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 the impact of digital technologies on young people. There are relatively few quality studies in this area, and those that have been conducted often go in contradictory directions. There’s enough evidence to suggest that keeping kids from their phones improves concentration, Livingstone says, but it’s much harder to say that banning phones leads to less bullying or more play “The research is really insufficient for this,” she says.
According to Livingstone, it is extremely tricky to disentangle the impact of smartphones on specific issues such as bullying, mental health, sleep time, exercise and concentration. She highlights 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, she says, but they’re also seen as a multi-purpose solution. “They seem to be the point where we can do something,” she says, “and they seem to be the most obvious new thing.”
The proposed new bill would also increase the age at which children can consent from 13 to 16 to allow social media companies to use their appointment. “If we can create a version of these apps and a version of smartphones that is effective for U16s, it will make it easier for them to clock in and do real-world activities,” MacAllister told the Today to show. The United Kingdom has already adopted a law in 2023: the Online security act—which is supposed to protect children from certain types of content, but most parts of the law have not yet taken effect.
Rather than 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 the University of Bath Spa and author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time. “We need to think about how we can design (digital technologies) better and help people understand how to use them,” he says.
And getting there, Etchells says, requires moving beyond simplistic narratives like assuming that restricting screen time will lead to more outdoor play. He cites a 2011 law in South Korea that prohibits children from playing online games between midnight and 6 a.m. After four years, the ban had made no significant difference in terms of Internet use or hours of sleep. The law was abandoned in 2021.
“If you talk to a mental health professional or a researcher in this field, they will tell you that there is no single cause for things to get worse or better,” Etchells says. Viewing restrictions on smartphones as the main answer to the problems facing young people might prove to be an easy answer rather than the right one.
