New York City schools have had a long history of phone restriction policies, with an outright ban in the early 2000s that was reversed about 10 years later. Individual schools, like the ones where Corletta and Leston teach, have had the freedom to implement their own restrictions.
That will change again in the new academic year as all schools in New York state will implement a bell-to-bell ban — one of the strictest among dozens of other states that have passed similar legislation — barring students from access to personal devices that can connect to the internet for the entire school day. Schools will be required to provide storage for the devices.
But with such new policies, many being implemented for the first time this school year or in effect for less than two years, no one knows what the perfect model looks like.
Researchers are moving cautiously as they grapple with uncertainty about the effectiveness of in-school phone bans on mental health. Data yields mixed results — and there’s growing a sentiment that more has to be done outside of schools to get kids off their phones and back into the world.
A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly three quarters of Americans support restrictive phone use in schools, up six percentage points since last year — but many are also unsure how far the bans should go. About 44% of respondents supported all day bans, with others split on whether students should have access to their phones between classes or at lunch.
It is not to help the children.
It’s explicitly designed to hurt LGBT teens
Kids are being harmed, but so is everyone else.
We need to stop acting as if there is some bandaid fixes or regulations that can adress these issues.
Phones in general need to be refocused on their utility, and social media specifically needs to be rebuilt as a public services, and the notion of it as a for profit enterprise needs to be buried six feet under.
Leave the kids alone. They’re already oppressed enough (the real reason their mental health is shit, phones are a scapegoat)
I want to respond to the unschooling bit here as I have some personal experience.
First I acknowledge that this is an anecdotal thing and there are likely examples of unschooling going way better. Second, I really do empathize and appreciate people wanting to not have kids grow up in a system that perpetuates toxic aspects of capitalism.
This being said, I think unschooling, while having a fine motive, can set up children to have extremely difficult lives. We have family friends who are unschooling their children and their knowledge and behavior is concerning to me. The eldest is 13 years old and doesn’t know how to read, because she never had any interest in learning. I am fine if a child wants to be a creative. But learning to read and write I feel is too important a skill to leave out of any curriculum. I won’t let that become just some tool that perpetuates capitalism.
Do I enjoy our capitalist society? No, and I want to work towards a better future in that regard. But I also think unschooling just tries to cover ears to the reality we live in. I think it’s important to teach children to criticize the systems we are in. But if a child grows up wanting to be a creative, but can’t read, write, do simple arithmetic, all sorts of skills that one would need to just survive in a capitalist dominated world… Like what’s the point. Traditional school does not have to be nefarious. I grew up in Seattle public schools and was taught to criticize these systems despite being a cog in it at the time.
We did not want to be in school and ran away from it all the time. It was a terrible, awful experience. Yet we did have a thirst for learning just not in a rigidly defined system where we could only fail or pass, where hierarchy was the main thing going on, where teacher’s egos could not take being told they were wrong. Where we were bullied and stressed all the time.
We did not do well in school but thrived outside of it as far as learning was concerned.
We hope you can appreciate why we push so strongly for unschooling or any other system that is not the terrible experience we were forced into, and we know many still are as well, to this very day.
I was abused (bullying is a cutesy term to.avoid calling it what it really is) in school and still have social anxiety from it. It’s only “a good place for socialization” because all the other ones are banned being banned (see OP’s post) or are engineered out of the built environment. In high school I learned as much out of class as I did in, and the more valuable half too.
I’m sorry y’all had a bad experience in traditional school. But I still think a healthily funded well curriculumed public school system can be a great thing. I recently had my 10 year high school reunion and it was a really awesome time with a bunch of smart thinkers and kind souls. Ofc that’s not the experience for everyone, but a lot of people have great experiences in school. I mean I was also bullied in school but overall am very happy I had my public school experience. I’m sure unschooling can go well too. We can trade anecdotes all day though. I can’t say for sure that unschooling is actually bad and public schools are actually good. What I do know is I’m not ready to throw away the public school system just yet
What we are saying is that it needs to exist for reasons other than teaching to a test or to get a job, we agree it shouldn’t be thrown away but it needs to be massively different and way less abusive.
