Motherhood is not just about responsibility; it’s also about healing. Through parenting, mothers often find themselves restored. Beyond changing diapers and packing lunchboxes, they heal their hearts in the process. Emily Fauver (@emilyfauver) shared a touching TikTok video of her toddler’s reaction, which helped her feel emotionally healed after years of depression. The video is captioned, “My toddler’s reaction when I told her I was adopted.”
The video, captured by a home security camera, begins with Emily standing in the kitchen. Sunlight streams through the window, and a fluffy white dog lies sprawled on the floor. Emily is feeding the pet and snacking on a banana when her little girl, Ella, in an orange dress, enters the scene. “Why is Mimi your mom?” Ella asks. “I was adopted, actually,” Emily answers. “Why?” Ella insists. Emily then reveals what she hadn’t been able to share for years: “Because my mommy didn’t want me. My mommy didn’t want me, so a new mommy came and got me,” she says, quivering.
Representative Image Source: Pexels| cottonbro studio
Ella appeared baffled. She just exclaimed “Awe!” Pausing for a while, she finally declared, “I want you. I really want you. I’ll be your mommy.” In a split-second, Emily found herself weak-kneed. She instantly dropped the banana on the countertop and dropped to the floor, her eyes rolling with teardrops. “Give me a hug. That is so sweet,” the mom said, and embraced her daughter, “That’s exactly why I had you.” The girl repeated, “I’m your mommy now.”
“My heart will never be the same. She’s healed so much of my inner child for me,” Emily captioned the video, which has garnered over 9.5 million views and 1.9 million likes since it was posted in October 2022. The video was followed by a flurry of thousands of comments in which people said they were bawling over the girl’s reaction.
Image Source: TikTok | @jenkinscales
@amberdawnmorningstar reflected, “She didn’t even think for 5 seconds, she decided immediately, she was going to be your new momma.” @lyssryann_ commented about Ella, saying that she “is the sweetest thing!” @antonioyarzagaray added, “That’s one of the sweetest things I have ever heard. I don’t know how she gets it, but she gets it. Life is hard. Love is everything.” @abbieking90 said, “Kids really do know how to heal some of the deepest emotions without actually knowing they are doing it.”
Image Source: TikTok | @st.love.family.1992
On Reddit’s r/MadeMeSmile group where the video was re-posted, it was upvoted 71,000 times. In the comment section, u/chiliNPC urged, “Protect children at all costs. They truly are the purest souls.” The video also grossed a whopping 760,000 likes on Instagram where @barbygirlsyd said, “’I’ll be your mommy’ has me in tears,” and several other people connected with the same sentiment.
Image Source: Instagram | @skiinglizard
This heartwarming video is one from the series where Emily regularly posts clips of herself with her daughter Ella. She even hosts a series of TikToks called “Big Bow Cooking Show” that features her daughter’s cooking. She has 4.7 million followers on TikTok. A top-spot beachbody coach, Emily has also appeared on “The Codependent Podcast.”
Image Source: TikTok | @minuitmaya
Emily was born in California and raised in Oregon. In a 2019 Facebook post, she revealed she had struggled with drug addiction and abuse in her foster home during her early years, leading to eating disorders and depression. However, as the video shows, her daughter’s priceless reaction has helped her heal from her childhood trauma. Emily now lives in Kansas City with her husband and high-school sweetheart, Dylan Fauver, and their two kids.
You can follow Emily Fauver on TikTok and Instagram for more lovely mother-daughter videos!
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest person lived to the ripe age of 122 years old. Such a lifespan is an incredible feat, but what if the average person could beat that record by 34 years? Recent research done in Russia has led scientists to believe that the average human lifespan could be up to 156 years.
The researchers at Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center developed a mathematical model that allowed them to “switch on” a variety of aging mechanisms. This allowed them to calculate a human’s lifespan where mortality risk never increased with age. After experimenting with different scenarios and conditions, they found the biggest barriers to longevity were caused by non-renewable tissues and somatic mutations.
What are these barriers against longer life?
Somatic mutations are DNA changes within a cell. They accumulate over time during a human’s life and cannot be reversed with any existing therapy. These DNA errors that pile up in our cells contribute to the aging process.
