The Lancet’s latest study showing school cellphone restrictions don’t improve teenagers’ mental health is both right and wrong

Authorities’ “solipsism bias” assumes social media is the ONLY thing in teens’ lives – not family, not past experiences, not offline relationships, not social issues, not larger life.

For its main purpose, The Lancet’s just-published study by a 9-member university/health professional team surveying 1,227 United Kingdom students ages 12-15 supplemented by high-tech “accelerometer” measures of physical activity and sleep is convincing:

“Restrictive school policies in their current form do not significantly influence phone and social media use or result in better outcomes for adolescents across a range of mental, physical, and cognitive domains. These findings therefore do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form.”

The authors selected 30 secondary schools that had implemented a range of cellphone policies* after noting that their search turned up “no published peer-reviewed studies reporting on the association between school phone policies, adolescent phone/media use behaviours and mental health, wellbeing and other related outcomes (e.g., sleep, physical activity, educational attainment, and behaviour).

That is, authorities force excessive cellphone bans on teenagers without bothering to research them, then huzzah to the press and political forums in self-congratulation that miracles are transpiring before their eyes. Then, no-they’re-not research intrudes. The Lancet finding is typical: “We observed no significant differences in anxiety, depression, problematic social media use, sleep, physical activity, attainment, and disruptive behaviour when comparing adolescents exposed to restrictive or permissive school phone policies.”**

The Lancet study’s goods and bads

But there’s a different problem. The Lancet’s is the latest of hundreds of studies of social media as a cause of young people’s depression that omit the most crucial variable, parent, adult, and family abuses and troubles. That’s like excluding smoking from studies of lung cancer causes.

Including family abuses and troubles probably would not challenge these authors’ main finding “that restrictive school policies in their current form do not significantly influence phone and social media use or result in better outcomes for adolescents across a range of mental, physical, and cognitive domains.” The proportions of abused teens is unlikely to vary much between schools with differing smartphone regulations.

However, including adult-inflicted abuses and troubles would strongly affect The Lancet authors’ secondary finding: “We did observe significant negative associations between these outcomes and increasing phone and social media time. This study therefore provides further evidence of the adverse consequences from increased smartphone and social media use, and that lowering phone and social media use is important.”

As detailed in past posts, parent/adult abuses and troubles like addiction, poor mental health, suicidality, incarceration, household violence, and emotional abuses so completely dominate teen mental health that all other factors are proving distractions. The problem was the lack of good measures. Only recently has the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – alone, and finally – included vital family issues on its 2021 and 2023 Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences surveys.

The results were explosive, blowing the teen-mental-health-and-social-media furor sky high – which is why social-media-blamers are ignoring them.

The CDC’s analysis found teens’ exposure to serious parent- and adult-inflicted “adverse experiences” is “common, with approximately three in four students (76.1%) experiencing one or more, and approximately one in five students (18.5%) experiencing four or more… The most common parent- and adult-inflicted issues teens experienced were “emotional abuse (61.5%), physical abuse (31.8%)” and parents’/caretakers’ “poor mental health (28.4%).”

Unfortunately, like previous researchers, The Lancet authors’ study failed to include parent and family adversities in their analysis before weakly associating social media and smartphone use with teens’ increased “anxiety, depression, problematic social media use, sleep, physical activity, attainment, and disruptive behaviour”.

Note that these are exactly the problems the CDC survey associates far more powerfully with parent/family abuses. Compared to non-abused teenagers, teens growing up with abusive and/or troubled parents and household adults are 1.5 times more likely to report physical inactivity, twice as likely to report failing in school, twice as likely to report sleeping 5 or fewer hours a night, 3 times more likely to report poor mental health, 4 times more likely to report persistent sadness, 4 times more likely to take a weapon to school, 7 times more likely to attempt suicide, and 11 times more likely to self-harm, the CDC’s 2023 numbers show.

Further, drug and alcohol problems have risen among grownups in both the US and the UK, as well as Canada and Australia. In the UK, deaths from drug misuse (the iceberg tip of drug abuse overall) in 30-69 ages doubled from 1,313 in 2010 to 2,621 in 2022, exactly the period teens’ depression and anxiety increased.

Where Jonathan Haidt’s and Zach Rausch’s critique goes wrong

In After Babel, two psychologists who advocate banning cell phones from schools argue The Lancet study is seriously flawed:

“Readers and journalists may have assumed from the headline that the study compared a set of more permissive policies (i.e., where students could use their phones anytime) to a set of more restrictive policies (i.e., schools that went truly phone-free, with phones inaccessible) than the study actually examined. Note how restrictive schools were defined: “Required phones to be inaccessible to pupils.” … That sounds good, but only four of the twenty restrictive schools had policies that made phones truly inaccessible… In reality, the study was primarily a comparison of schools with a classroom ban versus schools that let students keep their phones with them at all times, in their backpacks. We cannot know how many of these students truly turned off their phones and kept them in their backpacks all day long.”