Oh yeah I for sure agree with that. Standardized tests are fucking stupid. There are issues with the way it’s set up and think it can and should be changed and overhauled. I don’t think giving youth some direction on things to learn is bad but it for sure right now drives kids to a certain capitalistic end goal. Which I also still think isn’t totally un-useful in this fucked up system we find ourselves in (though it can be done kinder). Give kids the tools to understand why the system is fucked up while also gentally preparing them to work through it and maybe try and change it for the better.
I think we’re mostly on the same page. I do sometimes get worried about homeschool stuff as this perpetuation of the hyper individualistic nature of the United States (where I live) but there are some things a traditional school system can learn from it. Thanks for talking through it with me though c:
Yes, we agree on that.
Oh, we are well aware how homeschooling and unschooling can go wrong, especially in such a system, we are not fans of it and so not support abuse perpetuated in any education, public, home, or otherwise.
We are against it being for religious reasons or conspiracy reasons, we just want people to be able to choose what truly works for them, public school does not work for everyone currently and those who it does not work for should not be forced into it.
Those who it does work for still deserve better than what is avaliable currently though.
Smartphones are the medium through which children are most oppressed through social media apps, poisoning their brains. Instagram and Facebook deliberately targeted young girls to make them feel like shit about their bodies, and engagement based algorithms (particularly YouTube) pumped harmful fascist ideas to young boys.
You’re downvoted, but the data show this to be accurate.
Not really bothered by downvotes when, like you say, the data is pretty clear on the matter.
Then it is the social media companies that should go or fix their act, not phones in and of themselves.
Sure, but the phones are the tools which are facilitating the harm and they’re not necessary for a child to have in school. I’d even go far enough to say that no minor should have full unfettered access to a smartphone or the internet but this requires a level of involvement from parents.
Kids get bullied in school. Kids feel alone. LGBTQ+ kids, neurodivergent kids, others. Phones connect them to support. Friends, like minded folks, etc. Some get support at home. Some don’t.
Bans will harm a lot of kids. It’s a sad and dangerous moral panic.
Parental involvement would be wonderful, but we should not punish all kids just because some parents aren’t up to the task.
I’m showing my age here - I was alone in school. I am neurodivergent and part of the LGBTQ+ community, both things that were not well understood or accepted when I was in school. The only brief pieces of support and connection I had was online needed to be on a PC as smartphones were simply not a thing.
Are you saying that children today must have instant and immediate access to friends and like minded people online during school hours? The children I know (i.e. children within my family and the children of friends) don’t have smartphones at school and are able to wait until break times or after school to socialise but they’re also not American; is this a uniquely American issue?
We have to acknowledge the times we’re in. Many kids only access to non-face-to-face communication is their phone, no desktop, no laptop (or at least not one that isn’t school-issued and locked down). Many kids don’t have the support they need at home. Many kids don’t have enough friends they can regularly meet face-to-face. Kids have less autonomy these days than the times when we grew up, too.
Consider if your PC was taken away because landline phones existed. Or if your landline phone was taken because you could use the postal service or pass notes in class. Etc.
So, no, please don’t focus on the “instant and immediate” part of your question, and focus on the “access”. In that sense, yes I am saying kids today must have access to friends and like-minded people. Banning phones in schools could take that access away for a significant portion of their waking hours. And for vulnerable kids who don’t have steady home lives, that might be a disproportionate effect.
I do believe that we should adapt to prevent new technology from disrupting education, but I believe blanket bans have too great a potential for harm.
Thank you for expanding more on this, it’s gone a long way to helping me understand better.
I still believe that social media, as it currently exists, is something which is harmful to children for reasons I laid out previously but connection and support are important.
The perfect solution would be to disallow any kind of traditional social media outside of break times whilst bolstering better spaces for support and friendship both online and offline; the first part of that is definitely a symptom of the second but I’m not sure how to best solve that outside of direct community support and advocacy for such spaces.
