Evening phone ban improves teen exam grades: Swiss study

Banning mobile phones in the evening prolongs sleep and improves grades Keystone-SDA

Teenagers sleep an average of 40 minutes longer and perform better at school when they are denied smartphones in the evening, according to a study by the University of Geneva.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“Parents therefore play a key role. Their involvement directly influences the health and success of their children,” lead author of the study, Kevin Mammeri, was quoted as saying in a press release issued by the University of Geneva.

+ Why some people choose not to have a smartphone

For the study, which was published in the journal Discover Public Health, the researchers analysed responses from over 300 schoolchildren aged between 13 and 15. The young people completed a questionnaire about their sleeping habits and their parents’ rules regarding screen use.

The results show that pupils who are subject to the strictest rules – no mobile phones in the bedroom and no mobile phone use in the evening – sleep significantly longer. On average, they gain 40 minutes of sleep per night.

“This is considerable when you consider that this age group needs around 9 hours of sleep, but often only gets 7 to 8. Every week, this gain of 40 minutes is almost equivalent to an extra night’s sleep,” said study leader Virginie Sterpenich.

Weak rules are useless

This was confirmed by another result of the study: pupils with strict rules performed better at school on average than those without strict mobile phone usage rules.

According to the study, other restrictions, such as limiting daily screen time or a set time when the device should no longer be used, had no significant impact on sleep duration.

“These results suggest that the introduction of a rule requiring the physical removal of electronic screen devices from the bedroom is associated with longer sleep duration,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Translated from French by DeepL/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].

News