The curious case of cell-phone bans
The push to “protect” children from cell phones and social media is gaining momentum worldwide. As EU and Asian countries consider legal limits on minors’ access to social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in a Los Angeles courtroom last week about whether his company’s popular apps, which include Facebook and Instagram, are addictive.
That question already seems to have been resolved in the public mind. Pennsylvania now seems poised to become the 32nd state to ban or limit cell phones in its public schools. A parent leader who supports the ban told the Philadelphia Inquirer the legislation is necessary to “detach kids from addictive devices” and “break the dopamine feedback loop.”
These concerns are easy to understand given the rise in anxiety and depression, as well as the decline in academic achievement recorded since the iPhone’s debut in 2007. But a growing body of research challenges the use of “science” to support these bans. While it makes sense that electronic devices connected to the World Wide Web can distract some students from their teacher’s instruction, there is, at best, conflicting evidence that the interventions can improve academic performance and discipline. The evidence is even weaker regarding medical claims that technology causes addiction, depression, and dopamine rushes. Although experts do not believe that limiting cell phone use causes new problems, they worry that blaming devices for a wide range of issues may prevent schools and parents from addressing the more complex issues that undermine discipline, academic achievement, and mental health.
A new study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics that followed more than 100,000 Australian kids in grades 4-12 for three years reported that “moderate social media use was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being.” These results dovetail with the findings of another new study of over 25,000 youth in England that found that neither time spent on social media nor on video games predicts later mental health problems in youth. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the claim that people become addicted to social media because it provides a dopamine rush is also not supported by the literature.
“Our findings suggest that policies framed primarily as a mental health intervention are based on a flawed premise: that time spent online causes anxiety and depression,” the lead author of the British study, the University of Manchester’s Qiqi Cheng, told RCI. “Our data shows this is not the case. While we found that anxious adolescents do spend more time online (a correlation), our longitudinal model confirms that increasing usage does not predict a decline in mental health. This suggests that high usage is likely a symptom or a coping mechanism, not the cause.”
Fig Leaf
These new studies are significant, but they are not groundbreaking. Researchers have been finding for years that while social media can be a channel for unseemly political arguments and harassment, it can also be a positive coping strategy for youth, particularly during periods of stress or social isolation, such as during COVID lockdowns. Indeed, back in 2020, during the pandemic, news media and research groups often described social media as a “lifeline” during lockdowns. The narrative has since changed 180 degrees since then, even as the evidence has not.
Experts say they are frustrated by the stark divide between the complex forces at play regarding cell phones and social media and the almost exclusively negative portrayal of their impact in the media and the stringent policies they have inspired. Such policies, they say, can harm well-being by cutting youth off from sources of support. This may particularly be true for teens who struggle with social anxiety in real life or have difficult family environments. As the authors of one 2023 study put it, “[O]ur results suggested that social media use positively predicted adolescents’ well-being.”
Blanket bans on social media can also be harmful because they may offer a fig leaf that covers deeper issues, leaving them unexplored. “Depressive symptoms,” the authors of the 2023 study reported, “may not be directly associated with actual behaviors of regularly using social media but rather with some maladaptive cognitive and affective processes related to social media use.”
Although many parents, educators, and politicians understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation, it can be hard to resist that flawed logic. As Professor Cheng told RCI, “First, intuition often overrides data. As we observed in our study, there is a correlation: anxious adolescents do spend more time on screens. Parents witness this correlation daily. However, it is very hard to convince someone that what they are observing is a ‘trait’ (personality) rather than a ‘state’ induced by the device. The correlation is visible; the lack of causation is invisible.”
Given this tendency, blaming technology can offer a tempting quick fix. “Social media provides a convenient scapegoat,” Cheng said. “If we accept that screen time isn’t the primary driver of the mental health crisis, we are forced to look at much harder, structural problems – like academic pressure, family breakdown, poverty, and underfunded mental health services.”
Peter Gray, Research Professor at Boston College and expert on youth education and mental health, said blaming the smartphone offers a tangible villain and a seemingly simple solution. “It is a lot easier (at least in theory) to ban social media for kids than it is to solve more complex societal problems. It is more satisfying for us adults to blame those greedy social media companies for kids’ suffering than, say, to blame an increasingly oppressive system of schooling that we have imposed on kids, or to blame society in general for the severe constraints we have put on kids’ real-world freedoms.”
‘Copycat Effect’
Nevertheless, the push to ban phones in schools has gained momentum around the world – the American Enterprise Institute suggested that a “copycat” effect may be at work. Perhaps the most notorious has been Australia’s ban on youth under 16 accessing social media. While researchers have questioned the health impacts of that effort, it is also not clear if the ban is even keeping youth off social media. Though almost 5 million teen accounts were deactivated in Australia after the ban, downloads of VPNs, programs used to mask the location of an internet user, surged. This suggests that teens are simply opening new accounts to work around the ban.