Why are you so obsessed with taking away that access? That’s not a good thing you know
The thread lays out my opinion retty clearly; characterising a discussion as an obsession is being deliberately disingenuous.
and they’re not necessary for a child to have in school.
We disagree, there are many reasons why they should be allowed, including in order to facilitate learning, and to stop abuse by providing evidence of it happening.
Yeah, good point. There’s lots of phone camera footage that those in power would rather not have made, like cops chokeholding kids in the middle class
Surely learning can be facilitated with devices provided by the school if such devices are necessary? There are dumb phones with cameras that can be used to document any evidence of abuse.
School is prison
Not really what we were discussing and trivialises the harm done by systems of retributive punishment but okay.
Remember all the shitty stuff happening in classrooms that’s been outed by phone cameras over the last 10+ years? Pepperidge Farms remembers…
Snapchat in particular (but TikTok and Instagram, too) is absolutely toxic for children and should be illegal, imho. This legislation is a step in the right direction, but we’ll need to educate parents to move the needle even further if we want to see major mental health gains.
If you’re a parent reading this, please consider getting your child a dumb phone instead of a smartphone! A tablet at home is fine—not having notifications 24/7, and being in a semi-monitored space (with no social media apps installed) will make a big difference.
Sounds like a problem specific to Snapchat. I recommend everyone against corpo crap. It’s not even strictly an age thing they jsut abuse us all
In this age of school shooters I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable sending my hypothetical kid to school without a phone, or knowing it wouldn’t be allowed to be on them provided they kept it away and silent.
Definitely confiscate it if it’s out when it shouldn’t be, but when phones can be how people have access to money, bus passes, ID, etc then it seems unreasonable to not expect kids to learn how to be responsible about having it with them. I don’t want to deal with a bunch of 18 year olds that don’t know how to use a phone appropriately in the workplace.
From the outside looking in, it’s funny in a sick and twisted way that legislators are looking to ban phones from schools because they’re dangerous but do nothing about guns.
Look, school shootings are horrible and should not happen. I support sensible regulations on gun sales, for example.
That said, we are going to need our AR-15s to shoot Fascists.
I could be incredibly wrong with this however it’s my understanding that fascists equally to being shot whether it be by a 9mm or an assault rifle. Additionally, there are still mass shootings where far too many innocent people are dying with a notable lack of fascists being shot.
I don’t believe the justification of having AR-15s to shoot fascists is the worth the trade-off of dead children.
FYI: My understanding is that smart phones make school shootings more deadly, as they start misinformation, panic, and help shooters find targeted individuals. But school shootings aren’t a major concern where I used to teach (not the US), so I never looked into whether this is sorted by research, it was just the explanation we were given as teachers for our lockdown procedures.
The details are quite graphic so I wouldn’t recommend reading about it, but you can also find news stories of kids being on the phone with 911 and being kept calm, relaying information about the shooting to help authorities, etc. I don’t know of an instance where phones were used to track victims, but so many shootings happen it wouldn’t surprise me. I just think the potential positives outweigh the potential harm, at least in the US.
So glad to hear that more districts are following the evidence on the toxicity of cell phones on youth mental health. As a former secondary teacher, I’ve been following this very closely, and it’s good to see politicians actually doing the right thing in increasing numbers globally, finally. If only we could get more parents on board with banning social media access for their children (until age ~16) in the first place!!
To be clear, there’s very little evidence that having dumb phones are a problem. Phone calls are great, and simple SMS/MMS texting is largely used by students effectively for communication and to build connections. And, obviously, are more than sufficient for parents to keep in contact with their children.
The problem is smart phones, especially “social media” apps, but, more generally, with addictive and deceptive dark patterns in most popular apps and, increasingly, websites.
For example, within minutes with a fresh account on TikTok, Instagram, or SnapChat shorts, teenage girls will be shown content promoting self harm/suicide and encouraging disordered eating. Teenage boys will be shown misogynistic “manosphere” and racist content just as quickly. It’s incredibly toxic.
