The link between addictive screen time and mental health
Recent research has found that social media addiction, phone and video game addiction, and suicide at a higher risk of thoughts and behavior.
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When Alabama enacted a new law between 2025 and 2026 that kept calls out of classrooms, one teacher saw the immediate change.
“Today, 100% of my students took notes in my class, did their assignments, sought help when they got stuck, and when they were done, they spoke to each other,” Jonathan Buchwalter, an 11th grade history teacher at Tuscaloosa County High School, said on Aug. 8.
“I’ve been pulling out my hair like eight years. Has this an easy solution ever been this easy?” Buchwalter asks in the video.
33 states have enacted laws regarding school mobile phone use amid growing pushes to restrict access to smartphones for students at schools, primarily due to concerns about mental health and academic considerations. As the 2025-2026 grade policy begins to unfold, educators and parents alike are closely watching students and their mental health.
How smartphones affect the younger brain
According to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center, almost half of teens say they are always online, with 72% of teens saying they sometimes check notifications as soon as they wake up.
“They’re chemically obsessed with cell phones,” Buchwalter says. “They can’t experience anything that is not constant stimulation.”
Child psychiatrist and Professor Yang Pon-Sing of Yale School of Medicine say that smartphones can influence productivity and prioritization, run out of brain cognitive patience, deplete the thresholds to tolerate frustration, rewire the brain’s joy pathways, and affect the brain in three key ways: dopamine release.
“The dopamine system is set up over time to trigger a dopamine release and a pleasant release, beyond multiple events. You actually need this phone.
Smartphone addiction is heavily linked to social media algorithms that feed user-curated content, but can also be affected by color saturation, notifications and update screens. Over time, technology addiction will rewire the brain to expect immediate satisfaction, depleting the threshold for brain cognitive patience and accepting frustration in the process.
“If we expose ourselves to this kind of simple dopamine hit, and if we expose ourselves to cheap dopamine hits when we were younger, we reset our moody homeostasis only by accessing these items,” Ponsin says.
As a result, education today requires more “gamification” in the form of cuffot, scratchlet, or risk-style games. Buchwalter says he feels more pressure now than he began teaching him to become a “stand-up comedian” and “game show host” to attract students.
“When we say, ‘Everything has to be fun,’ we don’t prepare children well for the adult world,” Buchwalter says. “Even if children are boring, they need to take education seriously.”
Efforts to ban calls at schools gain traction
When Buchwalter began teaching in 2017, he said the phone was still a problem, but it didn’t feel like a fight following the Covid-19 pandemic. Even in Buchwalter’s best act class, the phone became an almost day-long problem. More and more, he found himself suspended police phone use lessons. He felt “completely helpless.”
“By then, the kids had been wired for so long, so they had been so tuned to the internet for so long during Covid and quarantine that they lost a lot of their ability to self-regulate,” Buchwalter says.
For many students, this year it is the first time they have navigated their school settings without constant access to their devices. “She actually had to socialize all day,” said one Alabama mom, who reunited with her teenage daughter, Tiktok, over the phone after going all day. The Post has received 1.9 million views.
Until this year, mobile phone policies are determined by class, and the challenge is for teachers to implement non-standardized policies. Last year, he and other teachers experienced situations in which students vowed and acted when asked to clean up their mobile phones in class.
“It was absolutely exhausting,” he added.
In Alabama, students must leave wireless communication devices such as tablets, pagers, personal computers and gamers in their lockers and personal vehicles during class hours. Opponents of the policy argue that the ban makes it difficult for parents to contact their children during an emergency.
But Buchwalter says his classroom changed very quickly.
“It’s magic,” Buchwalter said, adding that he cannot ultimately assess the impact of legislation until the end of the school year. “I thought there would be more friction.”
This is a campaign expert like Jonathan Hyde, author of The Unreliable Generation, who drives it based on the fact that a telephone-free academic environment provides children with better opportunities for academic growth and socialization. Groups like Waiting Up to 8 Days or Free Childhood on Smartphones encourage parents to sign an agreement that promises to delay giving their children’s devices until the end of 8th grade or until the end of 16 years old.
If Buchwalter classes ended a few minutes earlier last year, the room will become silent as children reach for their phones. The conversations happening in the class now are very lively, so he has to ask the students to stay quiet.
“One of my favorite parts is when they finish their class work or when they’re in the lunchroom, they talk to each other,” Buchwalter says. “It was like, ‘Oh, what a goddamn, what should this be?’ ”
Rachel Hale’s role in covering youth mental health at USA Today is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editor input. Contact her at rhale@usatoday.com @RachelLeighhale x.
