It really can't be underestimated either for children or adults how much we are dependent on ease of access.
If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it. If you are stuck in a room and you have a math textbook and a novel you now have a choice.
A phone? A phone is everything else. You're putting "the thing we are supposed to be doing" and "everything else" in the same place. I can't even do it as an adult, I need to put my phone on the other side of the room if I want to read something proper.
> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it.
I would literally doodle, stare out a window, zone out daydreaming, or anything else other than read a textbook I didn't want to read for one reason or another, or pay attention to a teacher for that matter.
Yes, it is anecdotal, but I'm sure we've all been children before, and even if you didn't do it, people around you surely did if you paid any attention. For god sake, I remember my classmates just using a lighter on small patches of whiteout ink during one specific class because of how bored they were. Extreme example? Yes. But passing papers, making paper planes, and other crafts, literally anything to pass the time.
This isn't exclusive to children either. If an adult doesn't want to do something, they might very well not unless forced to, and even then.
Btw, I'm not trying to argue about banning or not banning a phone, this is specifically about the statement above.
EDIT: I should probably mention that this isn't a 5min thing, I could easily zone a teacher out for 45min-90min blocks if I didn't care about what they had to say, much less a book I didn't want to read.
> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it.
I'm not so sure if this is true. No clue about kids, but if I'm (personally) stuck at the office and I'm really not feeling like working, I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place with lots to do (like home, lol) but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me.
I suspect the problem isn't the phones, the problem is lack of honest, genuine interest. Compliance can be enforced, but I'm not sure about efficiency of learning under duress. Compulsion brings aversion.
This, of course, is a purely idealistic view, assuming ideal high-skilled spherical educators in vacuum rather than actual real-world conditions. While there are always ways to captivate interest and steer it into productive learning, it requires some orders of magnitude more resources than what's available.
It’s more than that. You sitting in your living room watching Netflix instead of working is different than a classroom.
In a classroom environment, once one kid is futzing around on their phone, others follow. That creates issues for the teachers who end up policing behavior instead of their jobs. You also have the obvious issues with cheating.
When I was the president of a school board, a subset of active and vocal parents were against the ban, citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre. In some cases I had doubts with respect to the veracity of that argument. The parents are a problem too - many have an expectation to text or speak to kids throughout the day.
The school handled it well IMO, no phones until grade 5, then kids can have them in their locker and use them at specific times.
> I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me.
I mean there's a very broad spectrum here, and a slight distraction can be the difference between spending 5 minutes staring at a wall followed by three hours in flow state vs. spending three hours in mindless distractions.
And children don't have any experience in how to cultivate flow state in the presence of distraction. Removing distractions naturally provides more opportunities to find the flow.
I agree. An adult can ask themselves what they're doing and why and how it aligns with their interests so on (aka have that midlife crisis, haha), a kid probably doesn't yet have enough self-reflection capacity yet.
In my perception, distractions are ideally managed through interest management. Make the desired task actually truly desired - and you're guaranteed to not get distracted. And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working.
When you don't have someone to help with "why am I doing this and not that?", I guess it's true that next best option is to eliminate potential of distraction. It's not great, but is probably better than not doing anything about it.
So, as always, there is an ideal approach (that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment), and a working approach that's very contrary to the ideal way of doing things.
Hm... Maybe teaching kids (and adults) about the modern attention/spam economy actually works can help to lower the distractions. After you see through attention-grabbing tricks, scrolling through online feed wastewaters (or watching junk on streaming platforms, or playing "games" whose entire raison d'être is to make money on players) becomes much less interesting or rewarding. Just a thought.
I tried leaving a stack of programming books beside my pc while I'm working and putting my phone in another room. It does work. But I keep forgetting to do it.
I was considering trying a month of no I internet browsing unless it is required for my job or learning.
I did something like this for a couple of weeks recently. I call it 'no idle screen time'. Any activity that involved using a screen (phone, computer, or television) had to have a purpose. The purpose could be simple such as messaging friends, finding an answer to something I was curious about, or simply looking at the weather forecast. Usually it would be work related.
