How to actually get kids off their phones

It was the last day of school before winter break, and Aiden and his eighth-grade classmates were playing a game of Mafia. After the first round, though, one of Aiden’s friends got bored and quit playing.

Another friend called him a “screenager,” Aiden recalled — “like, your attention span is so short.”

The incident was an example of a larger trend, Aiden, one of several Scholastic Kid Reporters I talked to for this story, told me: “People are less likely to have fun and enjoy being around other people, and they prefer being around technology.”

Five years ago, the national conversation about young people and social media was dominated by worries about cyberbullying, online harassment, and body image. Today, the biggest fear among teens and adults alike is, arguably, brainrot: the idea that social media sites, especially short-form video platforms like TikTok, have eroded young people’s ability to pay attention to anything for longer than a few seconds. 

But as much as users of all ages seem to agree that the rise of short-form video creates problems for young people and for society, few agree on a solution. Social media bans like the one that took effect in Australia earlier this month have been met with optimism in some quarters, but many are skeptical. 

“It’s not going to work,” said Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University. “Youth are going to circumvent them.”

If anything, the shift to short-form video is a reminder of how difficult it is for parents and policymakers to keep up with shifts in young people’s digital lives, and how hard it can be to solve or even identify problems arising from a technology as ubiquitous and ever-changing as social media.

The short-form video revolution

It’s not your imagination: Young people today are spending an increasing amount of time watching short videos on their phones. Among kids ages 0 to 8, viewing on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts jumped from an average of 1 minute in 2020 to 14 minutes in 2024, according to Common Sense Media, with older kids likely posting higher numbers.

Like any media, these videos vary in quality, but they have elicited special concern from parents and researchers alike. One recent review of research on short-form video found an association between consumption of such content and poorer cognitive performance, especially in the areas of attention and inhibitory control. 

Rapid-fire videos get young people “habituated to short content,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at University of California Irvine and author of the book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity. “They don’t have the cognitive stamina to be able to spend longer time on material.”

Educators routinely complain that students no longer have the attention span to read a book or listen to a lecture. “I’ve had to adjust how I cover material across, let’s say, a three-hour class,” Hinduja said.

These complaints are largely anecdotal, but they’re echoed by young people themselves. “Attention span has decreased so much with the short-form content,” Evy, 13, told me. “If you don’t like the video, then you just scroll until you get another one.”

The problem with banning kids from social media

While most people agree that the proliferation of little videos is a problem, few agree on a solution. Australia’s new law, which supporters hope will combat loss of attention span as well as bullying and other issues, requires platforms like YouTube and TikTok to screen out users under 16. But teens quickly fled to platforms like Yope and Lemon8 that weren’t covered by the initial ban, leading some to fear an endless game of “whack-a-mole” as new options pop up to replace banned ones. 

School cellphone bans, which have gotten a lot of positive press in the US, have generated their own version of whack-a-mole, young people told me. Aiden’s school in Los Angeles instituted a ban last year, and now he notices more students playing sports at lunch, he said. 

But when deprived of their phones, kids also started spending more time on their laptops, Aiden said. “They would find their way back to technology.” 

Experts are also concerned that bans like the one in Australia will keep kids from marginalized groups, like LGBTQ+ youth, from connecting with one another or finding resources. “It’s going to keep youth from access to certain information that could benefit them,” Hinduja said.

How do we fix what phones are doing to us?

Every adult with a smartphone knows that scrolling often feels bad — but translating that feeling into clear and actionable policy, and especially targeting that policy at young people, has proved extraordinarily difficult. There’s not even conclusive research showing that social media is bad for mental health, Mark said, in part because it’s so hard to separate social media’s effects from the impacts of every other aspect of modern life.

But talking to kids about their phones did drive one point home to me: Their relationships with social media aren’t all that different from ours. They derive some pleasure from watching videos they like; Aiden mentioned sports highlights, for example. But they spend more time on their phones than they want to, and they’re looking for ways to cut down. 

“When you first start out, you’re happy,” Xander, 13, told me. “But when you get off, you’re, like, drained, because you think, I could have been doing so many better things than scrolling on my phone.”

The most effective reforms, then, might be those that apply to us all of us — not just teens or children. Instead of age-based bans, some experts recommend more across-the-board reforms of social media platforms, like stronger harassment-reporting mechanisms or restrictions on targeted ads.

Leyla, 12, offered an even more radical solution: banning infinite scroll. “I would definitely hate if scrolling got taken away, because I do like to scroll, but it’s definitely going to get people less addicted,” she said. In fact, just such a ban has been proposed in the past, by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.

Such across-the-board changes would be harder for teens to circumvent than age restrictions, and would also benefit all of us. After all, little videos mess with our brains too.

In the absence of legislation, kids, like adults, have tried various tricks to wean themselves off their phones. When Aiden and fellow Kid Reporter Sara asked their classmates about strategies for curbing phone use, one said, “I set a 15-minute restraint on YouTube and Instagram each day to keep me in check.” Another added, “Before I watched YouTube while doing homework. Now I give my phone to my parents while I do my work.”

Xander had advice any psychologist would approve of: “Take a walk, go to the gym, go to the library, do something productive,” he said. “The main reason why most people get on their phones is because they have nothing to do.”

And when asked how parents could help, Aiden offered a hard truth: “It’s important for them to not use social media as much. For them to not always be on their phone to set an example for their kids.”