Screens are here to stay. They have transformed our modern world — with good effects, and bad.

We can be better informed because we now have information from around the globe at our fingertips. We can more easily connect to the people we know and more easily reach the people we don’t. Letters, like news, used to travel slowly but now information is instant.

So what’s the downside? With such a glut of information, it can be hard to discern the true from the false. And social networks can put us in touch with only like-minded people, causing schisms in our society when we fail to consider others’ points of view.

The young are particularly vulnerable. A host of studies have shown an association between high uses of screens and low well-being. While associations between screen time and poor health, like lack of exercise and obesity, have been well-documented, a study published last December in “Preventive Medicine Reports” looked at the psychological effects of screen time on youth aged 2 to 17.

The researchers found that high users show less curiosity, less self-control, and less emotional stability. Twice as many high (as opposed to low) users of screens had an anxiety or depression diagnosis.

Non-users and low users did not differ in well-being. After just one hour a day, increasing amounts of time spent with electronics was correlated with progressively lower psychological health

Total screen time averaged 3 hours and 20 minutes a day and was progressively higher among older children, primarily driven by more time spent on electronic devices. The largest increase in screen time occurred between elementary school and middle school. By high school (ages 14 to 17), adolescents spent 4 hours and 35 minutes a day with screens.

The well-being of adolescents was more affected than for children, researchers found. These high users possessed twice the risk of suffering from low well-being than their counterparts who used screens an hour or less per day. Adolescents with a lot of screen time — some as high as seven hours a day — were 95 percent less likely than low users to be calm, curious, or task-focused. They also had significantly more arguments with parents.

In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced recommendations for children’s media use. The academy recommends limiting screen time to an hour a day for children 2 to 5 years old, and advises parents to watch high-quality programs with their children to help them understand what they’re seeing.

For children 6 and older, limits are to be placed on the time and type of media and it is not to “take the place of adequate sleep, physical activity and other behaviors essential to health.”

The American Academy of Physicians also advises families to designate “media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms,” and urges “ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others with respect online and offline.”

Against this backdrop, we praise the organizers of Voorheesville’s Screen-Free Week, highlighted in a front-page story last week by our New Scotland and village reporter, Sean Mulkerrin. Parent Lori Storrow told Mulkerin that kids “rely on social media in order to get approval, when the approval should come from themselves.”

Storrow, one of the organizers, went on, “So that’s a huge struggle right now: They don’t have their own self-confidence yet and they’re judging their own self-worth upon other people’s opinions — we just went outside and played.”

Our photographer, Michael Koff, took pictures of the Storrow girls — 8-year-old Maria and 11-year-old Sophia — doing just that, playing at their school’s new playground. There, they were finding challenges and building confidence — and having fun.

This week, Mulkerrin has a story, with pictures, of Voorheesville kids learning to program code into computers to get structures built of Legos — like tiny windmills — to follow commands. The students are being carefully guided by their classroom teacher, Tim Mattison, as well as by Al Fiero, who secured the grant to make the project possible.

That use of screens is immeasurably valuable — students are learning how to think like scientists. And the computer is essential to their work and their understanding.

So, just like the organizers of the National Screen-Free Week, we are not saying: Don’t use screens at all. Rather: Use screens judiciously while making room for the rest of what the world has to offer and for what you can find within yourself and the people you know.

The website for National Screen-Free Week says, “Even though it’s about turning off screens, Screen-Free Week isn’t about going without – it’s about what you can get! An hour once dedicated to YouTube becomes an hour spent outside; ten minutes whiled away on social media turn into ten minutes spent doodling; a movie on a rainy afternoon is replaced by time spent reading, chatting, or playing pretend!”

The event, which has support from organizations around the world started in 1994 as TV Turnoff Week, and is now hosted by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Storrow told us that Gail Brown at the Voorheesville Public Library had been instrumental in launching Voorheesville’s Screen-Free Week. “Before the library, it was just an idea,” said Storrow. “She inspired and supported me.” You can read this week’s Library Notes column for more details on the Voorheesville events.

Libraries are allies in the healthy development of children’s minds. Last week, Luanne Nicholson wrote in her Guilderland library column about the “Welcome Baby Bags” — filled with information for parents about early literacy and brain development and fun things for babies like board books and maracas — as part of the library’s increasing services to children from birth to age 2 and their caregivers.

Reading is important for very young minds. Berne-Knox-Westerlo recognized this over two decades ago when a 1,000 Books program was started in the rural district, allowing parents of young children to take home books for free, with the goal of reading 1,000 to them before they started school.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents start reading out loud to their children from the time they are born. Many studies have shown that, when parents read to their babies, those children concentrate and pay attention better, have a better vocabulary than their counterparts who haven’t been read to, and are better prepared for school.

A 2015 study, published in the journal “Pediatrics,” found through doing brain scans that networks involved in reading or listening to stories start at a very young age and that brain activity was higher among the children whose parents reported creating a more literacy-friendly home.

But it’s not just children who can benefit from Screen-Free Week. It’s all of us. The week runs this year from April 29 to May 5. Why not give it a try?

Saturday morning, as we sat in a waiting room on the first floor of St. Peter’s Hospital, we were thinking about this editorial. Ubiquitous television screens seemed to mesmerize some of the others who waited. We decided to shut out the blather. Perhaps we’d instead talk to the person sitting next to us, a stranger. No, he was busy looking at his phone.

So we looked around. What was that display behind us? We got up to see. There, in a glass case, was an enormous Bible, with the scripture hand-lettered in calligraphy, illustrated with golden illuminations. We were awed by its beauty.

We read about the Bible; the information was posted nearby on — yes — a screen. The magnificent book before us was a copy of The Saint John’s Bible, created by Donald Jackson, Senior Scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office along with a collaborative team of scribes and artists.

We read that this was the first illuminated, handwritten Bible of monumental size to be commissioned by a Benedictine monastery in more than 500 years.

We longed to turn the pages but found the modern-day substitute filled in well. We could touch the screen to see pictures of various illustrated pages.

Here was the “Sower and the Seed,” drawn by Aiden Hart. A figure that looked uncannily modern — were those jeans he was wearing? — but clearly, by his halo, must be Jesus, was sowing seeds.

His hand broke out of the picture space as the seeds fell from it along with the words from the Gospel: “The sower sows the word.”

We looked more closely and saw, at the foot of the figure, four hills, each representing the places the seeds may fall as described in the parable — on a path where birds eat them; on rocky ground with little soil where the plants were scorched; on thorns where the plant was choked; and, finally, on good soil, where the seed produced grain, ultimately increasing a hundredfold.

Our number was called by the hospital technician, and we left the waiting room feeling richer for what we had seen — a melding of ancient words and means presented through a modern screen.