UK Considers New Smartphone Bans for Children

We know surprisingly little about the impact of smartphone bans 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 studies that have been done often point in contradictory directions. There is just about enough evidence to suggest that preventing children from accessing their phones improves concentration, says Livingstone, but it’s much harder to say that banning phones leads to less bullying or more play. “The research is just really insufficient for that,” she says.

Separating out how specific issues like bullying, mental health, sleep time, exercise, and concentration are impacted by smartphones is extremely tricky, says Livingstone. She points to the lack of mental health services for young people and poor pay and conditions for teachers as other potential issues that get overlooked in favor of smartphone bans. Phones might be part of the problem, she says, but they’re also seized upon as an all-purpose solution. “They seem the bit we can do something about,” she says, “and they seem the most obvious new thing.”

The proposed new bill would also raise the age at which children can 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 version of smartphones effectively for U16s, it will make it easier for them to clock out and go do real-world activities,” MacAllister told the Today show. The UK already passed a law in 2023—the Online Safety Act—that is supposed to protect children from some kinds of content, but most parts of the act have yet to come into force.

Rather than focusing on bans, legislators should think more about how to teach children to have healthier relationships with technology and hold tech companies to account, 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 we design [digital technologies] better, and support people in understanding how to use them,” he says.

And getting there, according to Etchells, means moving past simplistic narratives like assuming that restricting screen time will lead to more outdoor play. He points to a 2011 law in South Korea that banned children from playing online games between midnight and 6 in the morning. After four years, the ban had made no meaningful difference in terms of internet use or sleeping hours. The law was dropped in 2021.

“If you talk to any mental health professional, any researcher in this area, they will tell you there’s no such thing as a single root cause for things getting worse or better,” Etchells says. Looking to smartphone restrictions as the main response to the problems facing young people might turn out to be the easy answer rather than the right one.