Fit to Lead: February 2025
“I feel like my childhood [was] cut short. [I’m in] eighth grade, I can barely remember sixth grade…I feel like when you reach a certain age, you feel like you wasted your childhood on your phone…You see that phone is really messing with [your] head. We used to go outside all day.” —eighth grade student

Students are struggling every day with the consequences of their digital media use—particularly smartphone and social media use—which is impacting their learning, mental well-being, and physical health. They may come to school exhausted after spending all night using their smartphones and are distracted and unfocused in class. In schools without complete cell phone bans, hallways may be quieter as students look down at their phones rather than talk with each other. As a result of negative online experiences, pressures, or addictive media use, some students may struggle with anxiety or depressive symptoms that impact their daily functioning in and outside of school.
This is the picture educators often observe when it comes to smartphone use in secondary schools. To address it, many schools are moving toward restricted use of smartphones in schools. While this approach can undoubtedly remove many of the distractions that affect student learning, it is not clear from existing research how this approach is helping to reduce the harms of digital media use. Further, the strategy of banning or restricting smartphones fails to take into account some of the positive aspects of digital media use that also play an important role in adolescents’ lives. Think of the student who feels that they don’t belong at school and finds a supportive community online, or the student who is motivated to advocate for a cause that is important to them by seeing the successes of others celebrated online.
Shifting the Focus to Digital Wellness
In addition to policies that restrict smartphone use in schools, students will also benefit from school efforts to promote digital wellness, which the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab defines as “a positive state of mental, physical, and social-emotional health pursued through intentional, authentic, and balanced engagement with technology and interactive media.” These types of efforts combine education on media literacy, online safety, and privacy, as well as teaching skills that enable students to use digital media in balanced and healthy ways. If students are taught to self-manage their digital media use and are empowered to take control of their online experiences, they will gain lifelong strategies to be productive, responsible, and healthy—online and offline.
Furthermore, schools should also consider the range of needs students face when it comes to digital wellness. One of the key findings we identified in our work with schools—including students, educators, and parents—is that not all students face the same challenges related to digital wellness. For example, some students can self-manage their use of digital media enough that it doesn’t affect their daily functioning. Other students need extra support in building their online communication and media literacy skills, as well as minimizing the emotional effects of things like negative social comparison (a concern especially for girls) and exposure to harmful content or hate speech (frequently experienced by LGBTQ+ youth). Lastly, a small number of students experience severe mental health issues and/or symptoms of problematic interactive media use, which the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab describes as the “disordered use of interactive media and technology that results in negative consequences to social and mental wellbeing and academic outcomes.” Given these diverse needs, it is important to consider a holistic and systemic approach to digital wellness that addresses the needs of all students.
Applying MTSS to Digital Wellness
Based on our own and others’ findings, no single policy or practice can effectively help all students learn to use digital media in intentional, productive, and responsible ways. Rather, schools need a multi-pronged approach that combines policy changes, educational programs, and even family engagement to support the various needs of students. The Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework can provide the type of multi-pronged systemic approach needed to promote digital wellness. MTSS is an integrated approach initially designed to ensure that all students receive the level of academic support they need. It has more recently been applied to promoting students’ social and emotional development and meeting their needs for mental health support. Given the role of digital media use in both students’ learning and their social and emotional well-being, the application of MTSS to digital wellness seems very appropriate and relevant to the challenges that students and schools are facing every day.
In the context of digital wellness, the three-tier MTSS model can be applied to promote students’ authentic and balanced use of digital media and address mental health concerns that may be related to or exacerbated by their online experiences. Here we take a familiar model and apply it to digital wellness:
- Universal practices (Tier 1) that can be implemented schoolwide include developmentally appropriate, high-quality, and up-to-date classroom-based digital literacy and digital wellness education for all students at all grades; school policies related to smartphone and digital media use at school; school climate initiatives that recognize the influences of both online and offline experiences on the school environment, and additional schoolwide efforts or events (e.g., a phone-free day).
- Targeted supports (Tier 2) include small group activities that provide some students with extra opportunities to learn and practice online communication skills and self-management of digital media use and/or address mental health consequences of digital media use. Such efforts may include integrating digital wellness education into existing group behavioral interventions for students at elevated risk of harm (e.g., girls, who are at risk of negative social comparison, body image issues; LGBTQ+ youth who are exposed to hate speech or harassment online).
- Intensive supports (Tier 3) entail one-on-one counseling for students who need customized and intensive support related to addictive or problematic digital media use, cyberbullying experiences, and/or severe mental health issues where digital media use may play a contributing or exacerbating role.
When MTSS is applied to digital wellness, it requires that schools proactively identify students’ needs and challenges with respect to digital media use and provide appropriate supports or interventions to address those needs. In the absence of a well-tested screening tool designed for use in school settings to detect concerning or problematic media use, several other sources of information can be used by a student support team to identify students with heightened needs:
- Teacher observation can help point to students who are exhibiting addictive media use in the classroom and who show possible indicators of problematic use, such as declining grades, fatigue in class, or becoming socially withdrawn.
- School discipline data can identify students who have violated school smartphone or social media policies or who are involved in cyberbullying incidents.
- Surveillance surveys can point to groups of youth who may be at elevated risk of more severe negative media use consequences (e.g., LGBTQ+ youth and hate speech, girls and social comparison or body image) to ensure that targeted or intensive supports are available to meet the needs of these specific groups.
Prioritizing Your Digital Wellness Strategies
Given the multitude of strategies associated with addressing digital wellness through the MTSS framework and the limited resources available, we suggest establishing a digital wellness task force or making digital wellness a charge of an existing task force that can make recommendations and decisions. This group—representing school staff, students, and parents—can ensure all voices are heard and can work together to decide which strategies to prioritize given limited resources. A first step for this group would be to take an inventory of existing efforts to identify gaps in school programs and services. This group can also work to ensure that any new policy or practice is implemented along with educational efforts about the changes within the school community to ensure that students, parents, and educators alike have buy-in. This is particularly important when it comes to policy changes, such as those which place more restrictions on students’ smartphone use at school. If parents and students understand how and why programmatic and policy changes are being made, the new approach has a greater chance of success. The task force should repeatedly reassess and adapt strategies as needed over time as both the school environment and digital environment change.
Taking these steps toward selecting different types of strategies to promote digital wellness and organizing them into a single comprehensive system of supports using the MTSS framework can go a long way in promoting students’ academic achievement and mental wellness. Such an approach can help schools work toward a greater balance between addressing and preventing the negative consequences of digital media use while promoting authentic, intentional, healthy, and responsible use.
Shari Kessel Schneider is a senior project director at the Education Development Center, where Shai Fuxman is a principal research scientist. Learn more at solutions.edc.org.
References
Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab. (2022, May). Family guide to problematic interactive media use (PIMU). digitalwellnesslab.org/family-guides/family-guide-to-problematic-interactive-media-use-pimu/
U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, Regional Educational Laboratory Program. (2024, February). Multi-tiered systems of support and the importance of promoting student well-being. ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/northeast/Resource/107537