Many human organs like the liver and skin continually replace cells and regrow damaged portions of themselves. However, there are two organs that can’t do this: the brain and the heart. Brain tissue (neurons) and heart tissue (cardiomyocytes) cannot regenerate. This proves to be the most prominent biological limit that shortens our lifespans. This explains why issues like dementia and heart disease are prominent causes of death and morbidity later in life. Since those organs’ tissues don’t replace damaged cells, they’re prone to irrevocably decline over time.
“The key finding of the study is the discovery of substantial differences between tissue types. Neurons and cardiomyocytes, which lack the ability to divide, turned out to be the main limiting factors: when all other causes of aging are eliminated, somatic mutations alone reduce the theoretical median lifespan from 1,759 years (for a hypothetical non-aging human organism) to 156 years,” said Evgeny Efimov, a research intern at the Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center, researcher at AIRI, and one of the key authors of the study.
This suggests that somatic mutations and DNA damage is what ultimately prevents humans from living indefinitely, even if our brains and hearts regenerated cells like other organs.
So what’s next?
Now knowing these biological limitations, the researchers hope to study other areas of aging impacting the human lifespan that could plausibly be reversed. This includes mitochondrial dysfunction, telomere shortening, epigenetic drift, and loss of proteostasis.
The hope is to have a clearer priority list of issues for future therapies to tackle. This is not just to possibly extend life, but to improve lives in general. By developing a fully comprehensive theory of aging, Skoltech hopes to pinpoint which aspects of aging are within our scope to address. After all, thoroughly studying each puzzle piece that makes up human life gives us a better understanding of the whole.
Of course, other impactful factors in a person’s lifespan can be addressed today. As most know, things like diet, sleep, and exercise are among them. A person’s living environment can also negatively impact their lifespan if it doesn’t have clean air, access to clean water, and so on.
For now, the best method for living long is to follow instructions from your physician. Whether you make it to 156 years or not, living well is best for whatever time you’re given.
In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 states have passed laws banning or restricting cellphones in K–12 classrooms; in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued a formal advisory on social media and children’s and adolescents’ mental health; and bestselling books tell parents that smartphones are “rewiring” their children’s brains.
These concerns and policies are part of a quickly changing national and international conversation around how young people spend time on screens and its relationship to their overall health and development. My reading of the mounting research on this issue across disciplines is that the popular narrative blaming screens and smartphones for an adolescent mental health crisis runs well ahead of the current evidence.
I study adolescent digital media use and its influence on social, emotional and academic outcomes. A growing body of research suggests that one-size-fits-all solutions are not the answer and that managing appropriate use of digital media needs to take into account a child’s developmental milestones, how parents and adults around them use media, and the ways kids use it to connect and learn with friends and family.
Screen time: From monolith to multifaceted
Wide adoption of digital media and the internet broadened the range of experiences young people could have online. At the same time, the digital age introduced newfound uncertainties. As with the advent of radio, comic books and arcades, adults worried about how children might interact with or be affected by internet use.
Policies introduced by the academy in 2013 and 2016 continued to advise that school-age kids and adolescents – those ages 5 to 18 – be restricted to no more than two hours of “entertainment” screen time a day. The goal was to curb risks associated with heavy media use, among them disrupted sleep, online safety, cyberbullying and physical inactivity.
Originally created for young people’s engagement with stationary media that tend to be confined to one room or context – for example, watching television – these hourly limits became outdated with the integration of smartphones and other digital devices into everyday life. Compared with watching television, online media was far more difficult to track and define, and more nuanced in its use.
In January 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics retired its decade-old framework that had largely organized its advice around hourly screen limits. The new policy statement on children, adolescents and digital media diverges from this blanket approach. Instead, it suggests parents consider the larger picture in which this media use exists rather than lumping all screen use together.
Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend that when children under 24 months use screens, they should be limited to content and devices that encourage children and caregivers to interact. For ages 2 to 5, screen time – including TV and interactive apps on devices – may be extended to more solo use, provided it’s high-quality digital media designed around learning goals in mathematics and reading. But recreational use should be limited to roughly an hour per day.
For school-age children and teens, the newest guidance has begun to step away from fixed screen time limits and asks families to weigh online activity in the context of everyday life.
Doing so recognizes that a child’s digital experiences are shaped by diverse factors rather than the hours spent online. Current guidelines call on caregivers to distinguish among types of media, from television and social media to video games and interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots. They also call for taking into account a child’s individual characteristics, such as their interests and personality, family members’ own use of screens, and the type of content children are spending time on.
