No phone calls have a limited impact on children’s mental health

In Florida, the bill using mobile phones in elementary and middle schools from Bell to Bell recently sailed through the state legislature.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law on May 30th. The same bill requires high schools in six Florida districts to adopt a ban during the next academic year and prepare a report on its effectiveness by December 1, 2026.

Parents are split on this issue. According to a report from Education Week, many parents want their children to have a phone for safety reasons and as a result they don’t support the ban.

However, in the debate about whether calls should be banned at K-12 schools, and if so, students themselves rarely give a voice.

We surveyed 1,510 children aged 11-13 in Florida in November and December 2024 to learn how technology plays in digital media and life at home and at school. Their response was insightful – and sometimes surprising.

Adults generally cite four reasons why phone use is prohibited throughout school. It helps improve your child’s mental health, strengthen academic outcomes, reduce cyberbullying, and limit the overall screen time for your child.

But, as our research shows, it may be a bit of a hope that the mobile phone ban will achieve all of that.

What do kids want?

Some of our research questions shed light on children’s feelings about the ban on mobile phones.

When they were in a situation where they were unable to use their smartphones, they asked if they felt relieved, and 31% said yes.

Additionally, 34% of children agreed to a statement that social media is more harmful than good.

And children were 1.5-2 times more likely to agree to those statements if they attended schools where calls were banned or confiscated for most school days, as they were only allowed at certain times. The group covers 70% of students surveyed as many individual Florida schools and districts have already restricted their students’ mobile phone use.

How students use their mobile phones is important

Some of the “power users” in mobile apps may probably use breaks.

20% of children surveyed don’t turn off their phone push notifications, that is, notifications from apps that appear on their phone screens. These notifications may come from the most popular apps kids use, such as YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram.

These 20% of children were about three times more likely to report experiencing anxiety than rarely notified children.

They were also almost five times more likely to report getting most D and F in school than children whose notifications are always or sometimes off.

The findings also suggest that among the most heavily screen users, phone bans are likely to have a positive effect on performance and mental health. For example, 22% of children reported using their favorite app for more than six hours a day. These students were three times more likely to report that most of them were making money in school than children who spent less than an hour on their favorite apps every day.

They were also six times more likely than users over time and could report severe depression symptoms. These insights remained even after eliminating many other possible explanations of the differences, such as age, household income, gender, parental education, race, and ethnicity.

Prohibiting students from accessing phone calls at school means that these children will not receive notifications for at least those seven hours and will spend less time using the app.

Phone and mental health

However, other data we collect suggest that prohibition is not a universal benefit for all children.

17% of children attending schools that ban or confiscate cell phones report symptoms of severe depression, compared to only 4% of children making phone calls during the day at school.

This finding was held even after excluding other potential explanations of what we were looking at, such as the type of student at school and other demographic factors.

Our research does not suggest that banning calls may cause mental health issues.

For example, a school where children already struggle with mental health may just happen to be a school that bans calls. Furthermore, our survey did not ask children how much mobile phones are prohibited at school. If the ban is just released, it may still have a positive effect on mental health and grade.

To better understand the effects of a ban on mental health, mental health indicators should be looked up before and after a call ban.

To gain a long-term view on this question, we plan to conduct a national survey of digital media use and mental health for ages 11 to 13 to 13 to 13 to follow up in adulthood.

However, even with data restrictions from this study, it can be concluded that banning calls at schools is not an immediate solution to mental health issues in children aged 11-13 years.

Upgrading, cyberbullying

Students at schools where calls are prohibited or confiscated did not report that their children achieved higher grades than their school children calling.

This finding is because these factors are also known to affect grades for students in both private and public schools, and even after eliminating other possible explanations such as differences in gender and household income.

Here are limitations to our findings. Grades are not a complete measure of learning and are not standardized across schools. Children at schools without phones may actually be learning more than their mobile phones at schools where their kids are calling during school hours, even if they earn the same grades.

We asked our children how often they experienced abuse online over the past three months. Children at schools with limited calls during school hours reported that cyberbullying actually endures more cyberbullying than children at schools with less restrictive policies. This result persisted even after thinking smartphone ownership and many demographics as possible explanations.

It’s not necessarily saying that the ban on mobile phones will cause an increase in cyberbullying. What could be active here is that schools with particularly bad cyberbullying have either been banned or confiscated, and online bullying is still occurring.

However, based on the findings, it appears that the ban on school phone calls will not prevent cyberbullying.

Overall, our findings suggest that banning calls at schools may not be a simple fix for students’ mental health issues, poor academic performance, or cyberbullying.

That said, children may benefit from a school without phones in ways we have not explored, such as an increase in attention span and a decrease in glasses.

Justin D. Martin is an Eleanor Pointer Jamison Chair of Media Ethics and Press Policy, an associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Digital Communications at the University of South Florida, and a life researcher in media research. Please contact Martin atjustindmartin@usf.edu. Chighaf Bakour is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida.