Technology rules grab the headlines. But the real story is about durable skills. #
Posted August 10, 2026 [ Reviewed by Davia Sills
](/us/docs/editorial-process)
Key points
- Rules and bans don't build judgment, attention, or the capacity for real relationships.
- Eighty-six percent of kids already use AI for schoolwork. The question isn't whether—it's how.
- Phone bans may address a threat to attention, but banning a device doesn't teach a child to focus.
- The skills students need now—attention, judgment, critical thinking—don't come pre-installed with policies.
Walk into almost any American school this fall, and you’ll find things that were debated a short year ago are simply the way things are now. Student phones are out—or on their way out. Screen time on school-issued devices is being cut. Artificial intelligence is the subject of impending policies, rules, and, in some states, law.
On the surface, these changes look like they’re about technology. But really, they are about how young people learn to focus, tolerate boredom, develop critical thinking, build social skills, practice independent judgment, and decide whom—or what—to trust.
Policies can shape an environment. They cannot, by themselves, build the capacities that an ever-evolving environment demands.
Here are three significant shifts heading into the new school year, and how policies are, and are not, making a difference in each one.
Phone Bans Become About More Than Just Phones #
A year ago, cellphone bans were still gaining momentum. Now restrictions are widespread: As of June 2026, 22 states and the District of Columbia had adopted bell-to-bell cellphone bans—meaning students generally cannot access their phones during the school day. Another 19 states had enacted more flexible laws that permit or encourage local restrictions without requiring a full-day statewide ban.
The pushback has grown well past the phone in a student’s pocket to the device the school itself hands out. In June 2026, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the nation’s second largest—approved new guidelines limiting screen time on district-issued devices, including a full ban for its youngest grades, with phased implementation beginning this week.
The psychological argument for all of this makes perfect sense. Attention is finite. Devices can impose a cognitive cost even when not actively used: just the thought of a phone across the room can create a mental pull toward what might be happening elsewhere.
And public opinion largely supports these moves. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in late May and early June 2026, 77 percent of U.S. adults supported banning middle and high school students from using cellphones during class—a figure that has risen for the second consecutive year—while 48 percent supported all-day bans, up from 36 percent in 2024.
Kids Are Using AI, Not Waiting for Us to Figure Out if They Should #
When it comes to AI, kids aren’t waiting for permission. Common Sense Media’s 2026 census of more than 1,200 U.S. children and teens ages 9 to 17 found that 86 percent had used or interacted with generative AI, and 24 percent did so daily. Among young people who use AI, 85 percent reported using it for schoolwork, with use especially prevalent among older teens. That makes AI an ordinary feature of many students’ academic lives.
The defining trend isn’t that kids are using AI—it’s that they’re using it with almost no instruction on how to use it wisely. Three-quarters of students say their school has discussed what they can and cannot use AI for, but just over half have been taught how to use it safely. Whatever rules a school hasn’t set, students are quietly writing for themselves.
The more important question isn’t whether a student uses AI, but whether they use it as a scaffold or a substitute for learning. A scaffold can help a student brainstorm questions, organize an outline, or identify gaps in understanding while leaving the student responsible for the intellectual work. A substitute bypasses that work entirely—and with it, the practice of planning, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and argument-building.
This distinction matters especially during childhood and adolescence, when executive functions are still developing. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence found that adolescents reporting greater executive-function challenges tended to see generative AI as more useful for schoolwork, especially for completing assignments.
IntelligenceEssential Reads That finding doesn’t mean AI is harmful, and it doesn’t show that AI use causes executive-function difficulties. What it does suggest is that students who find planning, organizing, or getting started especially difficult may be particularly drawn to a tool that reduces those demands. With the right guidance and instruction, AI can help many students enhance their learning. Without those supports, it can make it easier to skip the productive struggle through which learning actually happens.
AI Becomes a Friend—and the Youngest Kids Trust It Most #
Much of the public conversation has focused on whether students will use AI to do academic work for them. But for some young people, AI is no longer just a homework tool. It has become a social and emotional one too.
In a nationally representative 2025 survey of teens ages 13 to 17, Common Sense Media found that 72 percent had used an AI companion—a chatbot designed for conversation, emotional connection, or relationship-like interaction—at least once. Among those who had, about one in three had chosen to discuss something important or serious with an AI companion rather than a real person.
Concerningly, younger teens trust AI companions significantly more than older teens do. Twenty-seven percent of 13- and 14-year-olds said they trusted advice from an AI companion, compared with 20 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds. The children with the least experience—and the fewest years of calibration or education behind them—are extending the most trust. That is exactly backward from how trust is supposed to develop.
The stakes become clearer when you consider what happens when a struggling young person turns to one of these systems. A 2025 risk assessment by Common Sense Media and Stanford Medicine’s Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation found that leading AI chatbots presented an unacceptable level of risk for teen mental health support—including failures to recognize indirect signs of distress and a tendency to keep the conversation going when a young person needed to be directed toward human help.
The Skills No Policy Can Replace #
The rules, bans, and restrictions students will find when they walk through the door this fall may address real problems. But they will not, by themselves, build critical thinking, calibrated judgment, relationship skills, or the other capacities students desperately need in a tech- and AI-infused world.
Attention has to be practiced. Thinking has to be done. Trust has to be earned and tested through real-world experience. Relationships have to be built through the friction and repair that no chatbot will ever provide. Understanding how to use digital and AI systems needs to be taught.
That hard work is still up to humans.
References
Harvard Kennedy School, "Many States Are Banning Cellphones in Schools. Is It Working?" Interview with Professor Paul Peterson. June 9, 2026. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/education-tr…
ABC News / Good Morning America, "LA School District Approves New Screen Time Limits for Students." June 24, 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/la-school-district-approves-new-screen-tim…
Pew Research Center, "About Half of Americans Support All-Day School Cellphone Bans." Survey of 9,750 U.S. adults conducted May 26–June 1, 2026. Published July 29, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/29/more-americans-now-s…
Common Sense Media, The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens (2026). Nationally representative survey of 1,204 children ages 9–17, conducted March 18–26, 2026. Published June 8, 2026. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/a-comprehensive-report-on-tee…
Klarin, J., Hoff, E., Larsson, A., & Daukantaitė, D. (2024). Adolescents' use and perceived usefulness of generative AI for schoolwork: Exploring their relationships with executive functioning and academic achievement. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 7, 1415782. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2024.1415782
Common Sense Media, Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions. Nationally representative survey of 1,060 teens ages 13–17. July 16, 2025.
Common Sense Media and Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, AI Chatbots for Mental Health Support [risk assessment]. November 2025.
Sun, X., Wang, Y., & McDaniel, B. T. (2026). AI companions and adolescent social relationships: Benefits, risks, and bidirectional influences. Child Development Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdpers/aadaf009