Youth Well-being Project

Children and adolescents are experiencing a crisis of mental health. Over the last decade, families, educators, mental health practitioners, and researchers alike have noted an alarming trend: the share of adolescents reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness has risen steadily, with more than 40 percent of high school students in 2023 saying they had experienced an extended period of sadness or hopelessness in the prior year that disrupted their usual activities. Concurrently, visits by youth to emergency rooms for issues like depression, anxiety, and behavioral challenges have also seen a sharp rise. 

Many scholars have pointed to smartphone and social media usage among youth as an important contributor to this crisis. Despite widespread attention paid to the potential risks of digital media, the existing body of evidence remains limited on what solutions would best guide young people toward healthier social media and smartphone use. 

A robust understanding of the effects of smartphone use on children’s well-being requires rigorous study. Our team is pursuing projects aiming to provide new evidence and test solutions in both home and school contexts. 

Behaviors at Home 

In partnership with Qustodio, a software company building internet safety solutions for families, our research team seeks to develop scientific insights and scalable interventions to foster healthier smartphone and social media use among children aged 9 - 14. We are conducting large-scale experiments involving approximately 1,000 parents and their children. By assessing the effectiveness of interventions designed to limit smartphone use, we aim to evaluate their impact on youth well-being, mental health, social interactions and dynamics, and academic outcomes. 

Our interventions will encourage different decision-making processes for setting smartphone use guardrails and limits, ranging from unilateral parental control to collaborative approaches. Additionally, we will consider other treatment variations to study the most effective strategies to mitigate usage, like the types of limits recommended (e.g., school-day blackouts, bedtime, daily time limits), strength of encouragement, and stringency of limits. 

Ultimately, we hope to identify scalable strategies that can inform the decisions of parents, policymakers, developers of parental control apps, and other key stakeholders committed to promoting healthy youth smartphone and social media use. We are working with policy partners including the Utah Governor’s office and the UK regulator Ofcom who will aid us in disseminating and scaling our research insights. 

Policies at School 

In parallel, our team is leading a research effort on phones and schools, which aims to generate credible, nationwide evidence on how school phone policies affect student outcomes by: 

• Building a comprehensive dataset of school phone policies (and when they changed) across U.S. middle and high schools.
• Linking those policy changes to outcomes including test scores, attendance, discipline, grades, classroom focus, social connections, and mental health. 
• Prioritizing how smartphones influence students during the school day (e.g., in-class distraction, classroom climate, peer interactions), while acknowledging that school policies affect only a portion of overall smartphone use. 
• Informing decision-makers—primarily school leaders and parents—with actionable, evidence-based guidance on whether and how tighter phone policies improve student learning and well-being.

We launched a national survey called Phones in Focus in April 2025 targeting public-school educators, including principals, teachers, and staff to gather data on school cell phone policies. By combining these self-reports with longitudinal data on attendance, academic outcomes, school climate, classroom engagement, and mental health, we hope to identify which phone policies correlate with better student and teacher outcomes. 

We are conducting this work in partnership with school districts and state school leaders, as well as nonprofit and private sector partners focused on delivering data-driven insights and solutions to the K-12 space. These include GreatSchools, Panorama Education, and Yondr.