ABOUT THE CHILDHOOD INDEX
How well is your state protecting kids online and supporting a healthy real-world childhood?
BACKGROUND
Across the country, momentum is building in the movement to reclaim childhood and protect kids online. Families everywhere are demanding change, and state leaders are stepping up with bold legislation and decisive efforts to hold tech companies accountable. But progress varies widely state-to-state, and right now a child’s chance to flourish depends too much on where they live.
Developed by The Anxious Generation Movement, the Childhood Index ranks all 50 states on the strength of their laws and leadership across phone-free schools, childhood independence, social media age limits, and tech regulation. By highlighting effective policies and key opportunities, it serves as a benchmark for state leaders and an actionable tool to help them accelerate progress.
Our four tiers — National Leaders, Rising Stars, Emerging Action, and Limited Action — reflect where each state stands today, but this is not meant to be a final verdict. We believe every state can become a National Leader. We’ve created this Index to help them get there.
Methodology
The Anxious Generation Movement’s in-house policy team evaluated all 50 states across nine criteria related to how well each state’s leaders and laws are protecting children online and supporting a healthy real-world childhood.
Partners and Data Sources
We are grateful to the partners whose data and expertise helped make this work possible.
FAQs
Developed by The Anxious Generation Movement, the Childhood Index ranks all 50 states on the strength of their laws and leadership across phone-free schools, childhood independence, social media age limits, and tech regulation. By highlighting effective policies and key opportunities, it serves as a benchmark for state leaders and an actionable tool to help them accelerate progress. For more details, see our Methodology page.
Each state was assessed across nine criteria. Our in-house policy team evaluated each criterion on a red/yellow/green scale — green for strong, meaningful action; yellow for partial or promising action; and red for little or no action. A state’s tier reflects its overall performance across all nine criteria. For a full breakdown, see our Methodology page.
Our in-house policy team conducted an analysis of each state’s laws, policies, and leadership, and drew on the Phone-Free Schools Report Card, original survey data from the Institute for Family Studies, and expert evaluations from Let Grow, the Institute for Families and Technology, the Becca Schmill Foundation, and Smartphone Free Childhood. Together, these sources provide a multidimensional picture of each state’s policy landscape and the strength of its leadership on these issues. For more details, see our Methodology page.
Every state page includes specific recommendations highlighting the biggest opportunities for improvement. In general, states move up by enacting key policies — bell-to-bell phone-free schools, reasonable childhood independence laws, social media age limits, and tech accountability laws — and by having political leaders who champion these issues publicly and consistently. For a detailed roadmap, see our Policy Menu.
We hope policymakers, parents, and advocates will use the Index as an advocacy tool, not a relocation guide. The Index is designed to help communities push for better policy where they live.
The Childhood Index focuses specifically on policies and leadership related to protecting kids online and reclaiming childhood in the real world. We agree that factors such as education, healthcare, and childcare are critically important, but they are outside of this project’s scope.
AI and edtech are policy areas we’re actively tracking. As of publication, no state has passed laws in these areas that meet our standard, but several legislatures are considering bills. Our framework was designed to incorporate such laws as they are enacted.
For this iteration of the Childhood Index, we did not evaluate state laws restricting gambling or prediction market apps for minors. We recommend checking out CASPR’s recent report grading states on their related policies.
Data privacy is a complex policy area that affects both kids and adults. Many of the policies we evaluated include data privacy protections for minors, but we did not assess states on those elements specifically. Broader data privacy policy is outside the scope of this project.
Not all social media laws are created equal. Our best practice standard calls for laws that ban account creation for minors under 16, without a parental consent loophole, and that restrict platforms based on manipulative design rather than content — similar to the approach Australia has taken. As of publication, no state has fully met this standard, which is why all states in this category received a yellow or red.
These are distinct but complementary policy approaches.
- Social media age limit policies set a minimum age for social media account creation (ideally age 16), restricting the age at which minors can enter into a contractual relationship with social media platforms that can then harvest their data and engineer their engagement. The strongest social media age limit policies do not contain a parental consent loophole, solving the collective-action problem that families face.
- Harmful design regulation targets the specific features that make platforms most damaging to young users, including algorithmic recommendations, infinite scroll, manipulative notification defaults, minimum default privacy settings, and data practices that exploit developing minds.
These approaches often — and ideally — overlap: An age limit law that defines covered platforms by the presence of harmful design elements rather than by specifying the services that count as “social media” effectively does both at once. If that’s the case in your state, the state received credit under both social media age limits and harmful tech design regulation. As of publication, no state has enacted a strong social media age limit law with no parental consent loophole.
For more details, see our Methodology page.
We welcome feedback and invite you to fill out the form on our contact page.