Get the white paper here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15844153
A girl lies feet-up on her warm bed at home. Well-fed. Loved. Sheltered. Seemingly safe.
But in her hands—a glow. A portal. A flickering bridge to wars she cannot name, faces twisted in rage, bodies broken among borders she’s never crossed.
And then there are whispers that tell her she’s never enough.
Her environment does not end at her home’s walls—it bleeds through pixels, pulses in notifications, seeps into synapses.
It is not just outside her—it is inside her. Emotionally. Physiologically. Neurobiologically.
She is plugged in, linked up, pressed upon. This isn’t metaphor—it’s measurement.
Flesh and data entwined. Her smartphone is no mere tool—it’s an appendage.
The numbers do not lie. Youth anxiety, depression, self-harm—
a rising tide in perfect, terrible sync with the glow of the “smartphone generations.”
This is not a plea to halt the march of technology—it’s a cry to meet it. Eyes open. Tools sharpened.
We teach our children to read, to write, to calculate—abstract arts, wrestled into sense over centuries.
Yet the “Three R’s” were etched in the 1830s—before light bulbs, algorithms, and AI.
Long before a child’s world could be swallowed whole by a screen.
So where does that leave her? Where does that leave the ones who come after?
Adrift in a digital ocean—a technological storm with no compass, no map, no language for the currents pulling them under?
While no map or model guarantees safe passage— we use them every day to increase the odds.
UBM is that map, that model, that compass and that language.
A unified model: accessible, elemental, goal-directed, alive.
Practical enough for a seminar. Urgent enough for a soup kitchen.
The truth is, we’ve never taught behavior to our adolescents—only demanded it.
It’s time. Time for the Fourth R: BehavioR.
Elemental Behavioral Literacy. It begins here.
Use it. Test it. Teach it. Share it.
Because soon—a child will look up from their screen, jaw dropped…
And what they do next
may very well depend on what you do now.
Learn more about The Behavioral Literacy Project
Get the white paper here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15844153
Grunburg, M. (2025). The Unified Behavior Model (UBM) An Elemental, Falsifiable Framework for Behavior Change (1,0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15844153
