This article summarizes an article in OSV News highlighting the bans on cell phone and social media use in Catholic schools, including some observations of positive impacts as a result of the effort. This article also reviews the importance of friendships and definition of digital wellness explained in a previous Live and Forgive article, How to Improve Your Digital Wellness and Life Wellbeing with Better Friendships. In general, the efforts and observed positive impacts described in the OSV News article demonstrate the validity of the connection between digital wellness and high-quality friendships outlined in the previous Live and Forgive article. This article also includes a refined operational definition of digital wellness in relation to friendships.
More News Says More Digital Wellbeing in Schools
A recent article in OSV News entitled School Smartphone, Social Media Bans Gain Momentum Across U.S. highlighted efforts in Catholic schools to improve student engagement and digital wellness of students through limits on cell phone access and use during the school day. In general, schools and educators report positive impacts on student engagement, and expected positive impacts on student digital wellness.
The OSV article highlights previously publicized connections of cell phone and social media use to wellbeing in general, including:
- The U.S. surgeon general issued a 2023 advisory warning children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems, including experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.
- A December 2025 study in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics examining more than 10,500 children found those who received phones at age 12 vs. 13 had a more than 60% higher risk of poor sleep and a more than 40% higher risk of obesity.
- A 2023 study by Common Sense Research found 43% of children ages 8 to 12, and 88%-95% of children ages 13-18, have their own smartphone; half of U.S. children get their first smartphone at 11.
- An April 2025 Pew Research Center survey reported, “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.”
- While 74% of teens find social media helpful for building connections, 45% also admit they spend too much time using it.
What is the connection of digital wellness to good friendships?
In another recent article right here on Live and Forgive entitled How to Improve Your Digital Wellness and Life Wellbeing with Better Friendships I explained that friendships are an important part of wellbeing, and that digital wellness is the use of portable devices and platforms such as social media, to engage in high quality friendships like the spiritual friendships described by Aelred of Riveaulx and millennia of social thinkers before him. I also explained how time away from good friends, and missing good friends, is also part of a full life and wellbeing. Digital wellness, therefore, includes personally:
- Not depending on cell phones or social media for high-quality friendships,
- Engaging in high-quality friendships in-person
- Using cell phones and social media intentionally as a support for high quality friendships
- Not confusing entertainment, social comparisons, or social acceptance using cell phones or social media as engagement with high-quality friendships
- Finding meaning and satisfaction OK with time away from cell phones or social media and focusing onin-person experiences of high-quality friendship (i.e. seeking, starting, sustaining high-quality friendships)
- Finding meaning and satisfaction in time away from high-quality friendships, missing friends, and wanting to be with them again, perhaps preferably in-person rather than online.
If you are a parent or caretaker of young people, I think that digital wellness includes attentive, positive, and nurturing relationships with those young people that includes teaching and modeling digital wellness in cell phone and social media use.
Notre Dame ethics professor Melissa Moschella also gives us a possible reason to consider that digital wellness includes using cell phones and social media in a way that contributes to wellbeing of the whole community, in all of the communities of which one is a member, and which support the wellbeing of their members.
How are schools confirming the friendship and digital wellness connection?
The OSV News article provides anecdotal accounts of the positive impacts of school limits on cell phone and social media use that demonstrate the validity of the connection between digital wellbeing and high-quality friendships outlined in the above list.
Not depending on cell phones or social media for high-quality friendships, and engaging in high-quality friendships in-person is on the list. The OSV article describes thatJ esuit Father John Belmonte, superintendent of Catholic education in the Diocese of Venice, Florida, observed:
It’s been very popular — anecdotally, the students have loved it, because they’re actually talking to each other again…They rediscovered what actually being social is like, as opposed to social media,” he added. “I even heard a report that some students started an UNO card playing club at one of our high schools, so they could play card games during lunch. Those things were not happening when they were glued to their cellphones.
Using cell phones and social media intentionally as a support for high quality friendships, and not confusing entertainment, social comparisons, or social acceptance using cell phones or social media as engagement with high-quality friendships is also on the list. Christina Mehaffey, principal of Faustina Academy in Irving, Texas, a private, independent K-12 Catholic school with 220 students, observed:
We’re seeing digital dependence, addictions, all over the place. Kids are just struggling left and right,” she stressed. “And they’re inattentive; they’re not engaged. They don’t care about the good, the true and the beautiful, because they have this entertainment in their face and at their fingertips.
Understanding the connection between friendships and digital wellness may offer a perspective that recognizes how cell phones and social media can support high-quality friendships, digital wellness, and overall life wellbeing. In a world where cell phone technology and social media re not going away, this perspective offers the possibility of using limits rather than bans, to teach and model high-quality friendships and digital wellness for students. As the OSV News article included, Danielle Hladky, director of Communications and Marketing at Calvert Hall College High School observed:
We’re not trying to shy away from phones; smartwatches; AI enabled glasses; things of that nature,” she explained. “We want to embrace and find ways that we can use them as a community, to help our students grow — because as we know this is where we’re headed as a society. But also realizing that there’s a time and a place.
This article is an original work of the author and was not composed by or with artificial intelligence (AI). The author is solely responsible for the contents of this article. © 2026 Thomas Delaney. All rights reserved.
If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of wellbeing, forgiveness, inner renewal and spiritual growth, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com — he will be glad to connect with you for a conversation.
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