What started off more than five years ago as one-off bans in individual classrooms grew into statewide efforts to curb student cellphone use during school. Now, the idea of limiting children’s tech use has arrived at the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C., where bipartisan efforts are reaching even further by considering plans to ultimately ban kids under 13 from using social media at all.
The proposed legislation comes at a time when technology is being pushed harder than ever, both by tech companies and by the White House.
And it raises questions about whether and how lawmakers, educators and parents should draw distinctions about the various ways children use screens — for learning, for socializing and for entertainment.
The latest was a joint effort by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. In a Jan. 15 listening session dubbed “Plugged Out: Examining the Impact of Technology on America’s Youth,” a panel of four experts spoke on the potential damages of screen time. The hearing covered a wide swath of ground, from AI-enabled toys, to the shuttered e-Rates program and the ideal age minimum to keep young kids off social media.
“It’s incredibly hard to be a kid right now; all the parents I know, myself included, are deeply concerned about all the time kids spend glued to screens, watching and reading insidious content that puts their minds and their bodies at risk,” Cruz said in the hearing. “Parents are fighting a constant battle to keep their children safe in a rapidly evolving digital world.”
Conflicting Federal Efforts?
Federal interest in regulating children’s use of technology is picking up steam. In June 2025, the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing examining school policies banning cellphones. In early December, the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade held a hearing titled “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online,” focused on issues around privacy and safety raised by more than a dozen bills. Later that month, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held a listening session on “the drivers and consequences of excessive screen use in schools.”
“I think we were aware we had to monitor cellphone usage, but because of the pandemic, everyone was pushing kids in front of these tech vehicles and now we don’t know how to take them away,” says Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins' Center for Safe and Healthy Schools. “There has probably been a role to consider the federal piece of it for a while.”
The mid-January hearing called by Cruz through the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation did not have any legal weight, but it dovetailed with the proposed Kids Off Social Media Act from Cruz and Schatz. If passed, the act would ban children under 13 from social media sites and prohibit social media sites from recommending algorithm-based content to children under 17. And it would require schools to work “in good faith” to limit access to social media sites on their own networks. The bill has advanced to be up for a Senate vote. It was last up for discussion in 2024.
“It's a real struggle to keep your kid offline when you're told that, ‘All my friends are on Instagram or TikTok,’’” Cruz said. “It's incredibly hard to be the one parent who won't let your kid have a phone or social media accounts. So, [this bill] says, ‘We're going to hold Big Tech accountable to their terms of service.’”
The push comes as the executive branch presses for more artificial intelligence in the classroom, with President Trump’s “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” executive order.
The order called for the creation of a task force, which was charged with establishing public-private partnerships to develop online resources that would help teachers and students with AI literacy and usage.
Brian Jacob, the co-director of University of Michigan’s Youth Policy Lab, believes the two initiatives can co-exist, as they address two separate ideas. One expresses enthusiasm for applying AI for educational purposes, while the other centers fear of screen time spent on non-educational uses, like watching social media videos.
“There is a bit of an odd nature of these things happening at the same time,” he says. “I think you could want students to be off devices more, but when they’re on them, [to be] utilizing AI or having AI be part of intelligent tutoring systems that would better assist students. I think in practice you could try and incorporate AI more into the education space while still limiting, having less, online time.”
School-focused organizations leaned into that nuance. In response to Cruz’s listening session, 17 organizations, not all of them tech-related — including the American Federation of Teachers, American Library Association and the National Education Association — pushed back on rhetoric about the dangers of technology. They appealed for continued federal support for educational technology and funding, and pointed toward edtech’s helpful role in the classroom.
“Because technology is now integral to the environments in which students live and learn, a school’s focus must be on intentional implementation rather than assumptions about ‘more’ or ‘less’ technology,” the organizations wrote in an open letter to Cruz prior to the hearing. “Effective learning depends on selecting the right tools to support specific instructional goals. Fragmented or inconsistent implementation — not technology itself — is what overwhelms teachers and families.”
The organizations argued that “‘screen time’ is not a single category and should not be evaluated as such,” adding that technology used in the classroom, that is “aligned to curriculum, guided by educators, and governed by locally developed school district privacy and security policies,” is “fundamentally different” than students using devices for entertainment purposes.
“It is essential to distinguish between largely unsupervised, entertainment-driven technology use at home and the intentional, monitored, and carefully curated use of technology in schools — where digital tools are employed to support learning and prepare students for future academic and workforce demands,” the letter says.
State Efforts Set the Foundation
The federal efforts, while new, build on legislation over the last few years from several states. As of last fall, more than half of the nation's states have adopted a phone ban in schools, with most mandating that phones cannot be used during instructional time.
The efforts initially began school by school, such as the 2019 rule at California’s San Mateo High School that all 1,700 students place their phones in pouches. The first statewide effort occurred in Florida in 2023, which initially allowed students to use their phones between passing periods and at lunch, but banned them in the classroom unless explicitly allowed for a lesson. It also banned social media apps on school computers and Wi-Fi networks.
Source: Shutterstock/ChameleonsEye
As of late January, only five states do not have any statewide policies, with the majority having some sort of ban or restriction of cellphones in the classroom.
Phone bans represent a rare flashpoint of bipartisan agreement.
“Children's safety online is not a partisan issue,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, said during the Senate hearing. “Every parent, teacher, lawmaker, wants the same things. We want kids who are safe, healthy and able to thrive … But in the absence of federal legislation, states and governments have stepped up.”
States have begun amping up restrictions, with some eyeing “bell-to-bell” laws that ban phones from the start of the school day through the end, including passing periods and lunch time. Florida amended its 2023 bill in 2025 to the bell-to-bell language. Several others, including Indiana and Kansas, are considering beefing up their restrictions.
But some dissenters suggest that it should be a school-by-school issue.
“States and legislators really are concerned, but I think it’s a challenge when you’re making state legislation [to weigh] how much do you want to mandate decisions,” says Jacob at the University of Michigan’s Youth Policy Lab. “Do you want to make every district do the exact same policy? I can see arguments for leaving it up to local leaders.”
The open letter by the school associations also pushed for more local control, instead of federal control.
“Decisions about education devices, classroom technology, and local screen-use practices should remain in the hands of local educators and their families who best understand their own students’ needs,” the letter stated.
Lack of Consistency in Schools
Some states adhere to restrictions more than others. According to the newly released “Phone-Free Schools State Report Card,” 17 states received a “B” for their bell-to-bell policies, getting lower marks for allowing cellphones in accessible places or not explicitly stating where phones should be stored.
Both Jacob, and Anderson of Johns Hopkins, are concerned about the lack of explicit, consistent guidelines in schools.
“Everyone sees a need for some kind of limitation; what’s kind of crazy, and it’s the same with the artificial intelligence push, is it doesn’t look the same,” Anderson says. “It’s different from school to school, classroom to classroom, district to district. The lack of consistency makes it difficult to show the effect these bans have.”
Jacob worries the guidelines will place the burden on teachers.
“I fear a lot of schools will ban them but say ‘Kids have to keep them in their pockets and teachers have to police that,’ and that approach will be really tough to implement in any way,” he says, adding it is best to mandate keeping them in lockers or a centralized location.
Many at the federal level believe full phone bans in schools are key to fixing excessive screen time. However, Anderson — who testified before the D.C. State Board of Education about phones’ effects on children — believes officials should be looking at the bigger picture.
“I feel like we’re putting a Band-Aid on the ocean,” she says. “I think people in schools feel they can control the hours of 8:30 to 2:30, but there also needs to be more conversations on what can happen outside of school — and managing that.”
