Bell-to-Bell Cellphone Bans Promise Better Well-Being for Boys

At a Senate hearing this September, three parents recounted heartbreaking stories about how popular AI companions emotionally manipulated their teens and encouraged them to harm themselves and take their own lives. Only one of the parents was lucky enough to figure out what was happening in time to save their child. The other two tragically lost their teens. In each case, the victim was a teenage boy. 

Digital technology’s effect on boys is too often overlooked. In part, this is because with the mental health variables that are typically measured (like anxiety and depression) the total number of young girls who are negatively affected is higher than boys. Social media, for example, is known to be especially harmful for girls because it fosters social comparison, fuels cyberbullying, and exposes girls to early sexualization and worse by strangers. 

Nevertheless, boys have been as negatively impacted as girls—just in different ways. Over the decade that smartphone ownership and social media usage became ubiquitous, the rate of major depression has increased more for teen boys (161%) than for teen girls (145%). And, of course, boys continue to have higher rates of suicide. 

Social media, video games, and pornography have exacerbated the existing pessimism facing young men by making it easier for boys to isolate themselves from what appears to be an unhopeful world.

It’s also clear that technology has exacerbated existing problems for young boys. As both Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves have observed, boys and men were retreating from the real world long before the advent of new media. For decades, higher shares of teen boys have reported thinking that they didn’t have much of a chance at a successful life, compared to their female counterparts. The internet, social media, video games, and pornography have exacerbated this existing pessimism by making it easier for boys to isolate themselves from what appears to be an unhopeful world. For example, as our own research has shown, nearly 1 in 3 young adults who watch pornography at least once a day report feeling “down, depressed, or hopeless” most of the time, and men are twice as likely as women to report using pornography daily. 

Cell Phone Bans and Boys

Despite this retreat from life, a recently enacted school policy banning cell phones in Florida is showing promising signs of helping boys in particular return to real life. In 2023, Florida became the first to pass a bell-to-bell cellphone and smart device ban at school. These bans have quickly become one of the most popular and successful policies nationwide. As of this year, 26 states have passed legislation restricting the use of cell phones in schools. Eighteen of those, plus Washington, DC, have instituted comprehensive “bell-to-bell” cellphone bans. 

In October, a working paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research exploring how a bell-to-bell cellphone ban in one Florida school district affected student behavior and learning. It found that the ban had significant impacts on both. Initially, schools in the district saw an increase in suspensions during the first year of the ban. However, by the second year, student disciplinary actions returned to normal levels, indicating students’ adjustment to the new policy. 

As states and schools seek to enact policies safeguarding teens from tech, it’s important that boys not be left behind. 

More importantly, by the second year, students were also performing better on the state’s standardized test, the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking. On average, student scores increased by 1.1% during the second year of the policy compared to the first. But when compared to the year before the ban, those test scores were up 2 to 3 percentage points. 

Interestingly, when broken down, it was boys who saw the greatest increase in their test scores—up an average of 1.4 percent. As the authors of the report note, increased performance across the board was likely linked to the decrease in unexcused absences as a result of the new policy. Such a significant decrease in unexcused absences offered, in the authors’ words, “suggestive evidence that improved student engagement and school climate could be important factors behind the observed test score benefits.” To put it another way: better test-scores seem to be linked to a return to real life and work at school. 

As states and schools seek to enact policies safeguarding teens from tech, it’s important that boys not be left behind. Bell-to-bell cellphone bans seem especially helpful for boys, and we need other policies that will help both boys and girls with the online challenges facing young people today. As Richard Reeves put it, "We can't flourish if either men or women are floundering. We need both to do well." 

Jared Hayden is a policy analyst for the Family First Tech Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.