Benefits became clear almost immediately. I got more actual work done. I suddenly had way more free time than I imagined. I renewed my library card and started reading again. My focus improved. I actually started actively listening to music again (rather than just having it on in the background). I got more exercise. I took the time to prepare better food. A certain low-level sense of anxiety that had become all too familiar simply disappeared.
I did slowly regress. It started with watching a movie or show in the evening, that sort of thing. Now, here I am writing this comment. Probably time to give it another go.
Reminds me of my time in boarding school, my grades were awesome there and I read alot cause I can't play video games, unfortunately it didn't make me wiser so I struggled a lot with self discipline later on.
It's not only distraction though. The phone is a window to the internet which offers all the knowledge of the world.
And in 'my day' I spent a lot of time at the library which was full of thrillers and comics. And spent most of my time learning about computers and electronics.
It's not an unprecedented problem and offers new offers new opportunities too.
> But I guess I'm an outlier like most people on this site that promotes learning new things though text-heavy presentation.
Bold to assume this is what most people on this site are like!
I'd hypothesize you're still an outlier in that group in these regards. And that's great! But lots of the data points to people like HN's general demographic still being pulled away from long form text content and towards synthesized/aggregated content served via mixed media. There's still just such strong cultural elitism in the notion of reading a book to learn something, it's not super sexy to claim on a messageboard.
> Bold to assume this is what most people on this site are like!
Really, look at the front page of this site. If you're not interested in dense textual content you would have closed the tab within 1 second. I really love this site but most people won't even see the story titles, their brain just registers "a confusing jumble of text" and doesn't even try to engage.
> But lots of the data points to people like HN's general demographic still being pulled away from long form text content and towards synthesized/aggregated content served via mixed media.
And what data is that?
> There's still just such strong cultural elitism in the notion of reading a book to learn something, it's not super sexy to claim on a messageboard.
I don't think I'm elitist or sexy. Just different. I hate video content because I can't consume it at my own pace (usually much faster than the content offers because video is tailored for the slowest possible denominator). And it's difficult to build context ("where am I within the story") when skipping forward or backwards. In text this is pretty seamless.
I don't tend to consume textual content in a start to end sequential manner. But I jump around. Because some stuff I already know, some i really want to deeper dive on, some I need to refer back to later. This is much harder with video.
Your comment is totally irrelevant to the conversation regarding schools, though. Smartphones are massively corroding kids' brains these days, and YES, this is much worse than TV or video games back in the day.
You've definitely used Twitter, even if just to see an announcement or something. Too much important information has been posted there over the last decade for anyone online a lot to have been able to avoid it.
I personally balk at the idea that everything is at our fingertips. Yes, a lot of information is readily available, but it is mostly very shallow, poorly referenced, and in short form. It is actually very hard to find in-depth, long form content on the Internet these days. You have to look very hard. Almost the only way to find it is by crawling dedicated forums and getting links that way. It's still much easier to find information in books.
> It really can't be underestimated either for children or adults how much we are dependent on ease of access.
nit: If you mean to say these groups are so dependent on ease of access it's impossible to estimate correctly to what degree, you mean it can't be overestimated, not underestimated.
I use my phone to look up words/concepts/references all the time while reading - I couldn't do without it, flipping through a dictionary or walking up to a computer to read a quick Wikipedia intro to a concept/person/place/etc would just get me far more distracted.
I did that, and I use my Remarkable 2 mostly for reading epub novels and even leave the pen at home by now... :(
Okay, knowing myself I never thought I would use it much for creative work to begin with (and I was right).
I still think I did my best programming and learning about computers when I did not actually own one. East Germany, 1980s, I was in school. All programming happened with my head and paper,
I got the cheap standard case of the very first iteration (I was an original pre-order customer for the RM 2), not expecting to carry it around much (I was working from home most of the time anyway). I have to stick the pen somewhere else in the bag.
I just looked, they don't even have that cheap model anymore.
Sometimes when I'm reading a paper book I miss the easy access to a dictionary that I get on my ebook reader, but I have found I can just keep reading and infer enough to not interrupt my reading. I keep notes on a post-it and I check those later.
I'm not suggesting you do the same, is just that I felt identified with your comment.
Yet somehow we all survived before smartphones. If you have a question and raise your hand to ask, everyone else benefits from getting the answer as well.