Haidt and Rausch overlook The Lancet author’s separate analysis of only the most restrictive four schools:

“Additionally,” Lancet authors write, “we performed a sensitivity analysis with a small sample using only data from pupils in schools where restrictive phone policies required phones to be inaccessible to pupils (n = 4), to explore whether policies with greater levels of restrictions on pupils’ access to phones influenced outcomes... In the sensitivity analysis using only restrictive schools where phones were inaccessible to pupils, there were no significant differences with permissive schools across all outcomes ... reduced use in schools with restrictive phone policies did not manifest in differences in the overall use of phones and social media or differences in mental health and wellbeing and other associated outcomes, even for adolescents attending restrictive schools where phones were inaccessible to them during the school day (e.g., phones stored in a locker, a pouch, at school reception or left at home).”

That is, The Lancet authors DID present exactly the analysis Haidt and Rausch want of “only 4 schools” that met “our (Haidt and Rausch’s) definition of a phone-free school,” where phones were not accessible to students. They found even these 4 phone-free schools did not show less depression or better student outcomes.

It is telling that Haidt and Rausch urge us to reject this scientific-method analysis and to rely instead on a popular author’s non-peer-reviewed claims in Atlantic Magazine and on administrators’ (not students’) “natural experiment” claims of minuscule improvements (averaging 0.07 standard deviations) in student performance after cell phone bans — essentially nothing. That’s why they critique what The Lancet study gets right and embrace what it gets wrong.

Social media associations with teen mental health are weak to nonexistent

In a separate analysis, the CDC finds only a small association between teens’ “frequent social media use” (several times a day) and deleterious effects on teens’ mental health (PR=1.33, d=0.16). However, CDC numbers do show teens from abusive families report more social media use.

For example, among girls under age 16, a group targeted for special mental health alarms and smartphone and social media restrictions, 67% of those from abusive and troubled families reported frequently poor mental health, and of these, 68% reported using social media 5 or more hours per day. In contrast, among girls from non-abusive, healthy families, 19% reported frequently poor mental health, and of those, 21% used social media 5 or more hours per day.

The CDC’s findings suggest that abuse and family troubles underlie both teens’ greater depression and more social media use, making the superficial correlation between the last two factors very likely a reverse one.

The Lancet’s and other authors’ failure to account for teens’ adverse family experiences also obscures major interconnections. For example, 82% of teens who report being cyberbullied, and 88% of those who report both daily social media use and frequently poor mental health, also report histories of being emotionally abused by parents and household adults. Social-media-blamers insist that social media use must be the culprit when histories of abuse are far more compelling.

The question authorities should face is the opposite one

Does banning or restricting teens’ use of social media and cell phones harmfully interfere with abused and depressed teens’ efforts to establish connections, find people who can help, and access services?

As currently designed, studies cannot answer that question. That lack of explanatory value (seen in very low effect sizes) characterizes past and current studies. The Lancet study is just the latest to find that even omitting family adversities, only small associations exist between adolescent social media use and mental health and related problems (bivariate correlational values, 0.07 to 0.26).

Of course, specific restrictions on cellphone use are warranted where their use would be disruptive, such as in classrooms, workplaces, concerts, etc. However, The Lancet study is the latest warning that should deter lawmakers and schools rushing to implement unnecessarily sweeping restrictions on teens and social media while ignoring the vastly larger issues of parental abuses and family troubles.

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*1: Phones are allowed to be used at any time during the school day

2: Phones are allowed to be used at school during certain times/in certain areas Restrictive schools

3: Phones are not allowed to be used at school but are accessible to pupils

4: Phones are not allowed to be used at school and are inaccessible to pupils

**Just like the 2022 four-year Stanford Medicine and Data study tracking 250 seven-to-15-year-olds that found no relationship between even younger teen’s online/phone use and “their well-being and adjustment outcomes.” Just like a detailed, 2024 multi-institutional study of 2.4 million people over 15 years found worldwide found “internet access and use predict well-being positively and independently” for all ages. Just like the eight-year 2024 Trondheim study of 600 teens found, “increased social media use predicted more time with friends offline” and “no support for the assumption that social media use predicts declines in social skills” – all growing media consensuses as better studies emerge.