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Ontario implemented restrictions on cell phone use in schools for students in 2024.Xavier Lorenzo/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
When Ontario introduced restrictions on cellphones in schools that took effect in 2024, the goal was to help students focus and improve their well-being. Students in kindergarten to Grade 6 have to keep phones on silent and out of sight for the entire school day, while those in Grades 7 to 12 cannot use their phones during class time unless explicitly allowed by the teacher.
A new study of more than 600 kids and young adults ages six to 18 years published this month in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found that limiting access to cellphones and social media has had a clear effect on kids’ levels of depression and anxiety.
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The Globe spoke to Dr. Daphne Korczak, a staff psychiatrist and senior scientist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and one of the authors of the study, about its findings and what schools could learn from the research.
Before you undertook this study, what did we know about cellphone restrictions at schools and their effects on mental health? By the sounds of it, we didn’t know very much.
That’s one of the reasons that we wanted to undertake the study in the first place. It’s a topic that I think, especially as a clinician, but also as a researcher, we had heard quite a lot about, anecdotally, from students and from parents and from educators. But it did seem to be mostly anecdotal, especially when it came to the Canadian and certainly the Ontario context. Our aim was really to try and add some data to the conversation.
How did you find the children and parents who participated in the study?
These were parents and children that have been participating in a longitudinal study that we have been running since the onset of the COVID pandemic. It’s a cohort that was assembled in the spring of 2020, and we’ve been following kids and parents since then to try and understand how the pandemic was impacting their lives and their health and their families and their school. But then over time as we’ve moved into recovery, we’ve realized that other issues have emerged, and screen time has been one of them.
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What did you find about schools sticking to the policy and what they meant for students’ mental health?
We found that the level of adherence to that policy varied quite a bit. So, greater adherence to the cellphone restrictions was associated with lower social media use and, in turn, lower symptoms of depression and anxiety.
How significant was the effect on on kids’ depression and anxiety?
Small to medium size. There are many contributors to depression and anxiety symptoms. If you apply even a small effect to a large population of kids you can still have quite a significant impact. Kids could be underneath the clinical threshold or at the threshold for clinically important symptoms. They could be at and just hovering around it. They could be above. They could be below. So, you know, a small effect, it really can be significant.
When you look at the study and its findings, what do you think the message is to schools?
This is really a finding about implementation. Adherence appears to be important for effectiveness with respect to children’s mental health outcomes. We need more collaborative conversations about implementation to learn what’s feasible, what’s effective, and learn from each other and understand what is contributing to that implementation variability.
What do you think kids make of the ban and its enforcement?
By and large, what I have heard in my own clinical practice is that children and adolescents say they actually would like it to be more consistent. They would like the adherence to be maybe a bit stricter and more consistent because they actually don’t like it when the teacher spends a lot of their time trying to deal with cellphones and somebody who’s not paying attention. They find it distracting, and they would like the teacher to spend the time teaching.
Based on my admittedly limited experience as the parent of two teenagers, the way this policy is enforced can differ very much even within the same school.
Implementation is the key. It’s not sufficient just to have the policies. We need to help educators with how to implement them in schools so they can be effective.
This interview has been condensed and edited.