Approaches to Healthier Youth Smartphone Use

Youth Social Media — Illustration: Eric Nyquist

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 high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness has risen steadily, with more than 40 percent 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.

A growing consensus attributes this crisis, at least in part, to the proliferation of smartphone and social media usage among youth. Despite widespread attention paid to the potential risks of digital media, the existing body of evidence remains lacking on what solutions would best guide young people toward a healthier amount of time spent on social media and smartphones, as well as which of these strategies would have the most positive impact on youth outcomes.

In partnership with the Utah Governor’s Office and Qustodio, a software company building internet safety solutions for families, our team hopes to develop scientific insights and scalable interventions to foster healthier smartphone and social media use among children aged 9 - 14. We plan to conduct large-scale experiments involving approximately 3,000 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 limits within the app, ranging from unilateral parental control to collaborative approaches. Additionally, we will cross-randomize 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, policy-makers, parental control apps, and other important stakeholders to promote healthy youth smartphone and social media use.