Children Can't Wait: A Call for Physicians to Join the Conversation on Screen Time in Schools

A Father Who Can't Sleep

Patrick, a 44-year-old father of two, came to see me because he was losing sleep worrying about his 13-year-old daughter, Carla.

"She hates school," he said. Despite earning good grades, Carla protests going each morning and struggles to complete assignments each evening. Irritability, frustration, panic, and tears had become commonplace in a daughter who once told him everything.

"There are no textbooks anymore." Like many schools, Carla's school adopted online curricula during the COVID-19 pandemic and never shifted back. She spends much of her day on a school-issued device and then comes home to study on that same device. Her attention shifts constantly—from an assignment to a message, a scroll,a short video.

"The device is doing something to her," Patrick says, though he can't quite name it. Like many parents, he feels helpless… and guilty.

Naming What's Happening

As a psychiatrist, I can name what Carla is experiencing: dysregulation, fractured attention, and chronic low-grade anxiety. In plain terms, she is a child who can't settle, can't focus, and feels uneasy for no clear reason. Her experience is not isolated. A 2024 CDC report found that teens who spend four or more hours per day on screens are roughly twice as likely to experience anxiety or depression as their peers who spend less time. (1)

What Patrick is observing is not simply screen time; it is a learning environment whose demands on children's attention, behavior, and self-regulation have grown. Children who arrive at school with stronger executive functioning skills—developmental capacities that emerge unevenly and depend in part on the resources available outside of school—are often better positioned to navigate the distractions and self-management demands that technology-based learning requires. Children with weaker skills can lose instructional time to distraction, day after day.

The guilt Patrick carries stems from the control society still assumes parents have. If children are struggling with screens, parents are expected to set better limits. When parents enforce those limits, children resist. Both are left feeling as though they are doing something wrong. This narrative is damaging and needs to change.

A Brief Note on How We Got Here and Where We Are Now

The push toward one-to-one devices was already underway before the pandemic and accelerated dramatically during it. According to the U.S. Department of Education, federal pandemic relief sent nearly $190 billion to American public schools between 2020 and 2021. The funding came with obligation deadlines that required districts to commit funds within a defined period or lose access to them, creating pressure to spend quickly. The money funded an integrated package of devices, software, and human supports such as counselors, social workers, tutors, and reading specialists, as documented by the Intercultural Development Research Association. (2) (3) Many of those decisions were made under emergency conditions, with less scrutiny than would normally accompany changes of this scale. The federal funding has now expired. While human support is increasingly being cut, the technology infrastructure remains embedded in daily classroom practice.

Major medical institutions are increasingly framing children's screen exposure as a matter of child development and public health. The American Academy of Pediatrics' January 2026 policy statement emphasized that digital media should be designed around the developmental needs of children, not the other way around — placing the responsibility on platform designers, not on children being asked to adapt to products built to maximize engagement and capture attention. (4) The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a May 2026 advisory identifying harmful screen use among children as a public health concern and recommending that schools increase the use of textbooks and offline learning activities. (5)

From the Clinic to the Community

Once it became clear that I was watching a structural problem play out one patient at a time, I started engaging with school leadership and other parents, many of whom were wondering the same thing: Why are parents expected to manage screen use when schools require it both at school and at home? What followed was several months of collaboration with parents across our school district and conversations with students, teachers, and education leaders. The organizing culminated in a formal petition to our district asking for grade-appropriate limits on screen use, parent transparency, and the restoration of offline forms of learning. The petition does not ask schools to abandon technology. It asks them to apply the same evidence-based standards we would expect of any intervention affecting children at scale.

Parent groups in districts throughout the country are organizing similar efforts. The changes that transformed classrooms during the pandemic were implemented with remarkable speed because leaders believed action could not wait. Children's mental health, attention, and learning deserve that same sense of urgency. The question is no longer whether policymakers, education leaders, and the educational technology industry can move quickly. It is whether they choose to.

Why Physicians Belong in This Conversation

The UCSF Champion Provider Fellowship showed me that advocacy is far closer to medicine than I once realized. When we see a similar problem show up across patients, we should consider whether there is a systemic issue at play. If we fail to recognize and name those broader forces, we risk allowing patients to internalize blame for the consequences of decisions they did not make.