School Smartphone Bans Show Little Effect on Adolescent Social Wellbeing in Year-Long Study

When a large secondary school in Flanders imposed a total smartphone ban—prohibiting use during lessons and breaks alike—researchers at KU Leuven saw an unusual scientific opportunity. Rather than relying on snapshots taken weeks after such policies are introduced, as most studies do, they tracked nearly a thousand students across an entire academic year, surveying them once before the ban and seven times afterwards. The verdict, published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, is striking for how little changed: the ban did not measurably improve students’ social wellbeing, and social loneliness at school actually crept upward over the months that followed.

The research team, led by Jana Vereecke of KU Leuven’s Media Psychology Lab, followed 960 secondary school students with a mean age of about 14.7, roughly two-thirds of them girls. Their quasi-experimental design captured three complementary indicators of social wellbeing: social loneliness at school, friend support at school, and cyberbullying, both as victims and as perpetrators. The first survey wave took place in October 2024, two weeks before the ban took effect; the remaining waves ran monthly through May 2025. This structure allowed the team to separate short-term reactions immediately after the policy change from longer-term trajectories across the rest of the school year—a distinction that most existing studies, which typically rely on one or two post-ban measurements, simply cannot make.

The theoretical stakes rest on a well-known tension in media psychology. According to the stimulation hypothesis, smartphone communication with close peers can enrich adolescents’ social lives, helping them maintain support networks and feel connected even when physically apart. The displacement hypothesis warns the opposite: digital exchanges may crowd out face-to-face interaction, and when smartphone use becomes excessive or disconnected from offline relationships, its capacity to support wellbeing erodes. Smartphones also shift the boundaries that normally constrain aggression—constant, largely unsupervised connectivity lowers inhibitions and supplies raw material, such as photos and messages, that can fuel cyberbullying even when the harassment itself unfolds after school hours. A ban, in principle, could tilt this balance either way, which is precisely why policymakers have adopted them so widely despite thin evidence.

That evidence base, the authors note, remains limited and inconsistent. Reviews find that bans may reduce social problems such as bullying, but they emphasize methodological heterogeneity and a field dominated by descriptive, correlational work. A large Norwegian event study combining national survey data with administrative records suggested reductions in psychological complaints and bullying rates, but adherence was unclear and measurements lacked a pre-ban baseline for short-term effects. A natural experiment comparing Belgian schools found no significant differences in school belonging or engagement, with bullying declining in both ban and no-ban schools. Behavioral change theory adds another wrinkle: restrictive measures may first elicit frustration or reactance before new norms emerge, meaning that early null findings could reflect follow-up periods too brief to detect genuine effects.

The KU Leuven study was designed to overcome exactly this temporal limitation. Students completed supervised 15-minute questionnaires in class each month. Social loneliness was measured with items asking whether students felt excluded by other students or wished for more inclusion; friend support was assessed by asking how many best friends students could turn to for help or confide in during school hours; cyberbullying was captured with a definition followed by yes-or-no questions about victimization and perpetration in the past month. Age and gender were included as controls where statistically warranted—gender mattered for loneliness, with boys reporting lower levels than girls, and age negatively predicted friend support.

The short-term results were essentially null. Two weeks after the ban, social loneliness was statistically indistinguishable from pre-ban levels, with means of 1.70 and 1.69 on a five-point scale. Cyberbullying victimization showed no significant change, hovering near 7 percent prevalence. The one exception was perpetration, which dropped significantly in the second wave—odds roughly 5.78 times lower than before the ban—though the researchers caution that with base rates near 4 percent, this decline should be interpreted cautiously. Friend support dipped slightly but non-significantly. In other words, removing smartphones from the school day did not produce the immediate social dividend that many had expected.

Over the longer term, the picture grew more nuanced—and in one respect, more concerning. Multilevel growth models revealed a modest but statistically significant increase in social loneliness across the post-ban period, rising gradually from wave to wave. Friend support remained stable throughout the year, suggesting the ban neither strengthened nor undermined the supportive friendships students relied on. Cyberbullying victimization and perpetration fluctuated at low levels in complex, non-linear patterns, but the researchers emphasize that these trajectories were numerically unstable at such low prevalence and cannot be treated as meaningful change. Notably, a negative correlation between starting levels and change rates indicated that students who began with lower loneliness tended to increase more over time.

What explains the creeping loneliness? The authors point to the possibility that for well-integrated adolescents, removing smartphones has little impact because they can rely on established offline networks. For others, however, smartphones may function as a crucial social scaffold—providing access to support, contact with friends outside the classroom, or a sense of inclusion during breaks, especially for students who struggle to feel included offline. When that scaffold is removed, these students may become more acutely aware of their social isolation. The researchers are careful, though: without a control group or pre-ban developmental trajectories, the study cannot prove the ban caused the rise. Loneliness naturally fluctuates during adolescence as peer groups reorganize and academic pressures vary, so the increase may reflect a continuation of pre-existing trends rather than a policy effect.

The findings also carry a sobering message about compliance. Only 63.3 percent of students reported adhering to the ban in the final wave, meaning a substantial share did not fully comply—possibly diluting any effects. Recent work suggests that adherence depends less on strict enforcement than on whether students internalize and endorse the rationale behind the rules, with need-supportive communication fostering greater ownership than controlling approaches. The authors argue that schools considering bans should pair restrictions with structured offline alternatives, such as organized break-time activities and communal spaces, and embed them within broader frameworks of digital literacy and socio-emotional learning, actively involving students, teachers, and parents in policy design.

The study has clear limitations: it examined a single school that moved from a weakly enforced partial restriction to a total ban, lacked a parallel control group, measured cyberbullying with single items, and did not track actual smartphone use during or after school hours. Future research should compare schools with different baseline policies and restriction types, include both online and offline bullying, and measure compensatory smartphone use outside school. Still, within its specific conditions, the study suggests that adolescents’ social wellbeing at school is less directly shaped by smartphone access than often assumed. Bans may temporarily limit opportunities for in-school cyberbullying, but they do not appear to transform the deeper relational systems in which students’ sense of connection is embedded—and effective school policies, the authors conclude, will likely need to combine smartphone restrictions with broader initiatives that foster social connection and digital literacy.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal study of a school smartphone ban and adolescents' social wellbeing

Article Title: More than disconnecting? School smartphone bans and adolescents' social wellbeing

Article References: More than disconnecting? School smartphone bans and adolescents' social wellbeing. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1796471

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1796471

Keywords: smartphone ban, adolescents, social wellbeing, cyberbullying, loneliness, friend support, schools, longitudinal study, digital literacy, peer relationships, than, disconnecting