I’ve already written too much for an Internet comment, but if you want to learn more, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” is a great, recent popular press book that explains this in detail. The only big criticism I’ve heard is that he does the Malcolm Gladwell thing where he jumps a bit farther than the evidence supports, but the book is otherwise very sound, well explained, and well researched. And, even if his conclusions aren’t the ideal solution (as sorted by evidence), it’s still grounded in reality and much better than the status quo, so I think this criticism is overstated.
I found The Anxious Generation to have useful information presented with unfounded conclusions. No causal link established, written to drive this moral panic.
Queer and neurodivergent kids cut off from their only source of friendship and hope are going to suffer for that book, and it pains me.
Non-algorithmic websites aren’t a problem in the same way and can be accessed from a home computer or tablet. Chat rooms and web forums are generally really wholesome spaces, at least if they’re moderated. There are lots of amazing spaces for 2SLGBTQ+ and neurospicy youth to connect outside of for-profit, maximize-engagement, addiction services.
Part of the reason to ban smart phones is notification anxiety, btw. The constant barrage of notifications scoring youth on their value as a person (“likes”) is addictive and incredibly toxic. Removing constant distraction from notifications in their pockets at all times alone is a huge benefit, and there is strong research supporting that. (Like the study that showed even having a switched off phone in the room impacts the ability to focus, with increasing effects of the phone is in their pocket but off, increasing again if it’s on but silent).
I strongly, vehemently reject that limiting smart phone access will hurt 2SLGBTQ+ and neurospicy kiddos from finding connection as there are many better ways of accessing safer online spaces than what phone apps. (My favourite example is the “autism” Minecraft server moderated by dads of autistic kiddos—what an amazing, wholesome project!)
Actual LGBT and neurodiverse people disagree with you. There’s a plot afoot to isolate and censor them and you’re helping them. Why are you helping them and their manufactured moral panic?
Actual LGBT and neurodiverse people disagree with you.
let’s not invoke monoliths here, i am both and i think there are quite a lot of defensible arguments for restricting phones in the specific context of a learning environment–not least of which is that it’s hardly “censorship” or “isolation”[1] to ask them to just not use a phone for roughly 8 hours of the 24 hours in any given day.
social media is arguably far more alienating and inhuman on average to children and young adults than it is liberating ↩︎
It’s not a coincidence this is happening alongside age verification and outright bans. It’s all one big manufactured moral panic to isolate a vulnerable population I won’t give an once because people like you won’t stop taking. School attendance is also literally legally mandatory so how you’re treated there matters.
You’re also conflating certain corpo slop apps with literally any use of any mobile device, which is a common slight of hand that doesn’t get called out enough
It’s not a coincidence this is happening alongside age verification and outright bans. It’s all one big manufactured moral panic to isolate a vulnerable population I won’t give an once because people like you won’t stop taking.
you are the sort of uncritical, single-minded person who is going to help turn us all into digital serfs on a latifundium that can never be overthrown and permanently enriches a class of technolibertarian freaks that want to remake society in their image. the fact of the matter is smart phones as a whole are arguably the most successful corporate mechanism to privatize social life yet devised, and any “liberation” you think can be derived from them by any class of people is illusory without overthrowing capitalism. the phone companies and the apps they host have successfully positioned themselves as middlemen with free ability to hoover up an endless amount of “consensually given” data that can then be used to quantify said social life, commodify our personhood, and preemptively snuff out any real competition to the existing economic oligopoly. if you were to structure a system so incapable of being challenged that we’re doomed to live under it forever, this would be a pretty good way to do that.
children, needless to say, are especially not liberated by this state of affairs–or by the future that people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg want to build and which you seem to want to enable–and giving them free rein online in this absolutist way because you want to “emancipate them” is, ironically, often the best way to ensure capitalists exploit their labor and data in the current system. Roblox, for example, has made a fucktillion dollars off of your subtextually proposed strategy of just “letting kids be kids”–those children have essentially provided the company with a free, uncompensated, popular series of games for them to exploit the entire value of. totally coincidentally, they don’t even spend any of that money they’ve made protecting children from the actual social harms children could be exposed to on their platform, so Roblox is awash in grooming and cyberbullying and hate speech and sometimes even graphic violence that is never dealt with.
