The Social Network with Dr. Viren A. D’Sa

Photograph by Alex Gagne

Dr. Viren A. D’Sa, the top doctor who graces our May 2026 cover, has been practicing developmental behavioral pediatrics for twenty-two years. He is also director of developmental behavioral pediatrics at Hasbro Children’s and an associate professor of pediatrics and clinician educator at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. We sat down to ask him some questions about childhood development, trends he’s seeing in the field and how outside forces like social media, community and the environment shape children’s behavior and emotional growth.

Can you describe what a developmental behavioral pediatrician does?

A developmental behavioral pediatrician has gone through additional training after pediatrics. It’s about three years of clinical and research in early child development and behavior but also includes child development through the age of eighteen, particularly for children with developmental disabilities. Some of the areas we focus on in terms of identification, and then management and treatment, are developmental delays, autism spectrum disorders, learning disabilities and behavioral disorders like ADHD. We deal a lot with anxiety, which is commonly seen with many of these disorders, but also seen separately as well.

Do you stay involved with the patients throughout childhood?

We are often more regularly involved with these families and children than their pediatricians or primary care physicians are, because we might have made some tweaks to treatment, might have adjusted certain medicines, suggested certain medicines or other kinds of treatments, and we’re looking at how the child and family are coping and hopefully improving with them. That monitoring sometimes needs to be at three- or six-month intervals, which is often more frequent than they would see their pediatrician.

How did you get interested in this particular specialty?

I’ve always been interested in the brain and how it functions, how it develops. And I always knew I wanted to work with children and their families. So marrying that combination of my love for pediatrics, my interest in brain function, brain development, developmental and behavioral pediatrics, really presented that broadest approach to keeping these interests going. And as I did rotations and got experiences in that subspecialty, it took off from there.

Can you tell me what you’re seeing now, in terms of children coming into the clinic, and how that compares to when you first started practicing?

We have a heightened awareness of the influences in the community and the environment on children’s behavior and on children’s developmental trajectories and performance in general. Those environmental influences are having such an impact on children, particularly when you think about some of the social impacts of their social environment on them. A lot of the face-to-face, more direct interactions have been replaced by heavy doses of social media interaction. In some instances, they’re beneficial and helpful and help develop some social skills. But on the flip side, it’s often too much, too overwhelming and sometimes misused. There are children who could be taken advantage of by their peers. And you see a lot of mental health consequences from them.

How should parents guide their children through using social media?

Dialogue is something that’s really important, parent-to-child or caregiver-to-child, to help them understand the context in which these social media platforms work, the way messages can come through, and what they can mean. You’re preparing them to understand the nuances and differences between similar kinds of posts that are directed to them. It’s really about that dialogue, and keeping that open communication, where if a child experiences or receives something, or isn’t too sure what something might mean, that they can come to a parent and ask for clarification or find out whether it’s something that’s malintended or just a typical social interaction. But it all stems from that dialogue, and that’s difficult to do because at certain ages, preteens and teens are trying to assert their own independence and find their place in their friend group. It’s about balancing that privacy with safety in terms of mental health.