Name: Parents Television Council
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Protecting the Developing Mind in a Digital Age: A Global Policy Imperative

Written by Tara C. Thiagarajan, Jennifer Jane Newson, Shailender Swaminathan | Published July 20, 2025

Our analysis reveals that receiving a smartphone before age 13 is associated with poorer mind health outcomes in young adulthood, particularly among females, including suicidal thoughts, detachment from reality, poorer emotional regulation, and diminished self-worth. These correlations are mediated through several factors, including social media access, cyberbullying, disrupted sleep, and poor family relationships. This trend appears consistently across all global regions with the magnitude greatest in English-speaking nations. Based on these findings, we advocate for the adoption of a precautionary principle. We propose the implementation of a developmentally appropriate, society-wide policy approach, similar to those regulating access to alcohol and tobacco, that restricts smartphone and social media access for children under 13, mandates digital literacy education, and enforces corporate accountability.

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Addictive Screen Use Trajectories and Suicidal Behaviors, Suicidal Ideation, and Mental Health in US Youths

Written by Yunyu Xiao, PhD; Yuan Meng, PhD; Timothy T. Brown, PhD | Published June 18, 2025

In this cohort study of 4285 US adolescents, 31.3% had increasing addictive use trajectories for social media and 24.6% for mobile phones over 4 years. High or increasing addictive use trajectories were associated with elevated risks of suicidal behaviors or ideation compared with low addictive use. Youths with high-peaking or increasing social media use or high video game use had more internalizing or externalizing symptoms.

Electronic Screen Use and Children’s Socioemotional Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies

Written by Roberta Pires Vasconcellos, Taren Sanders, Chris Lonsdale, Philip Parker, James Conigrave, Samantha Tang, et. al. | Published June 9, 2025

Spending too much time on screens may cause emotional and behavioral problems in children—and those problems can lead to even more screen use.

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Teens, Social Media and Mental Health

Written by Michelle Faverio, Monica Anderson and Eugenie Park | Published April 22, 2025

Most teens credit social media with feeling more connected to friends. Still, roughly 1 in 5 say social media sites hurt their mental health, and growing shares think they harm people their age.

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The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight

Written by Common Sense Media | Published February 28, 2025

Forty percent of children have a tablet by age 2, and nearly 1 in 4 have a personal cellphone by age 8. While their screen time remains steady at about 2.5 hours per day, there has been a shift in how screen time is being used. Gaming time has surged 65% in four years, and traditional TV viewing has declined, while short-form video platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts are on the rise, underscoring the increasingly complex media environment that parents must navigate in their children's early years.

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Buying to Belong: Youth and Virtual Assets in the Metaverse

Written by Fairplay, Criscillia Benford, PhD, and Rachel Franz, M.Ed. | Published February 26, 2025

What happens in virtual worlds is of increasing importance to young people. Young people treat social gaming platforms as third places, using them to conduct essential psychosocial work – particularly socializing with peers, identity exploration, and authentic self-expression. Social gaming platforms, however, exploit young people’s developmental need to perform this work and poison in-game communities with design features and game mechanics that motivate purchasing behavior by manufacturing social and emotional pressure.

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School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study

Written by Victoria A. Goodyear, Amie Randhawa, Péymane Adab, Hareth Al-Janabi, Sally Fenton, Kirsty Jones, et al. | Published February 4, 2025

Adolescents attending schools with restrictive, compared to permissive policies had lower phone and social media time during school time, but there was no evidence for differences when comparing usage time on weekdays or weekends.

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Violence on TV: What happens to children who watch?

Written by Linda Pagani | Published January 20, 2025

Boys exposed to violent screen content in the preschool years were more likely to become antisocial and violent themselves a decade later, in their mid-teens, a new study shows.

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Unprotected from Porn

Written by Jason Carroll, Brian Willoughby, Brad Wilcox, Michael Toscano | Published January 13, 2025

The report documents how the rise in underage pornography use has been paralleled by more extreme and harmful types of pornography being available online. The authors detail how a growing body of research has consistently shown that a large portion of the sexual media available online is not only sexually explicit, but also regularly depicts rape, violence against women, deviant sexual behaviors such as incest and sex with minors. They also review a growing number of studies that show that a significant portion of children and teens are directly seeking out and viewing these types of harmful online sexual materials.

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Screen time and mental health: a prospective analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Written by Jason M. Nagata, Abubakr A.A. Al-Shoaibi, Alicia W. Leong, Gabriel Zamora, Alexander Testa, Kyle T. Ganson & Fiona C. Baker | Published October 7, 2024

The specific screen types with the greatest associations with depressive symptoms included video chat, texting, videos, and video games. The association between screen time and depressive, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, and oppositional defiant symptoms was stronger among White compared to Black adolescents. The association between screen time and depressive symptoms was stronger among White compared to Asian adolescents.

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External Studies

Study Category

Study Topic

Protecting the Developing Mind in a Digital Age: A Global Policy Imperative

Addictive Screen Use Trajectories and Suicidal Behaviors, Suicidal Ideation, and Mental Health in US Youths

Electronic Screen Use and Children’s Socioemotional Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies

Teens, Social Media and Mental Health

The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight

Buying to Belong: Youth and Virtual Assets in the Metaverse

School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study

Violence on TV: What happens to children who watch?

Unprotected from Porn

Screen time and mental health: a prospective analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

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