Restricting Kids' Cell Phone Use at School: Ethicist

Medscape

06-06-2025

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where I'm the head of the Division of Medical Ethics.
The state that I live in, Connecticut, has seen some very interesting legislative proposals recently around cell phone use. Many other states — New York, New Jersey, and many others — are having similar debates.The Connecticut one, I think, is the furthest along of them all.
It becomes important because I think parents ask questions about cell phone use for their kids. What should I be thinking? Should I restrict it? Is it dangerous? What should I do?
The state of Connecticut wants to help. First, they've proposed legislation to pull cell phones out of schools — at least kindergarten up through high school — to get the cell phones taken away from the kids so that they're not distracted and that they're paying attention to the teacher and also engaged in social interaction.
Even more radically, there's a proposal in Connecticut, a bill that would ban in young children from being able to access social media platforms, iPads, cell phones, or whatever between midnight and 6:00 AM. Is this a good idea?
A colleague of mine at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, wrote a book called The Anxious Generation . He believes that the rates we see of teenagers who are now experiencing anxiety, which has increased from 2010 to today from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4; the number of teenagers experiencing depression, which has gone up from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5; and even death by suicide, one of the leading causes of deathfor kids aged 15-24, have to do with social media.
Harassment, peer pressure, and getting stalked and bombarded with messages that attack self-esteem, target young people, and make them feel bad about their bodies can absolutely create mental health disorders.
Is there sufficient evidence in his book?Do we have sufficient evidence from other studies to say for sure it's the cell phone or the iPad that somebody's looking at late at night?
I'm going to concede that we don't. There's suggestive evidence, but not really many gold-standard studies that say, yes, it's the cell phone, iPad, or computerand where they are on social media.
On the other hand, I support these legislative efforts, like Connecticut's, to get the cell phones out of school, to get kids talking to one another, to get them paying attention more, and to do what we can to get them off [of their devices] in the middle of the night.
I would look at it this way.[Cell phones] may be causing problems by giving access to disturbing social media outlets. Let's face it, social media is a cesspool at this point, a sewer all over the place, and the companies that run it are doing nothing to self-regulate it. If we're wrong, the worst that happened is [kids] are not online for certain parts of the day.
I know parents sometimes say, well, what about if there's a shooting or an emergency at school? I think we can manage that. You can absolutely have teachers with cell phones. The staff can have cell phones. It's not that there wouldn't be any ability to alert the police or to allow some communication as necessary with the kids.I don't think the rarity of a school shooting, as much as we worry about it, is enough to say, yes, let's let the kids just get lost all day long at school in their cell phones.
I also understand why people are asking how this is going to really be enforced. Maybe it will be possible at school when you ask the kids to turn the cell phones in and lock them up or put them in a pouch where the teacher has the code or something.How is that enforceable at home at night?
One of the things missing, I think, from these efforts in Connecticut and elsewhere to decrease access by young kids to social media is the use of parental controls. I think some social platforms do a pretty good job saying before you give that cell phone to your kid or let them have their own computer, you're going to be able to program it with social parental discretion controls. Other platforms don't seem to care.
Let's set some standards and expectations about what parents could do and would be able to do to restrict access at different times. It's going to take an across-the-board effort from parents, government requirements, and a willingness of people who control social mediato try to make sure that kids aren't getting in trouble, but we have to really start to take steps.
We've got a problem in just saying there's nothing we could do about it, like the horse is out of the barn. That's not a response.
I support the Connecticut effort. We'll see. I don't think federal government's going to be moving in this area anytime soon.They seem oriented toward deregulation. I think many states may, and I think that's something that, as physicians, we should try to support. Less access to social media at certain times of the day and night is not a bad thing for kids.
I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.Thanks for watching.