these essential elements of childhood in a digital age.
Screens, Smartphones, and the Dignity of the Human Person
What does technology have to do with Catholic anthropology? Technology is not inherently the enemy. But when technology begins to replace relationships, displace attention, interfere with development, or shape how we understand ourselves and others, we must ask a deeper question: What kind of human beings are our technologies helping us become? Dr. Stacey brings together neuroscience, psychiatry, and Catholic teaching on the dignity of the human person to explore what it means to remain fully human in an increasingly digital culture. The goal is not simply to use technology less, but to ensure that technology remains a servant of the human person rather than becoming its master.
Raising Children in a Digital World
Helping families understand the science behind screens, smartphones, and social media.
Children are growing up in an environment unlike anything previous generations have experienced. Dr. Stacey explains how smartphones, social media, video games, and other digital technologies can affect attention, sleep, relationships, emotional regulation, learning, and mental health. Parents leave with practical strategies for creating healthier technology habits while preserving the relationships and experiences children need most.
The Smartphone Generation
What every Catholic adult needs to know about raising children in the age of social media.
Why are parents, educators, and even technology leaders increasingly questioning whether smartphones and social media belong in childhood? Dr. Stacey explores the developmental science behind the growing concerns surrounding smartphones and social media and offers parents (and/or school staff) practical guidance for delaying smartphones, setting healthy boundaries, and creating a family culture that prioritizes real-world relationships over digital ones.
Walking Through Grief
Accompanying children and families through profound loss.
Grief changes everything. Drawing from her experience as a psychiatrist, educator, mother, and someone who has experienced the devastating loss of her teenage daughter, Dr. Stacey offers a compassionate conversation about how children and families experience grief and how schools, parishes, friends, and communities can respond. This talk moves beyond simple advice about “moving on” and instead explores the importance of presence, listening, accompaniment, faith, and hope in the midst of suffering.
When a Child Is Hurting
Understanding children's mental health through a lens of compassion and hope.
Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and emotional distress are increasingly common concerns for families. Dr. Stacey helps parents and Catholic communities understand what is happening in the developing brain and how to recognize when a child may need additional support. Rather than approaching mental health solely through a medical lens, she emphasizes the importance of relationships, belonging, family, community, and the inherent dignity of every child.
The Lost Art of Childhood
Reclaiming play, imagination, boredom, and real-world connection.
Children need more than academic achievement and digital entertainment. They need opportunities to play, explore, create, struggle, get bored, solve problems, build friendships, and experience the world directly. Dr. Stacey explores what may be lost when childhood becomes increasingly structured and screen-mediated, and offers families practical ways to create space for the experiences that help children develop resilience, creativity, and joy.
Technology, Attention, and the Developing Brain
What parents and educators need to understand about the adolescent brain.
The developing brain is uniquely vulnerable to highly stimulating, immediately rewarding digital environments. Dr. Stacey explains the neuroscience behind attention, reward, impulse control, sleep, learning, and technology use in children and adolescents. Audiences gain a better understanding of why children can struggle to put down devices, and what adults can do to create environments that support healthy development.
Faith. Science. Human Connection. Hope.
Helping families rediscover what allows children (and the people who love them) to truly flourish.