Do you think that's useful? The old school way would be to jot down notes about questions and followups. I'm curious if the old school way relates to better retention of both the questions and answers. My suspicion is yes. I should do this myself more.
Nonetheless I did it all the time as a kid and it was fine using a dictionary. Is it much easier on a phone? Absolutely, but then I also get caught up reading the etymology, looking up on Wikipedia the Greek roots of the word, ending up at some Greek wars' battle in 500BC and what's the current geopolitical situation of the region, how did they vote on the last Greek Parliamentary election, etc.
For my curiosity it's amazing, not so much for getting shit done.
Maybe it's a translation issue, but it seems in this article that the effect on school work (i.e. tests, quizzes, reports, homework assignments, etc.) was not studied, as I think the title of the article implies it was. Rather, they studied the phone ban's effect on school culture and bullying.
To be clear, I believe a phone ban in schools would have a positive effect on academics, and that that would show up if it were studied. It's just that it doesn't seem like that's what they did in this case. Thus, arguing about whether phones affect attention span, memory, even reading time, is not relevant in the context of this article.
It has always felt absolutely bonkers to me that smartphone bans weren't put into place instantly across US schools as soon as they started becoming common.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. If I'd brought a handheld game console like a Gameboy or something into class, it would have been confiscated immediately. Sure, I get it, that's not the same thing; obviously phones have other uses.
But there is absolutely zero reason a kid needs their smartphone during class. All educational materials should be provided by the school. Kids do not need to be and should not be communicating with anyone outside class. If parents/guardians need to get in touch with kids during an emergency, they can do it the way they've done it as long as we've had the telephone: call the main office and have someone walk to the class to bring the kid to the phone.
I do expect that smartphones could actually bring something useful to the classroom -- after all, they grant access to more or less all the world's knowledge -- but the downsides of allowing them far far far outweigh any possible upsides.
There’s a lot of reasons where possessing a phone in school is legit. In cities, transit passes are commonly phone bases. Some apartments require smartphones for gate entry.
It’s not hard to have a little checkin locker by the teacher’s desk as kids come in. Just make sure they turn the sound off before sliding it into it’s temporary home
why can’t a student leave their phone in the locker? or the teacher has a large bin where all students must put their phone into (powered off) before class starts.
Agreed, and they shouldn't need to be instituted, because they were already policy, weren't they?
I had a CD Walkman during high school. Was smart enough to never to bring it out unless everything else in class was done and neighbors had nothing to say.
1980s East Germany, many homes did not have a phone. My parents could have gotten one, their job was important enough, but they did not want to be disturbed at home so they never asked for the great privilege of having a home phone.
It can be challenging to make your way to the school’s office once the facility has been taken over by an armed gunman, which is a great reason for kids to have comms at all times, if not one that commonly arises.
Once when I was 10, 11 years old, I needed to call home from school.
I had never used a payphone. I had perhaps rarely used our rotary home phone to dial out.
Of course it was after school hours, and a stressful personal crisis already, and no adult was hovering nearby to explain anything.
I figured out how to put in the coins and enter the number on TouchTone, (just like I'd seen on TV) but I didn't know what a dial tone or ring tone sounded like, nor a busy signal, and the line was in use at home, so indeed it was a busy signal that I patiently listened to for several minutes. I believed it was ringing and nobody was picking up.
By the time I was 21 and working at my first job, I was promoted and given a cubicle with a phone on the desk. I was quite anxious that it would ring and I wouldn't know what to do with the call. I was working for an Internet provider!
At the school by me every day is a line that stretches for blocks of parents picking up their kids at 3pm. All of these cars and human time was previously handled by a school bus and one driver.
People are paranoid for a variety of reasons about their kids.
Also, culturally, parents don’t let kids walk home. When I was a kid in NYC only the kids bussed in from the hood had busses, the rest of us from the local neighborhood walked. State aid only reimburses for trips beyond a certain radius.
A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school.
Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.)
But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home.
The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine.
It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids.
---
Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on.
Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting.
So what changed?
To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home.
But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.
On the reading question raised by another comment: I went to school recently enough that we had smartphones but before tiktok. You were allowed them but they'd be confiscated if seen in lessons or corridors.
