Every K-12 school, public or private, should ban smartphones, and probably dumb phones, too, in the school building and on school grounds — during school hours at least.
This is the necessary first step in fighting the mental health crisis facing children.
Children don’t need smartphones or social media at all, but that’s a parenting decision. (A really important parenting decision — you have no idea how many parents tell me that they deeply regret letting their child have a smartphone.) What school districts and principals can do is make the school grounds a smartphone-free place. (One benefit will then be reducing parents’ inclination to give their child a smartphone in the first place.)
“Take away their cellphones” is the headline on the latest article in the magazine Education Next. Education writer Doug Lemov argued:
An institution with the dual purpose of fostering students’ learning and well-being cannot ignore an intruder that actively erodes a young mind’s ability to focus and sustain attention and also magnifies anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Cellphones must be turned off and put away when students walk through school doors. Period.The author is right. But I don’t think he goes far enough. Schools should communicate to parents when their children are very young, starting in kindergarten, about the harms of smartphones. Schools should build a culture and help parents build a social life for their children that doesn’t lean on apps or phones. Sports teams shouldn’t communicate only through apps, especially not with the children themselves.
Smartphones desocialize children. As one expert quoted in the article said, “It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating notifications.”
Smartphones and the internet in general shorten everyone’s attention span, especially those of students. In 2017, a study found that undergraduates, who are more cerebrally mature than K-12 students and therefore have stronger impulse control, “switched to a new task on average every 19 seconds when they were online.” The phones permanently rewire our children’s brains.
Many places have banned cell phones in schools. Lemov wrote: “These bans are often followed by remarkable and instantaneous change. ‘It has transformed the school. Social time is spent talking to friends,’ a teacher from Australia told my colleagues and me. ‘It is so nice walking around the yard seeing students actually interacting again, and no distractions during class,’ said another.”
Parents should go to their school board meeting, call their principals, and petition their private schools to ban cell phones before the first day of school.
A footnote:
One of the many huge costs of closing schools, sports, playgrounds, clubs, activities, and life for young people was driving them to spend more time on screens, more time on the internet, more time on social media, and more time on smartphones. One study found a 17% increase in screen use from 2019 to 2022, and the increase was higher for children in poor families.
So, you politicians and health officials who said you were protecting children with lengthy closures and lockdowns into the summer of 2020 and the following school year, you were harming them. You should have known that. I hope that sinks in. You should apologize and probably resign.
