Ban phones in schools. But that’s the easy part: social media is the harder question.

• A new Pew survey shows that nearly 70% of adults agree that schools should ban phones during class.

• Teachers have pushed for a ban on phones – and more and more schools are agreeing.

• But the broader topic of social media and its effects on teen mental health continues to be debated.

In the ongoing debates about cell phone use by teens and children at school – and the effects of social media on young people – there is at least one thing that most adults seem to agree on: banning phones at school.

The Pew Research Center just released a report of recent polls in which 68% of adults surveyed said high school students should not use their phones during class. (Most thought children should have access at lunch and between classes – and 36% thought phones should be left locked all day.)

An increasing number of schools across the country are banning phones. Teachers are overwhelmingly in favor of this cell phone ban; 90% of National Education Association members supported policies banning phones during class hours, according to a spring survey. Students, as you might imagine, are not always that enthusiastic about it. (Although some have said they liked the cell phone bans.)

Meanwhile, there has been a noticeable crescendo in the debate over phones and teenagers over the past year, especially with the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller ‘The Anxious Generation’ and state cases against Meta and TikTok claiming various forms of harm to young people. The U.S. Surgeon General recently proposed that social media should include a warning label for teens.

Banning phones at school is different from discussing the potential harm of social media

The debate over phones in schools is related to this larger conversation, but also very separate for a number of reasons.

For starters, the discussion about phones in schools has practical solutions: Today, schools can issue phone bans in classrooms, and these basically take effect immediately. There are no lawsuits involving big tech giants or intellectuals pontificating about the ills of society.

And it doesn’t really take any deep scientific research or analysis to conclude that phones are likely to be very distracting in the classroom.

If you’re an adult with a phone, you can probably imagine what it would have been like to have that phone in 11th grade English class. I’m old enough that I didn’t have a cell phone in high school, but I can definitely saying that I would have thought of all kinds of ways to secretly text my friends under my desk during biology class.

Research on social media and teen mental health is not always clear

On the other hand, the argument that social media and phone use are causing a mental health crisis in teens is not so clearly a slam-dunk case. The research on this topic is mixed and there are compelling arguments in both directions. Let’s look at a very recent problem: A researcher published a meta-analysis of studies on what happens when teens quit social media and suggested that Haidt’s research was flawed. Subsequently, Haidt and his team published a three-part Substack series attempting to debunk the meta-analysis. Then another investigator came up with a new analysis of the whole case, trying to debunk Haidt again.

Which side is right here is far beyond my judgment, but the point is that academic research in this area is complicated. Studies can be flawed in design and data can be interpreted differently.

The way people talk about it also matters; Mark Zuckerberg recently said in an interview with The Verge, “I think the majority of high-quality research suggests that there isn’t causal broad-scale connection” between social media and damage to teen mental health (emphasis mine). Meanwhile, researchers from Oxford have just published a study showing that correlation between the two. I think even a high school student tweeting in science class knows the difference between correlation and causation.

There’s also a bit of common sense here: teens are not a monolithic group, and for some, social media and phones can be very useful; for others, they can worsen anxiety and depression and possibly worsen eating disorders.

While phones in school are generally a similar topic to the discussion about the potential harm social media can do to young people’s mental health, in reality they are separate conversations – with different standards of evidence and different solutions. And it’s a conversation about which most adults have come to the same common-sense conclusion: don’t text and study.

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