On balance I'd probably try and get rid entirely, but vividly recall my academic/engineering/whatever awakening being from downloading huge quantities of textbooks and the like onto my phone at the age of 14 or 15, so I wouldn't go stray too far away from modern technology in some sense.
I could also argue that this made me quite distracted but (say) also meant that it was the best part of a decade until I would see something, conditioned on that I found it interesting, that I hadn't seen before in formal education.
Social media is far more addictive now. And doom scrolling is far better tuned. I see my kids and those of my friends. It's not at all what it was even 10 years ago.
This is only getting wise as engagement is the only metric these companies care about. I support the social media ban under 18.
It should've been expanded into driving a long time ago. There are laws against distracted driving but I still see people weaving around like they're drunk on the roads. When I look into the car they're usually holding a phone (on speakerphone) or holding it up to their ear.
People suck at driving enough as it is without driving one handed and distracted.
Last year in Michigan it was made a primary offense. Driving was really pleasant for a month or two and they realized nobody enforces it where it would help most.
Montana is still legal apparently but I'm sure cops could write you a ticket for the infractions you commit while on your phone, just not for the phone itself.
Do you have proof there have been more car accidents since phones entered the driving arena compared to the before times? I always hear people claiming the roads are more dangerous but I’ve not seen any more accidents than when I was younger. Just a quick perusal on the web shows fatalities per 1 million miles has dropped significantly since the 1990s
In addition to the added crashes and deaths caused by mobile phone usage, state and federal leaders should be setting agendas that reduce car usage altogether to prevent deaths and injuries and pivot toward safer and by far cheaper modes of transit.
In the daily downtown crawl at 5PM I count about one in four drivers on their phone. Is there a way to tell apart the adaptive cruise control cars from the ones without ? ACC is the only way I can explain why there isn't a crash every 5 minutes.
Seems to vary across models. Googling for Honda Civic: "And the Low-Speed Follow function can bring the vehicle to a complete stop when a vehicle detected ahead slows to a stop, and it lets you resume operation by pressing a button or the accelerator."
> What would be the point of a no smartphone section in a restaurant?
It elevates the experience. Going back to the class thing [1], cell phone on the table or cell-phone use during dining is a noticeable thing between e.g. Michelin-starred restaurants and diners. (And I’m only counting N > 1 tables.)
Weddings in particular seem to have evolved "check your phone at the door" policies. Though perhaps mostly to keep folks from ruining the professional photographers shots by constantly diving into the action with cameraphones/flashes blazing...
Conceptually I like the idea of giving everyone a locking pouch to put the phone in, with the ability to unlock it provided at the end of the event. That way the phone never leaves your person, but is unusable.
But at the same time this sort of thing would also make me kinda annoyed (as I have no problem, generally, keeping my phone in my pocket, on silent, when having it out is inappropriate0.
I don't dispute the facts in the article, but this question kept popping up in my mind: how do they define reading time? I mean, in a too-pedantic sense, smartphone screen time is roughly divided into reading, viewing (photos/videos), and gaming. Given that they are not allowed to take the phones, it seems unlikely that the school knows a student's primary usage mode. For example, a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone, thereby reducing their time in the school's library.
In other words, how holistic is the metric "reading time?"
I'm a high school teacher. Not for long, but for a few years now.
Never have I ever seen a student reading on their phone. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it must be a vanishingly small fraction that I have not yet encountered. When my students are on their phones, it's games, or it's (primarily video-based) social media. A smaller but notable fraction is background media consumption, either music or movies.
That's not to say I don't have kids who read, though they're much rarer than the music listeners, just that the readers seem to prefer physical books.
So at least in my experience, I wouldn't expect that metric to be vulnerable to this particular flavor of distortion.
Thanks for the reality check. I was worried about how I could be conflating my own personal view as a parent with the popular narrative of "kids these days and their Instagram/TikTok." Probably says a lot more about me, but I vastly prefer the reading experience of a thick book on a phone than as a physical copy. And I have since I was a teenager (and it was just PDAs and clever TI-89 hackery).
I used to read on PDA and then later on Nokia Internet Tablet. But never in school even if I had one where. At those times it was just games(Bejewelled, Space Trader, DopeWars) or graphic calculator software.