You’re also conflating certain corpo slop apps with literally any use of any mobile device, which is a common slight of hand that doesn’t get called out enough
the “corpo slop apps” have like 95% market penetration among people under-18 and as such are the almost-exclusive mediums through which they interface with digital spaces (because they are explicitly engineered to make us envious and addicted, and to make us all into people who live and die for the fix for attention that such websites give us). let’s not pretend this is a serious “conflation” when all available evidence is this is the overwhelming use-case of mobile devices.
There are indeed reasonable restrictions, like “no phones in class” and so on. Blanket bans are going to cause lots of issues, and for some kids (generally the ones who are already the most bullied and vulnerable), will cause more harm than good.
Blanket bans are going to cause lots of issues, and for some kids (generally the ones who are already the most bullied and vulnerable), will cause more harm than good.
name one issue that a blanket ban will cause “more harm than good” on.
A neurodivergent kid with few friends at school, who doesn’t learn well in a public school environment, who has an authoritarian home life might rely on their phone to find connection.
My children are both, and I’m one of those.
There’s no moral panic in my concerns about cell phones, just evidence about their detrimental effects on mental health.
evidence about their detrimental effects on mental health.
Not really
I think you raise a lot of good points about individual services, and so on. I love when kids are shown these positive resources and given the ability to interact in healthy spaces both offline and on.
The issue with the current authoritarian wave of smartphone/social media bans, though, is that (in almost every single case) they aren’t providing new support for kids. They aren’t filling the gap in community they’re ripping away. Some kids don’t have as big a level of support from the adults in their life as you highlight. A blanket ban on smartphones will disproportionately affect the vulnerable kids.
There are more nuanced ways to prevent smartphone disruption, but blanket bans are going to cause a lot of harm.
It’s the only reason I’m still alive, as someone who was both. And hurting people like me is the goal. Psycho Christian abusers want total isolation and people like OP want to give it to them based off of lies by child abusers blaming everyone else for their misdeeds
the core issue here is not that the modern internet and social media landscape is bad for kids, it’s that it is bad in general, for everyone! Kids are just a vulnerable population that it is easy to point to and limit access for.
We need to reject the notion that this is a business, and accept that digital spaces are a public services that shouldn’t be designed around maximizing user engagement and profitability.
Delaying when we allow large companies to destroy people’s minds with dark patterns doesn’t solve the core issues. There’s no good way to regulate this, the core failure is the nature of these services as for profit companies with no incentive but to design manipulative and addictive systems, and things won’t get better until that is dealt with.
Good point. Children have no rights and so they can be targeted for censorship with ease. The laws they’re pushing don’t just apply to algorithm driven corpo hellsites or phones. It’s a full on attack on our kids and their ability to connect on ways that are bad for those in power.
You’re also right, of course, but children (with a developing prefrontal cortex) are particularly vulnerable, and that’s borne out by magnified mental health effects from social media use. Restricting social media would have big, positive effects.
The reason for age 16 being proposed is that this gives a couple of years for parents to help support youth with managing access to social media, for example by having supportive conversations about how to manage toxic content and people.
The prefrontal cortex thing is being.g used to take away rights already. Still want to use that unscientific excuse?
Haidt is a hack, and specific apps sucking obscures the sinister true motives behind this moral panic
Agreed. Kids are going to suffer, like for real suffer, as we take away their lifelines and act like we’ve solved a problem.
The “problem” they’re trying to solve is “LGBT kids aren’t killing themselves enough”
Could you please be more clear? As a concerned father and educator, I strongly agree with Haidt’s broad argument and I am very worried for Gen Alpha coming of age with addiction machines on them 24/7. I’d like to hear more about what possible “sinister true motivations” might be aligning with my concern for youth mental health.
It’s isolation to facilitate abuse. Christians want to cut off support lines for LGBT propel, especially teens.
them using AI to complete thier assignments are more problematic.
Most schoolwork is busywork anyways. I support AI ruining the sorry excuse for an “education” system we have