Rethinking screen time
Moving beyond strict screen time limits includes questioning the kind of digital activities kids and adolescents participate in. Do the activities encourage time spent interacting with others online, which can help young people develop important skills and competencies?
Scrolling an algorithm-based, auto-playing video feed likely does not equate to the same opportunities as video-chatting with friends, creating digital art or working with teammates in a multiplayer game. Research suggests these different uses relate to development in different ways and can help kids develop varying skill sets pertaining to everyday life and schooling.
Indeed, a large review of current research found that young people who take part in a range of digital activities, such as browsing the web, online gaming or interacting on social media, show positive associations with social connection, identity exploration, civic participation and learning.
The current evidence suggests parents and caregivers are best positioned to be digital instructors. Cutting children off altogether can carry its own risks for social and emotional development. Caregiver mediation of children’s screen time can produce widely different outcomes and effects, depending on whether the guidance is supportive or controlling.
Considering your own digital media use is the first step: Are family members engaging in problematic or heavy media use that children in the household might emulate? What applications and uses are most common in the family, and what positive or negative effects might they have, depending on the child’s age? How could these digital activities be safely integrated with other everyday experiences to increase their benefit for children? Conversely, what online time might be better spent on face-to-face experiences?
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Plan tool turns these ideas into concrete questions. For example, it recommends working out what each child needs from digital technology, what activities screens might be crowding out, and where their family or household can build in screen-free time. The recommendation is to talk with each child about why they are drawn to particular apps or online activities, what they encounter while browsing, and what might be lost when kids bring phones to gatherings such as mealtimes.
The debate over young people’s screen time is not going away. But the most up-to-date guidelines, and the growing body of research behind them, make a strong case for a more holistic approach. The guidelines treat digital media as a complex, diverse and evolving environment that children need to learn to navigate in the digital age. The risks and rewards depend, as with any developmental setting, on the child, the content and what online time might be crowding out.
An emergency room doctor and fellow mom has been noticing a troubling trend: Many parents are giving their kids something more powerful than bicycles to get around the neighborhood. As a result, she’s seeing more children come into the ER with injuries sustained in e-bike and e-scooter crashes. She recently went online with a plea to parents and young riders.
Dr. Meghan Elizabeth Beach Martin, known online as Dr. Beachgem, posted a video in her scrubs discussing her concerns after seeing so many children come into the hospital with e-bike injuries during the summer months. She’s worried that too many kids and parents don’t understand the proper safety precautions. As a mother herself, she even questions why children are allowed to ride these devices at all.
In the video, the doctor explains that some e-bikes can reach speeds of up to 28 mph. She says that if an e-bike goes any faster than that, it’s technically classified as a motorcycle. At those speeds, she regularly sees children with traumatic injuries and broken bones after hitting bumps, cracks in the road, or other vehicles. Many of them aren’t wearing helmets or protective pads, and some are even riding barefoot, making their injuries even more severe. Martin’s video has gained traction on Reddit and elsewhere online.
E-bikes and e-scooters, examined
Martin isn’t the only professional seeing a growing problem. The American College of Surgeons reports that there are more than 20,000 e-bike-related injuries each year. Meanwhile, a University of California, San Francisco study found that e-bike injuries doubled annually from 2017 to 2022. The same study found that e-scooter injuries increased by 45% each year during the same period.
Before riding an e-bike, it’s important to follow proper safety procedures. Make sure you and your child understand your area’s laws regarding e-bikes, including any minimum age requirements. Always wear a helmet and other protective gear when riding. Consider choosing an e-bike with safety features such as motor-interrupt brake levers and disc brakes. These are just a few of the many safety tips experts recommend.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has similar safety tips for e-scooter riders. Wearing a helmet is one of its top recommendations, along with taking other basic precautions. The agency also recommends checking the brakes before riding and slowing down for bumps, cracks, and other road hazards.
The vast majority of e-scooters and e-bikes are designed for only one rider, so avoid doubling up. Although laws vary by state and locality, wearing more protective gear is always the safer choice. Riders should also review local e-bike and e-scooter laws to make sure they are operating the vehicles safely and legally.
A little research goes a long way toward making sure you and your children can ride safely. It’s also important for parents to understand that many e-bikes and e-scooters can travel at speeds that make them very different from a traditional bicycle. The last thing you want is for you or your child to become another emergency room statistic.