Most people don’t have the patience and attention span to read thick books in the first place. That’s something that you have to develop with practice, and kids who have access to TikTok aren’t going to get that practice.
I know I’m an autist and Wikipedia addictions are not the norm, but how can people not enjoy reading?
I got in trouble all the time in school for reading (real books) during class time when the teacher was lecturing about things I already knew. Do kids like this not exist anymore? I thought autism rates were going up!
Seriously, no one reads? I thought kids were getting all political and woke, presumably from reading progressive things? I guess it’s all TikTok mind control?
I categorically oppose phone bans on the grounds that it harms the “brilliant lazy”, and that these forces are exactly the kind you want to cultivate. (insert the famous bill gates and 4 types of German officers quote about this here) - but if this class of people has evaporated from the school systems than who am I even defending?
Also, all reading time in the school library won’t be equal. If the school insists on only certain reading time being valid they ought to just force kids to read a specific set of books. (My personal preference would be for fundamentally less coercive education.)
Sure. But I can pretty much guarantee the likelihood of finding worthwhile reading material in the school library is significantly higher than the likelihood of finding it on TikTok or X.
> a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone
Parent here. They could be, but let's be realistic here: they're likely not or if they are, they are the minority.
My kids have dedicated reading time with physical books and, if they want to, they are always free to read more long form text on their devices (not likely -- that's just reality unless you have a dedicated reading-only device).
> smartphone screen time is roughly divided into reading, viewing (photos/videos), and gaming
My kids are avid readers, but even they won't read on a phone or a pad or a computer. If they got hold of a phone, they'd always choose either games or viewing videos.
Phones make for poor reading devices. My girlfriend spends a lot of time reading light novels on her phone, and I don't understand how. The small format, constant scrolling, and the presence of ads on many apps and sites makes the experience look miserable. I don't know how many kids are using the paid versions of their reading apps, let alone reading long-form content at all.
There's been a few studies suggesting reading on paper is better for retention than reading on screens, and I've found one suggesting the size of the screen makes a further difference, but it looks like the latter may have some conflicting findings as well.
I taught at the high school level for a decade. I would occasionally have students review their usage stats and 1) they were regularly a bit shocked by the number of hours they spend on their phones, and 2) the vast majority of that time was games and social media.
Personally speaking, myself and my friend group used our phones mostly for reading in high school in the mid-2010s. It's the exception but certainly not unheard of. Those interested in writing are likely to do a lot of reading, and there are many amateur writing communities online that are populated mostly by teenagers.
> a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone
It's a nice thought, but I have kids that age and never have I once seen this happen or heard of it happening with any of their friends/classmates; that's not what phones are for according to GenZ/GenA
According to everyone, I think. E-readers exist for that precise reason, although actual books are the best according to me: no battery, more resilient, can be lent. Phones are great as dictionaries (notably foreign language dictionaries).
Man, I love reading, but I simply can't focus on reading a long book on my phone. There are too many distractions, too many urges that are way too easy to satisfy with all sorts of time wasters. So if I, as somebody who reads a lot of books and has been an avid reader since childhood, can't resist wasting time and focus on reading on my phone, then I can't imagine any significant number of kids would be able to.
Even if you were watching them, you don’t know that they don’t have an app that plays a game frame at 1 Hz that they sync their minds to while you see the other 59 frames at 60 Hz and think you’re seeing a book.
Without root access to the device and blinkers to ensure they aren’t looking at a second device strategically placed out of sight, you can’t conclude anything.
Speaking for myself (a grown-up) I do read a lot on my phone, but it's almost all "brain junk food" like Hacker News comments :) instead of something which slowly develops a complex idea like a book.
Doomscrolling is not reading. And is the one behaviour above literally any other thing that phones force you into. Their form factor and their apps have converged on the perfect device for "making you keep meaninglessly looking at the device" while reinforcing that behaviour.
A lot of interesting debate on phone bans right now. Including a great discussion on twitter about how some of the research being used to justify bans is using some dodgy stats: https://x.com/MatthewBJane/status/1843795198109000034
Some schools ban phones but allow laptops and tablets. It is the phones specifically that are the problem, not social media. (apparently)
My phone usage dropped after I got a personal laptop and an eBook reader. So did pretty much every one else's. The phone is just really inconvenient for anything other than doomscrolling.
