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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Not really
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201402/five-myths-about-young-people-and-social-media
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202011/myth-versus-fact-social-media-and-teens-mental-health
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.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201402/five-myths-about-young-people-and-social-media
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202011/myth-versus-fact-social-media-and-teens-mental-health