By Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (May 9, 2025) – Staring at a phone for eight hours a day is bad, and not just because of the ill effects on test scores or adolescent social life. Staring at a phone for eight hours a day is bad in a first-principles, what are you doing with your life? kinda way. It’s bad because staring at a phone is an awful way to waste a childhood. 

Most of the arguments around kids and cellphones — whether to ban them from.  schools, whether to enforce age minimums for social media, as some NC lawmakers are considering — center on the downstream effects of screen time. Researchers try to tease out the link between social media and depression, or screen time and school grades. 

But after I listened to the clinical psychologist Mitch Prinstein speaking last month to a crowd of parents and school officials at East Chapel Hill High School, it was that eight-hour statistic that haunted me. In Prinstein’s surveys, 8.2 hours is the average amount of time a middle schooler with a smartphone spent staring at a tiny screen each day. That’s 1/3 of a young person’s life with head bowed, eyes down, mesmerized by a glowing rectangle. Some students in Prinstein’s survey spent twice that much time, meaning almost every waking hour, scrolling and swiping.

Prinstein co-directs UNC Chapel Hill’s Winston Center for Technology and the Developing Mind, and his presentation showcased exactly the kind of rigorous, responsible research that independent scholars should be doing. The Winston Center takes no funding from tech companies, which makes it uniquely credible in its findings on screen time and adolescent health.

And Prinstein was careful to point out that not all phone futzing is created equal. Yes, excessive screen time is bad for sleep. Yes, lots of kids are exposed to all kinds of disturbing content on everything from sexual violence to eating disorders. And yes, there is a growing correlation between social media and social anxiety. But there are also students who use their phones to connect with friends, or play games to blow off stress and relax. “It’s more nuanced and complex” than simply declaring screen time is bad, Prinstein said.

And yet, that statistic — more than eight hours per day. That is just plainly a sad and impoverished way to let a life slip by. No one chose to sentence young people to this pale existence; we’ve arrived here via slow-rolling negligence in the face of the tech industry’s bottomless appetite for time and attention.

That complacency is finally giving way to bipartisan action in states across the country. New York passed a law last week implementing a “bell-to-bell” cellphone ban during the school day, joining states from California to Florida in voting to limit phone use at school. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order on “cell phone-free education” that took effect this year, citing overwhelming teacher and parent support for a phone ban.

The full-day feature of the bans in Virginia and New York is especially important, removing the burden from teachers to police tech distractions in class and forcing students to actually talk to one another during lunch and hallway time. “It is essential that students have the opportunity to develop face-to-face conversations and develop critical in-person communication skills during unstructured school hours,” Youngkin wrote in his order.  In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul issued a report aptly titled “More Learning; Less Scrolling” and found that phone-free schools have experienced “a marked increase in student engagement both in the classroom and communal areas.”

In other words, take away the addictive tiny screens, and students have the chance to resurface into the real world. 

I have three small kids, vibrant and curious and physically daring little beings, and my biggest worry for the years ahead is that they will be insistently tempted to trade their wild and precious lives for an addictive digital replica, to swap out the real humans around them for online avatars. I see way too many adults making that trade, and every instinct I have as a parent tells me it’s especially bad news for young people. 

There is considerable evidence that social media influences brain development in worrying ways, Prinstein told the crowd at East Chapel Hill. “And this is the brain we’re going to live with for the rest of our lives.”

Lawmakers and school leaders should heed that warning. Take the phones, bell to bell, and give students back at least some of their hours and minds.

Eric Johnson is a father of three and a proud graduate of North Carolina public schools. He lives in Chapel Hill and works for the UNC System.