In my opinion, the lack of alternative activities is overlooked. It is a ban and a prayer that the problem will solve itself.
> remove social media and you won't have kids on their phones all the time
This is a testable hypothesis. We shouldn’t conclude either way without more evidence. As it stands, enforcing a phone ban has advantages over an app one.
Mobile operating systems are designed to engage and distract the owner. Lost your attention for a few minutes? Screen dims and threatens to darken! Oh no! Touch its face and keep it alive! Notifications from everything. Alarms that won't shut off until you do something about it. Pleading with us to recharge the battery. Insisting that radios be turned back on and sensor access be granted.
Every app, every website you visit is infested with dialogs and pop-ups that you're brushing out of the way, trying to get something accomplished.
It really tests your resolve and concentration, to see if you finished that one task you had in mind when you unlocked your phone, without going into 5 more on the side, or whether you can tame your phone sufficiently to be an assistant or productivity tool, rather than a firehose of marketing from dozens of companies to you, the consumer.
Phones are ok as communication devices though, even if it's only "lunch half twelve 2nd floor canteen?" to a coworker. Whether schools need that or not is another question, though "Mum can you check did I leave my maths book on the desk?" via whatsapp seems to be a thing these days.
There's nothing magic about phones that makes them bad. It's mostly the content on them: social media. Which people here earn money hand over fist making more addictive and then wonder how it all happened. I was in high school right around the first iPhone. Kids got good at T9 texting but it wasn't anything like now I guess.
It isn't magic but they are different than laptops and desktops in important but subtle ways.
They are (generally) always on your person. They discourage the creation of text. They always have an internet connection. They are usually charged right next to your bed, so they are the first and last thing you interact with every day.
I have a middle school student and have observed this trend personally. Our school is considering a cell phone ban during school hours (can still bring the phone to school, goes in locker, get it on the way out), which I 100% support.
We use parental controls on iOS but those are buggy (and Android even worse from what I heard).
Has anyone here tried the Haidt recommendation of "no smartphones till high school, no social media till 16" with their children? Is it better than just banning them in school?
The problem is if the school doesn't ban it, it's a lot harder for the parent to enforce. The child will either complain constantly about their friends having it, or just do it behind your back.
If there is a school ban, then enforcement happens at school too, making it harder to do behind your back, and the bulk of their social circle isn't on social media, avoiding the FOMO issues.
Having personally not had a smartphone or laptop through most of college back when Facebook was still cool (smartphone by choice, laptop by crime), I can say that social media on a library computer is a very different beast. You get most of the social benefits (I'd argue all of the important ones, is instant chat really needed?) while avoiding most of the distractions.
So I get the complaint, but I feel like even if kids sneak around behind your back (been there too, lol, I rooted my iBook G4 when my parents added a password) the added friction makes a difference. In other words, kids will be kids, but that shouldn't stop us from setting healthy boundaries.
Edit: Bit of a tirade, but I'm trying to say I agree with you! Just trying to add interesting context.
There used to be a Silicon Valley parents versus not divide in my personal observation of kids with smart phones/tablets. It’s now generalised to a class division: the children of the rich tend to have tight restrictions at home and, increasingly, at school, around device use.
We need statewide rules if we’re to avoid creating a generational gap in cognitive and social competence.
That's not surprising. Rich people can afford childcare for all or a large part of the day, and can instruct their nanny to actually engage the child rather than pacifying them with a tablet screen.
Parents who can't afford that will resort to anything to occupy their child when they need a moment of peace, and it's hard to blame them, honestly.
If we want to avoid creating a generational gap in cognitive and social competence we should outlaw private education ad significantly boost state education.
Wow! Interesting how this change not only reduced phone use but also led to improvements in school culture and social engagement. But I think the success of such a ban lies in its careful implementation, with collaboration between students, parents, and staff.
It could also be the students hide them better, because they aren't allowed to have them.
When I visited one of our offices in India there was a phone ban. Employees were given a locker for their phone (and other stuff if they wanted), where the phone was to remain while they were in the work area. Being a visitor, I complied, but then quickly found out almost no one else did. They all secretly had their phones out doing whatever when the boss wasn't looking. I stopped locking mine up after a bit as well after seeing this.