As RCI has previously reported, cell phone bans in school have been largely ineffective in improving student outcomes. The widespread adoption of such bans across multiple states, municipalities, and districts has not blunted downward trends in US standardized testing scores. It also does not appear to have reduced incidents of bullying or improved mental health. Data collected from Orange County schools in Florida, which banned phones for the entire school day, found an increase in the number of serious bullying incidents and the number of students referred for mental health services. So many factors are involved that it is hard to conclude anything from these numbers except that the ban did not deliver promised benefits. Since the statewide ban, Florida’s national testing scores reached their nadir: the lowest levels in 20 years.
Intuitively, it makes sense that banning cell phones should help with distraction. After all, we want students paying attention to teachers, not their phones. But what if the problem isn’t phones but the schools themselves? Students routinely report in surveys that schools are boring, and recent decades’ regulations and the emphasis on standardized testing have probably made this worse. Phones may just have been a very visible (and admittedly annoying) reminder to teachers, little different from the daydreaming, doodling, roughhousing, side chatter, or sleeping of yesteryear.
Indeed, research studies appear to bear this out. Although, as is often the case, studies that examine cellphone policies do vary in outcome, the most rigorous find little benefit to students related to learning, attention, bullying, or mental health. Just this month, a new large study from the U.K. found no student benefits from cell phone ban policies.
No Impact
Recently, news media highlighted a few studies that claimed “surprising results” of benefits for cell phone bans. These unpublished studies, however, have not gone through peer review, and a close analysis of these reveals that the beneficial effects were basically zero. Despite the news coverage, one of these studies admitted, “…there were no significant changes in overall student well-being, academic motivation, digital usage, or experiences of online harassment.” Similarly, another widely cited study suggesting support for cell phone bans found that exposure to cell phone bans predicted basically 0% of the variance in learning outcomes. Studies can sometimes find “statistically significant” results for effects that are vanishingly small. These two studies are better evidence against cellphone bans than for them, but were misleadingly presented in news coverage. It’s entirely possible that longer-term studies could change this picture. Perhaps benefits accrue over longer periods of time. But to date, both data from the real world and from scientific studies suggest these bans have been ineffective at improving student performance in schools.
Still, their appeal to educators is clear. Rather than focus on dodgy DEI-focused education, increased government regulation, the failures of Common Core, the tedious boredom and stress, etc., distracting the public with the monocausal quick fix of cellphone and technology bans gives schools maybe three to five years before it’s clear they didn’t work.
As Professor Gray argued in a recent post addressing these educational issues, “The ‘reforms’ led to an increase in a ‘skill and drill’ mode of teaching, aimed at increasing scores on standardized exams and away from methods more likely to generate genuine interest and pleasure…These ‘reforms’ no doubt help explain why teachers began to assign fewer full books to students in their classes and why students began increasingly to view reading as something you do for a test rather than for fun, enlightenment, or intellectual engagement.” In other words, it was government policy, not tech, which beat the love of learning and reading out of kids.
There is also a growing movement against EdTech efforts that began in the early 2000s, which advocated the use of more technology in education, including giving laptops to poor students to close the “digital divide.”
This EdTech movement has also recently come under fire, with claims that introducing technology in the classroom explains the downward trends in standardized test scores. For instance, one New York Times article boldly declared, “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education.” Lawmakers held hearings in January, blaming a wide range of technologies for learning declines in youth. A growing parent-led movement in Los Angeles, for example, seeks to remove laptops and other personal devices from the classrooms, returning them to paper and pencils in the age of AI.
However, randomized controlled trials of EdTech suggest that education technology in classrooms is associated with gains in learning. As one recent meta-analysis of studies concluded, “…effects found in the present study are consistent with prior meta-analyses that suggest that educational technology interventions can have positive effects on elementary school age students’ literacy.” Some interventions were better than others, and it may be fair to argue that they were more modest than some proponents of EdTech had advertised. But evidence technology has “eaten” education appears limited.
Hyped Headlines
Much of the concern has been driven by a misunderstanding of hyped newspaper headlines about learning outcomes. According to the Nation’s Report Card, learning outcomes for U.S. students have barely budged over the past 35 years. The 2010s, the prime period of youth adoption of tech, represented a high point in student learning outcomes. Those fell off again, following the COVID-19 epidemic and school closures. However, standardized testing scores today are about the same as they were in the early 1990s, before the adoption of modern technology.
For instance, 8th-grade math scores are slightly above 1990 levels.
Reading scores are only marginally below those from 1990.
As such, very modest changes may have irresponsibly been sold as a bigger crisis than they actually are. Professor Gray said schools are deflecting responsibility for youth problems away from their own failures, including the embrace of one-size-fits-all approaches such as Common Core. “[Learning] operates much better when teachers have the freedom to make their own decisions about what happens in their classroom than when governments or other higher authorities, who aren’t in the classroom, make that decision,” he said.
Some experts note the irony that even as politicians, educators, and many parents turn to cell phone bans as a cure-all, some indices suggest youth outcomes are improving, despite these failed policy efforts. According to the Centers for Disease Control, youth mental health outcomes have been improving for the past several years. Similarly, in Australia, youth experiencing high psychological distress dropped from 25% in 2023 to 19% in 2025, before any social media ban. Indeed, it would be critical not to let politicians retroactively take credit for youth outcome improvements already underway before their clumsy regulation efforts began.