The Rewinding of the Anxiety Clock

Will smartphone-free schools be enough to improve mental health and academic results?

Dec 04, 2025

We are witnessing a profound shift in how our kids use personal technology, both in schools and, perhaps, at home. After years of increased screen time, can we rewind the mental health clock and restore academic achievement simply by reducing screen use?

The evolving landscape affecting kids is evident both in school and at home.

Phone-free schools are already the law in many places or are about to become so. A total of 39 states across the United States have implemented or are debating phone-free policies in schools, joining many other nations in this approach. An increasing number of affluent US parents prefer schools that emphasize pen-and-paper instruction over screen-based learning.

At home, kids might face restrictions on using social media. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill aimed at restricting children under 17 from accessing social media without parental authorization, was expected to complement the removal of phones in schools. However, the bill is currently stalled in the House. At least seven countries have already responded to similar concerns by planning to set the minimum age for social media access between 15 and 18.

We’ve changed – so what?

Kids’ screen use, along with societal shifts, has driven significant changes in childhood. It is unclear whether the new policies alone will reverse these trends without additional action.

As screen time increased over the last 15 years, our methods of relating to one another, entertaining ourselves, learning, and forming relationships have slowly but surely begun to transform.

The American Time Use Surveys[i] (ATUS) measure how people—including children—spend their time. They indicate that both adults and children are spending less time socializing face-to-face. Teens are spending more time alone on their cell phones.

Our kids’ time allocation has changed over the last 20 years. According to studies[ii] analyzing ATUS data, they dedicate less time to paid work, slightly more time to homework in high school, and less time to socializing in person. More time is now allocated to online entertainment, particularly when social media is viewed as entertainment rather than true socializing.

In a future post, we will explore why this trend of lower social engagement, partly driven by technology, can profoundly affect teenagers’ well-being. We will also examine activities that can re-engage kids and discuss how to prepare them in childhood to become stronger adolescents.

The loss of institutional knowledge

Parents are not immune to these changes.

A young father told me he felt guilty every time he gave his child a cell phone to use as a temporary babysitter while he was getting ready to head out. “What else could I have done?” he asked. Most children of the aughts, the soon-to-be parents, have never experienced a childhood without smartphones. They may wish for a different kind of childhood for their children, yet lack the generational knowledge passed from one generation to the next.

At the same time, a 2025 survey[iii] reveals that 70% of parents believe that parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago. Time, financial pressures, and other socio-economic factors have evolved. Screens are often perceived as making our lives more convenient. Unbeknownst to many parents, the relationships they have with their kids through their phones are not always healthy. In Raising Human, we will investigate and address this challenge without making parenting more difficult, just different.

Schools have changed, too

Two changes in schools have reduced students’ social opportunities, particularly in middle school.

In the US, more children have longer commutes to school, partly due to school choice and partly because of school consolidations that have resulted in fewer, larger campuses. This means socialization outside of school is harder for students who cannot yet drive and often lack access to convenient public transportation. More adolescents are trying to socialize from home, on their phones. Is this experience comparable to in-person socialization? We will explore this very topic, examining why it matters and what we can do about it.

Starting with the 2001 “No Child Left Behind Act,” which mandated more standardized testing, schools sought additional time to administer these tests. Reducing recess became the easy solution. Consequently, students’ face-to-face social time shrank, and socialization moved online, often from the bedroom, alone.

In a future post, we will explore how online socializing is fundamentally different from face-to-face socializing and why it is more critical for adolescents during their developmental phase than for more established adults.

These changes at home and in schools cannot be countered simply by removing cell phones. It will require adaptation and greater intentionality in our adolescents’ social lives. The primary aim of Raising Human is to explore strategies that enable adolescents to adapt to a new environment, support the development of human skills, and master technology effectively.

The imperfect home and school environment of 30 years ago cannot and should not be set as an example. We cannot undo some of the technical and societal changes. Still, practical examples of healthier school and home environments exist today and can serve as starting points for learning and intelligent adaptation.

A test case of a phone-free school

Consider a school that has maintained a phone-free policy as it perceives changes in society and education. For 18 years, I served on the leadership team of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Despite being surrounded by the headquarters of tech giants like Google, Meta, and Apple, the school remained tech-free. Most of the students’ families worked in the tech industry, yet phones were banned on campus—even for parents.

From 2011 onward, the school was often featured in the press as a model for phone-free education. While some people labeled us Luddites, the public response was overwhelmingly positive. We could sense an intense discomfort with kids’ tech access, yet, in an apparent mystery, most parents continued to give in. Over time, our approach became an inspiration for others, demonstrating the possibilities.

The school didn’t stand still. As the students’ environment changed, teachers adapted. Parents brought different values and constraints to education. Teachers can never successfully teach to an idealized student; Instead, they adapt to their students. Still, as the man-made environment can change at a dazzling speed, some natural processes keep their immutable paces. It takes 9 months to have a baby and 18 years to reach adulthood.

Like clockwork, child development follows a biological sequence driven by the brain’s sequential development. This sequence defines how children learn and their psychological and emotional needs at every stage. The environment can nourish their growth or hinder it. Knowledgeable teachers do their best to leverage or compensate for these factors.

