Keeping smartphones out of children’s hands can feel like a lonely stand at the school gate, but new British research suggests families may protect kids better when they stand together.
“Where at least one fifth of families signed, school-recorded social, emotional and mental health need falls by around 8 percent of the counterfactual,” Gregory F. Veramendi, associate professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, wrote in a working paper published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The July 2026 paper has not been peer-reviewed.
The idea is disarmingly simple. Smartphone Free Childhood’s Parent Pact asks families at the same school to make a shared promise: no smartphones before age 14 and no social media before 16.
Veramendi analyzed 329 English primary schools where at least 20% of families had signed the pact by June 2026. He compared those schools with matched schools drawn from roughly 12,000 schools where fewer than 5% of families had signed, accounting for earlier mental-health levels, neighborhood affluence and school size.
The paper drew on two separate government systems. English schools record pupils with social, emotional and mental-health needs, while the Department for Work and Pensions independently handles child psychiatric disability claims.
Both sets of records moved in the same direction. Along with the roughly 8% drop in school-recorded needs, psychiatric disability claims fell about 6% in high-signup communities compared with the modeled result for similar low-uptake communities.
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The reductions grew as more parents signed and became larger over the study’s two-year window. They also concentrated among younger children, who were less likely to own a smartphone before the pact began.
There is a catch, and it matters. The paper measures signed promises, not each child’s actual smartphone ownership, screen time or exposure, and it follows the movement for only two years.
“I would not place this in the ‘causal’ evidence category,” Candice Odgers, chancellor’s professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, told The Times. She argued that a pledge records parents’ intentions without proving that children used smartphones less.
That caution does not make the results useless; it keeps a promising finding in its proper lane. The study offers evidence of an encouraging link between coordinated delay and children’s well-being, but it does not prove that signing a pact by itself caused every improvement.
The wider research gives parents reason to take that link seriously. A King’s College London review of 41 studies covering 41,871 young people estimated that 23% showed problematic smartphone use, including difficulty controlling their use or neglecting other activities. Researchers found consistent associations with depressed mood, anxiety, stress, poor sleep and weaker educational outcomes, while warning that the evidence showed correlation rather than cause.
For parents, the freshest insight may be less about a magic birthday and more about community. One family saying “not yet” can leave a child feeling singled out; a classroom full of families saying it together changes the social pressure behind the question.
Families do not have to improvise every rule after the phone arrives. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to weigh a child’s maturity and practical need before buying a first phone, then create a family media plan, keep conversations open and model the habits they expect.
Technology can serve a family, but it makes a poor master. Choosing patience together can give children more room for sleep, play, church, conversation and face-to-face friendship before the whole internet lands in their pockets.
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