Earlier this month, public health nonprofit Anxious Generation Movement released a Childhood Index rating, evaluating all 50 states on their laws regarding childhood independence, social media age limits, technology regulation, and more.
New York and Utah were the only states classified as “national leaders.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul says it’s a milestone New Yorkers should be proud of — one she has spent much of her time in office working towards.
New York and Utah rank as the nation’s best in child mental well-being. Photo courtesy of The Childhood Index
“I’m using my perspective as New York’s first mom Governor,” Hochul told Good Good Good in a phone interview.
“This … makes me feel compelled to act because I look at the entire state as one part of my large family. I have those natural protective instincts, especially when it comes to our children. And I took about a year to go around the state and listen, after the pandemic and the years afterward, [to] what is actually happening to our teenagers.”
This spurred her to support a myriad of child safety initiatives statewide.
These include mental health first aid training for all New York high schoolers, “unplug and play” initiatives for childhood independence, a law that requires social media platforms that offer addictive feeds or infinite scroll features to put warning labels on their apps, legislation to restrict those addictive social media features for users under 18, and “distraction-free schools,” or bell-to-bell phone bans that took effect in the 2025-2026 school year.
“We passed nation-leading laws taking on big tech, saying, ‘No, our kids are more important than your bottom line,’” Hochul said.
“Every time we did it, the tech company said they can’t do it. And guess what? When we mandated it, they were able to figure out a way to do it.”
Hochul said these new laws include default privacy settings for kids “at the highest level,” as well as the disabling of artificial intelligence features for kids.
Mental health first aid training has also been made available to all 10th graders in the state of New York — more than 180,000 young people.
“Every teenager is going to be trained in not just helping themselves cope, but how to identify the warning signs in some of their friends and classmates,” Hochul said.
Phone-free school policies went into effect in the 2025-2026 school year. Photo courtesy of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
But the star policy, Hochul said, has been the phone-free schools effort, which went into effect this past September.
“This cell phone distraction-free zone for schools … is absolutely the biggest game changer in our children’s lives. It has been liberating for our children,” Hochul said.
“They’re finally acting like kids again,” she added. “They’re at lunch and study hall, playing cards. They’re playing Jenga, they’re playing bingo, they’re bringing in old transistor radios.”
The cell phone ban didn’t come without a fight, she added. Parents were worried they wouldn’t be able to reach their children, school administrators were worried about the hassle, and of course, she said, the students were not particularly interested in the new policy.
But she believes the outcome was worth the battle.
In a survey conducted by the governor’s office, with 350 responses from schools across the state that implemented the bell-to-bell smartphone restrictions, 92% reported a smooth transition to distraction-free learning, 83% reported more positive classrooms and better student engagement, and 75% of teachers reported improvement in their ability to teach effectively.
Gov. Hochul kicks off the distraction-free schools initiative in September 2025. Photo courtesy of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
“Just after talking about it for a year, implementing a law, giving lots of time to roll it out, I would say this is one of the most successful societal changes in such a short time that you could have envisioned in a place like New York,” Hochul concluded.
“I want to see this nationwide. I think every governor should enact the same.”
New York is not the only state that has adopted phone-free rules for students. According to the Childhood Index, over 40 states now have some kind of screen-free policy in place, with many showing success. In one Kentucky school district, preliminary results showed students checking out more library books, and other states are also seeing modest improvements in test scores.
For Hochul, the phone-free zones are a milestone achievement — and a proof of concept for the $1 billion catalyzed to confront the youth mental health crisis in New York.
“I’m really proud that we are named top of the nation with Utah in terms of focusing on kids’ mental health,” Hochul said. “But I also want us to tell other states that it can be done. If New York can do it, you can do it.”
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Header image by Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
