By: Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
Mitch Prinstein, the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at UNC-Chapel Hill, told members of Gov. Josh Stein's Advisory Council for Student Safety and Well-Being said on Monday morning that nearly half of North Carolina's early high schoolers are experiencing digital stress severe enough to interfere with their sleep, exercise, homework, hygiene and family relationships.
Prinstein's presentation covered adolescent social media use, the rollout of the state's new cell phone-free classroom law, and what he called an urgent and largely unstudied new front: children's use of artificial intelligence chatbots.
"About 45% of the kids in early high school report that they're experiencing so much digital stress it's interfering with their daily rules and routines," Prinstein said. "Their sleep, their exercise, their homework, their hygiene, looking at their parents in the eye across the dinner table — this is all impaired. The more digital stress they report, the more depression they're reporting a year later."
Prinstein said his lab has applied the same diagnostic criteria used to identify substance dependency, excessive and uncontrolled use, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, and interference with daily life, to social media use, substituting the word "social media" for "alcohol" in the clinical standard. In his own research sample, 95% of respondents reported excessive, uncontrolled use of social media, and about half reported at least one symptom of clinical dependency.
He said his team is now collecting comparable data on AI use and is already seeing adolescents report withdrawal symptoms when they try to stop.
Citing American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidance that adolescents need eight hours of sleep a night, Prinstein said fewer than half of the nation's ninth graders and fewer than a quarter of 12th graders get the medically recommended amount — a shortfall he attributed largely to screens. Poor sleep, he said, is linked to obesity, risky behavior, lower grades, impulsivity, emotional outbursts and next-day driving accidents among teen drivers, and is associated with slower growth of white matter — the brain tissue that speeds signal transmission and underlies more sophisticated adult-level thinking — during a critical stretch of adolescent brain development.
Prinstein also presented data from brain imaging of roughly 10,000 children scanned annually across 20 sites nationwide, part of a broader study he said showed more screen time correlated with a thinner cortex over time, particularly in regions tied to impulse control and susceptibility to addiction. Kids who used their phones heavily in sixth grade showed a blunted brain response to social feedback by the time they were older, he said, while kids who started using phones heavily later showed the opposite pattern: a spike in sensitivity in the brain's reward circuitry.
"They're building brains that are now hypersensitive to social cues," he said.
Turning to phone use inside North Carolina classrooms, Prinstein cited a state-funded study — conducted with support from Jenny Corn at the North Carolina Collaboratory — that collected data from 22 schools across the state, more than 2,300 students and their teachers. Even with every school in the sample enforcing a no-phone policy, he said, students reported spending roughly 20 minutes of every classroom hour on their devices, a third of the school day, mostly on social media, entertainment and texting rather than schoolwork.
He said students are most likely to reach for a phone when bored or uncomfortable and try to resist while actively engaged, but slip once their attention drifts. Asked who they're texting during class, students most often named their parents — a finding Prinstein said surprised him enough that he texted his own daughter about it before catching himself.
"We kind of forget that we have the skill of getting a text and then ignoring it until we're out of our meeting," he said. "But the kids don't."
The effects extend beyond the student holding the phone, Prinstein said. Research shows a student who spends class time on YouTube or TikTok scores lower on standardized tests such as the AP exam — and so does the student sitting near them, a phenomenon he called a secondhand screen effect. He said the same distraction shows up with school-issued laptops, which many students use for gaming and streaming rather than classwork, and that teachers report the enforcement burden contributes to stress and attrition; a study his team conducted in Canada found teacher stress dropped and retention improved after a phone ban was imposed from the top down rather than left to individual teachers to police.
Citing a separate national study of more than 10,000 children across roughly 20 sites, Prinstein said children with the heaviest and increasing social media use scored lower on every measure tested, including impulsivity, reading, memory, processing speed, vocabulary and a composite measure of academic functioning.
Prinstein devoted a significant portion of his remarks to artificial intelligence, which he said is now the subject of three emerging strands of research: chatbots exacerbating existing mental health risks, chatbots fostering false intimacy and trust, and the displacement of human relationships and parental interaction. He referenced accounts of chatbots encouraging users toward self-harm and urging them to keep the conversations secret from their families, and cases of chatbots telling users their ideas were groundbreaking and that skepticism from others amounted to a conspiracy against them.
Citing a paper his team submitted for publication this past week, Prinstein said 65% of children in the North Carolina middle school sample reported interacting with chatbots regularly, and that his data show roughly one student per classroom describes an AI chatbot as their friend and prefers talking to it over talking to another person. He said the more adolescents use AI chatbots as companions, the more loneliness they report over the following six months. About 18% of students introduced to chatbots in school said they use them for things they wouldn't tell a teacher, he said.
Prinstein criticized the design of commercial chatbots directly, objecting to their use of humanlike language such as claiming to feel emotions or to be "thinking" while a response loads.
"They're not people. They're computers. We should refer to them that way," he said, arguing that chatbots' tendency to affirm and flatter users rather than offer constructive feedback runs counter to how psychologists, teachers and healthy relationships are supposed to function.
"Sycophancy is not what we need for childhood," he said.
Prinstein urged the council to recommend that schools set academic deadlines no later than 9 p.m. rather than midnight, arguing that late homework deadlines keep students on devices later into the night regardless of whether they're doing schoolwork. He described bringing digital media literacy presentations to middle and high schools across the Triangle and elsewhere, including an exercise in which students look up the privacy policies of the apps they use and learn what data those apps collect and sell. He said students are often stunned to learn how much of their information — browsing history, payment methods, contacts — is being monetized. Prinstein said the American Psychological Association has published health advisories summarizing the research on social media and AI, and offered to share testimony his team has submitted to other states considering similar legislation.
The council, which Stein created by executive order last year to develop school safety and well-being policy, met at the Juvenile Justice Center in Raleigh.