That’s possible, but harder to hide for students than employees. Employees are given, generally, a bit more trust than students are. At a lot of schools, students aren’t even allowed to leave for lunch.
Sure but not when there's a direct conflict of interest. I'd also wager he has loads of data on things like test scores and if he says there's nothing conclusive it likely means the data shows no change.
I’d wager he has less data than you think, and even less knowledge of how to analyze it. Like most local school programs, I can pretty much guarantee this was a “let’s see how it goes” and the success metrics were qualitative, not test scores.
If students were more attentive, more enthusiastic, etc., those would not be numbers that you could report, but would absolutely be positive results.
Glad to see phone bans become more popular. Jonathan Haidt had it on his list of suggestions to parents, to avoid the anxiety generation continuing. He had a longer list but the four big ones were:
Jonathan Haidt has also been critiqued by his peers [1] for looking at the data with a foregone conclusion instead of getting his conclusion from the data. He's another one of those moral panic peddlers and should not be trusted as a reliable source. [2]
You seem to dismiss anyone who claims a "moral panic" while relying on a source that claims multiple moral panics as the issue, such as "the fact that we're living in a late stage capitalist hellscape ... [without a] social safety net...as climate change cooks the world".
Furthermore, your backup includes 'X can't be caused by Y because X happened before Y existed'. This ignores that possibility that X can be caused by Y and also caused by something else that existed before Y.
Climate change is real, so it’s not a moral panic. I am not interested in sharing sources about this with you in 2024, because this has already been debated to death in the years prior. If you are not convinced of its existence, then that’s more your concern than mine.
Late stage capitalism’s reference is a touchy subject and probably hyperbole in most cases, but it is also a specific reference and does not require the complete abandonment of capitalism to repair the problems. Referring to it does not necessarily equate to a moral panic in my definition of the terms.
I do not ignore the possibility you cite; I find the reasoning of it existing prior far more convincing.
Some things don’t need data for us to take action. This is one of them. You can ignore the problem if it isn’t a big thing for you, but to many adults the reality of the anxious generation is right in front of them. Waiting for drawn out debates is not acceptable to them, and these actions have almost no downsides.
Picking the first offered action to a potential problem is a moral panic. Without intending it, one can potentially introduce different long-term negative effects. I am a parent of three and am fully aware of the anxieties of parenthood.
I once held a similar position of anxiety about this issue until someone wrote a response to me that was very similar to my own in this thread. I’m trying to share something similar with others: to inform those concerned that banning is not necessarily the only or best option.
As a kid for part of that time, I have to say my gut reaction is supportive.
Three of the most important consequences of your above were (1) creating boredom, (2) promoting independent in-person social interaction, and (3) emphasizing present-ness in the moment.
All in ways that are very difficult for children to experience today.
Many of my most impressionable and favorite childhood moments came from hanging out with friends, being bored, and getting engrossed in whatever we came up with...
... nowadays at that age, we probably wouldn't even get together and would immediately fire up our consumptive dopamine bricks to banish the first hint of boredom.
That makes me a bit sad to hear as a good portion of my social interaction as a kid was via multiplayer games. And all that time spent ended up leading to a career for me. It's a tough decision for you though, games and life in general are quite different now.
The nature of online games has changed. There's a huge difference between the predatory nature of modern multiplayer games vs Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Quake, AoE2, etc.
Even that’s a little unfortunate, because in my experience the older generation of straightforward competitive multiplayer games can be a productive and mostly safe experience.
Weird my experience as a teenager in the early 2000s was being told how much everyone had carnal relations with my mother on multiplayer games on the internet.
It was still a form of abuse, just not backed by multimillion corporations. Boys will be boys, but it’s less toxic when it’s in real life with kids you actually know and can see, vs. anonymous strangers over Xbox Live.
Trash talk during competitive games is normal, harmless behavior, not abuse. Boys back then weren’t sheltered and overprotected the way they are now so they could handle it.
I don't have kids, but now I am thinking about possibilities of setting up some old Windows PC with collection of DRM free relatively age appropriate zip or installer files. Preferably with mostly random filenames and only some list somewhere. Then allowing kids to just pick anything from there.
