Fostering Healthier Digital Lives Among Children

Screens, smartphones, and social media are now woven into the childhood experience—and governments around the world are racing to respond. The U.S. Surgeon General has warned the public about social media and youth mental health; Australia has barred younger teens from social media platforms; and the European Union is considering similar rules. Yet policymakers are making decisions without clear-cut or rigorous evidence: we still do not know which measures are actually effective at reducing children’s use of digital media, or what happens to children’s health and well-being as a result.

Our research project tackles those two questions with a particular focus on Sweden. The need is stark: 92% of Swedish 9–12-year-olds own a smartphone, this age group spends over four hours a day on screens outside school, and children’s prescriptions for melatonin, a sleep aid, have risen ninefold in a decade. The Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten) is rolling out one of the world’s broadest sets of digital-media policies: nationwide screen-time recommendations and a public-information campaign, a ban on social media for children under 15 (set to take effect in 2028), and a national recommendation to increase the age at which a child receives their first smartphone. By working in partnership with the Public Health Agency, which designs and implements these measures, our team can study the policy roll-out as natural experiments in almost real-time.

With access to Sweden's world-class data—linked, population-wide records covering more than 2.5 million children—our team can study the effects on sleep, mental health, school performance, and even crime, outcomes rarely measured at this scale. By pairing rigorous, large-scale evidence with a government partner ready to act on it, our project aims to show what works—and for whom—giving policymakers, funders, and families everywhere a sounder basis for protecting children’s well-being in a digital age.