For instance, teachers needed to place greater emphasis on the school’s social and emotional climate and the need to connect directly and meaningfully with one another. “At times, it felt like a cloud of anti-social forces loomed large over the students,” commented a teacher. In Raising Human, we will explore these forces and discuss potential solutions.

A loss that might affect both parents and their kids.

After COVID-19, a pre-pandemic trend accelerated. Interviewed on NPR[iv] in 2024, Dr. Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, summarized the situation: “Parents have lost their village.” He noted that almost half of the parents felt anxious. Parents spend more time at work and with their kids, leaving them less time to take care of themselves. According to the time use survey, they spend less time face-to-face with friends.

It is hard to separate the horse from the carriage. Did the lack of socialization among parents undermine the village’s sustainability, or did it simply mark its demise?

Ideally, the parents’ village would be a space of shared values about raising children—a place where parents know they can count on the support of other parents, and children can find emotional safety and their own social connections.

The school I mentioned earlier intentionally tried to maintain such a village, integrating parents of diverse backgrounds around an educational concept. Although not initiated by the school, families would support one another. When the Great Recession hit, it began to take a toll on that mutual support. The pandemic sent every family to fend for itself. More focused on work, feeling financially vulnerable, and starting to socialize through screens, parents began to retreat to the confines of their homes. It took more effort to care for each other.

The school’s village was built around creative play—sometimes called free play. It allowed young children to play with minimal parental involvement. Kids learned to self-entertain without relying on screens.

Creative play, even when done alone, provides many developmental benefits that shatter the fixed boundaries of online algorithms. In adolescence, it turns into a different set of activities that help adolescents to recuperate psychologically and develop relationships. Raising Human will delve deeper into the benefits of creative play at all ages and explore how it is implemented.

A significant challenge in sharing childcare, for instance, is agreeing on a consistent set of rules. This is true for small children and also holds when teenagers start visiting each other’s homes. Transparency, learning to negotiate these rules with flexibility, and a willingness to reciprocate go a long way toward building the village. The village helps parents and expands possibilities for small children and teenagers alike.

The cookie jar problem - why parents are set up to fail

Separated from the village, parents rely on tech companies to set up guardrails. In some instances, companies may have recognized the risks of selling products to kids not explicitly designed for their age group. Rather than enforcing a platform-wide age limit themselves, companies often shift the enforcement responsibility to parents by offering limited controls.

Today, each vendor has its own controls, sometimes dozens of options. This makes enforcement difficult. Attracted to the screen and often with few other places to go, teenagers engage with their parents in a Wack-a-Mole game to find ways around the controls.

Consider this single mother in Oakland, California. Her teenage son comes home from school before she returns from work. She wanted to control his screen time. However, she is not an IT expert; the task's complexity mushroomed before her. Eventually, she considered turning off the power to the internet gateway automatically at certain times, but that proved to be a more complicated task than a busy single mother had time to investigate.

There are, however, plenty of parents with excellent IT skills who are not always better off. A parent in the technical leadership of a major tech firm resolved to set strict screen time limits. With a PhD in computer science, he knew how to create a highly controlled environment, and he did. His son, however, developed a remarkable knack for guessing passwords, sometimes creating phishing scams, and finding hours in the middle of the night when he could be online. At 17, he reflected, “This is not the relationship I wish I had with my dad.”

In the absence of regulations or industry-agreed controls as a means of easy and universal enforcement, what resources are families left with? A cookie jar full of apps—colorful, tempting, and unlabeled as to their risks. Risks that are sometimes unknown or unrecognized by the apps’ makers. Parents are handed the lid and told to decide what’s safe. Should every app be scrutinized like a 1960s TV show? Is this only about content? Should every parent know every app? Can we even scrutinize an AI bot in that way?

Neither the current social environment nor the technology itself provides what our kids need to grow and develop. Despite all our efforts, technology cannot teach kids—or parents—how to manage technology or discover what will help them.[v] We need to find another way.

Raising Human is that exploration I invite you to join.

Offering more than limits

Technology was supposed to make our lives more productive and enable us to do other things. For our kids, it can be an escape from reality and has become their reality.

Raising Human asks: how can we raise a modern and healthy child today?

Rather than exploring content and apps, let us step back to examine in an accessible way how screens affect relationships at different ages and how to restore balance.

Once we understand the unfulfilled needs, we can start offering something more than limits—what our kids crave but don’t know how to ask for: belonging, community, purpose, and authentic human connections.

The opportunity is to make social media, AI chatbots, and similar tools accessories rather than central components to our children’s lives. These are just tools—use them as needed and no more.

We’ll also speak directly to those who build technology and might care about children—understanding how children fundamentally differ from adults is the first step toward designing more responsible products for them.

Raising Human is not about rejecting technology entirely. It’s about making informed, cool-headed decisions about what tech can and can’t provide. When parents and educators start guiding their children toward more meaningful experiences, they shed their worries and anxieties and feel validated in their roles.

Join the conversation

I invite you to join this conversation. Together, we can better understand the issues, the role of tech, the industry, schools, and parents. We will explore how to re-empower ourselves—parents and educators—so our kids can grow into adults capable of leading healthy, meaningful, productive, and happy lives, both in the physical and digital worlds.

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