We know surprisingly little about the impact of banning smartphones in schools, says Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics who studies how digital technologies affect young people. There are relatively few good studies in this area, and those that have been conducted often point in contradictory directions. There’s enough evidence to suggest that preventing kids from accessing their phones improves concentration, Livingstone says, but it’s much harder to say that banning phones leads to less bullying or more gaming. “The research is really insufficient for that,” he says.
Teasing out how smartphones affect specific issues like bullying, mental health, sleep time, exercise and concentration is extremely complicated, Livingstone says. She points out the lack of mental health services for young people and poor wages and conditions for teachers as other potential problems that are overlooked in favor of banning smartphones. Phones may be part of the problem, he says, but they are also being leveraged as an all-purpose solution. “It seems like it’s something we can do something about,” he says, “and they seem like the most obvious novelty.”
The proposed new bill would also raise the age at which children can give consent to allow social media companies to use their date from 13 to 16. “If we can create a version of those apps and a smartphone version effectively for under-16s, it will make it easier for them to clock out and go do real-world activities,” MacAllister told the Today show. The United Kingdom has already passed a law in 2023: the online security act—is supposed to protect children from some types of content, but most of the law has not yet taken effect.
Instead of focusing on bans, lawmakers should think more about how to teach children to have healthier relationships with technology and hold tech companies accountable, says Pete Etchells, a professor at Bath Spa University and author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time. “We need to think about how to better design (digital technologies) and help people understand how to use them,” he says.
And getting there, according to Etchells, means overcoming simplistic narratives like assuming that restricting screen time will lead to more outdoor play. He points to a 2011 law in South Korea that prohibited children from playing online games between midnight and 6 a.m. After four years, the ban had not made any significant difference in terms of Internet use or sleeping hours. The law was repealed in 2021.
“If you talk to any mental health professional, any researcher in this area, they will tell you that there is no single cause for things to get worse or better,” Etchells says. Seeing smartphone restrictions as the main answer to the problems facing young people could prove to be the easy answer rather than the right one.
