If you attend a public school in the U.S. today, chances are you’ve been given a device such as a Chromebook or an iPad to use in class. Fully 88 percent of public schools in the U.S. give such digital devices to every child, including some children as young as age five. The point, proponents say, is to prepare children for an increasingly digital world. But as concerns over the health effects of excessive screen time have risen, so, too, has pushback in schools toward screens of all kinds.

In the past few years, most states have banned or limited cell phone use in K–12 schools. And just last week the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the country’s second largest school district, announced that it approved a resolution to restrict screen time for students in school. The policy will eliminate screens from the classrooms of children in first grade and younger and cap the number of hours of in-school screen time for older students.

“It’s just a very interesting time. We have a pendulum that’s swinging [back],” says Cori Cross, a pediatrician who co-authored the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP’s) policy on kids and digital media and consulted on the LAUSD board’s resolution. “You had parents who wanted to change, and then you had a district that understood that need.”

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The AAP’s policy recommends setting limits around screens, especially for younger children. But scientists are still trying to parse how different forms of screen time affect kids’ health at different ages. One obstacle is that “screen time” can mean so many different things, and different uses likely have different consequences. Passive scrolling on social media, for example, is unlikely to have the same outcome as playing video games with friends or doing online research for a school project.

Broadly speaking, studies have found that excessive screen time of certain types may have some negative effects on kids, including an increase in anxiety and depression, a reduction in attention span and the ability to manage emotions, lower academic achievements and cognitive issues.

The L.A. school district mentioned this research in its resolution, but it’s not clear that the findings would apply to classroom technology. “‘Excessive use’ in most of these studies is more than five or six hours straight of using screens in a very passive way for entertainment,” says University of Michigan education researcher Elizabeth Keren-Kolb. That’s “very, very different” from using screens in classrooms to gather information, write papers, make presentations or work with fellow students, she says. Studies haven’t shown that such activities negatively affect health or academic achievement, Keren-Kolb adds. For example, the studies that link digital media use to lower academic achievement didn’t find a connection to screen time overall, only to time spent watching TV and playing video games specifically.

In contrast, well-designed educational media with clear learning goals are linked to better math and reading abilities in kids. Interactive rather than passive digital tools, with good navigation paths and a design to keep kids on track, all successfully support learning, Keren-Kolb explains. These tools also allow students to explore and create rather than requiring them to complete repetitive drills.

Good educational technology can also be tailored to each student’s strengths and needs, says Rebecca Silverman, an education researcher at Stanford University. And successful digital programs tend to follow explicit and systematic patterns from easier to harder skills that help scaffold kids’ learning.

Not all educational technology apps fulfill these criteria, she says. “Really the challenge for educators is figuring out what is helpful, using those effectively and then not using the things that are not helpful.”

Silverman and Keren-Kolb worry that limiting overall screen time in classrooms won’t necessarily help anyone learn better. “It seems like this policy is kind of a blunt way to address a problem,” Silverman says. Crafting a more precise policy to ensure students are getting the benefits of educational technology while reducing the risks may be a better approach, she says.

Some school districts require teachers to do a minimum amount of instruction online, but don’t specify a maximum amount of time. LAUSD, for example, recommends that teachers use a learning platform called i-Ready to teach certain lessons; students are instructed to spend approximately 90 minutes a week on the platform to complete personalized instruction in math and language arts.

“There are definitely pressures created postpandemic from the school district where teachers are being forced to do things with technology that they don’t necessarily agree with for their students,” Keren-Kolb says. Teachers tend to chafe under these requirements, she notes, because such rules can limit their ability to do what they judge to be best for their students. “Putting constraints around [teachers], I think, rarely is relieving. It often adds more management issues and more stress,” she says. A screen time limit adds another layer to that.

Parents, for their part, have also reported feeling constrained, Cross says. Families in LAUSD weren’t able to opt out of having their children use digital instructional tools; that has made it hard for parents to maintain screen limits and digital safety features they would like for their kids, she says. The school district is planning to give parents more choice as to whether to opt in to these programs.

“We’re worried about our children,” Cross says. “We want to make sure that their safety is something that we can monitor and [that we do] not just have to hope [they’re safe]. And until those things are met, we don’t want these devices in front of our children. And I think that that’s a very powerful message.”

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