While I can understand that some more extreme parents might go for this (I imagine there were some like this even before the internet and smartphones), that seems... well, a bit extreme?
Certainly sitting in front of a TV all day is bad for you, but I think policing TV use for a child to ensure it doesn't become a problem is a lot easier than policing smartphone use.
I don't get this. I have very little love for programmed television and news channels these days, but I mostly feel that way because I grew up around them. Reality TV sucks, the news is gruesome, Marvel movies are all the same, HBO just airs different flavors of sex and violence. If you're not exposed to this media and the inherently pulpy context it exists under, you're training your children to treat it as exotic and desirable. You owe it to your next-of-kin to show them the news and global politics in the same way too, lest they fetishize extremism in their late age because they weren't exposed to moderate opinions.
On the flip side, I lived in a rural area and my parents would frequently take me to play with kids that had no TV or internet access. Words cannot describe how thick these people can be. One of them was a pair of history buff brothers that weren't allowed to read anything their parents didn't vet - they didn't even know what the Civil War was when I mentioned it. There was a family that lived on a farm, where every time I visited their kids would ask me what weed looks like, what porn was and how alcohol tasted. There were the kids that asked me to recite Newgrounds videos verbatim, explain who "Iron Man" is and even ones that (tragically) didn't know the Mormonism their parents loved was a cult. Rejecting social media is a smart thing to teach anyone, but you have to be extremely careful to not use it as an excuse to shelter them.
Sometimes I worry that HN creates a "growth hack" mindset for parents that inhibits them from thinking rationally about how a child develops. It's not a new phenomenon but it seems fear overrides our willingness to empathize with the events of our own childhood. It all feels reminiscent of when people played Mozart for their baby because an unreviewed paper correlated it with higher IQ. Missing the forest for the trees, a bit.
Let's see... Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube... and that's just off the top of my head without thinking. There are more, many more than 3-4.
And unless you block the browser (parental controls on mobile are garbage), they're going to get to those sites anyway.
> when surely you really only need to ban like 3-4 big tech apps/domains
What are you basing this one?
(Semantic note: “surely” implies an internally-reasoned versus evidence-based hypothesis. It wasn’t always that way; maybe it’s because of its frequent use in reverse.)
It's extremely weird to me that phones weren't categorically banned in schools until the recent trend. When I went to school in the 90s and early 00s, phones were banned from class, and in some schools I went to, even on campus.
It really can't be underestimated either for children or adults how much we are dependent on ease of access.
If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it. If you are stuck in a room and you have a math textbook and a novel you now have a choice.
A phone? A phone is everything else. You're putting "the thing we are supposed to be doing" and "everything else" in the same place. I can't even do it as an adult, I need to put my phone on the other side of the room if I want to read something proper.
> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it.
I would literally doodle, stare out a window, zone out daydreaming, or anything else other than read a textbook I didn't want to read for one reason or another, or pay attention to a teacher for that matter.
Yes, it is anecdotal, but I'm sure we've all been children before, and even if you didn't do it, people around you surely did if you paid any attention. For god sake, I remember my classmates just using a lighter on small patches of whiteout ink during one specific class because of how bored they were. Extreme example? Yes. But passing papers, making paper planes, and other crafts, literally anything to pass the time.
This isn't exclusive to children either. If an adult doesn't want to do something, they might very well not unless forced to, and even then.
Btw, I'm not trying to argue about banning or not banning a phone, this is specifically about the statement above.
EDIT: I should probably mention that this isn't a 5min thing, I could easily zone a teacher out for 45min-90min blocks if I didn't care about what they had to say, much less a book I didn't want to read.
Yes, exactly right. And there are many students less likely than that to zone out, and many more likely to zone out.
But if you give them a tool to aid in being distracted, it will encourage all of them to not pay attention. It really is a question of likelihood
I think it about probabilities.
A smartphone is a guaranteed distraction because of what you can do with it.
No smartphone doesn't guarantee you read the book, but the chances are higher.
> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it.
I'm not so sure if this is true. No clue about kids, but if I'm (personally) stuck at the office and I'm really not feeling like working, I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place with lots to do (like home, lol) but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me.
I suspect the problem isn't the phones, the problem is lack of honest, genuine interest. Compliance can be enforced, but I'm not sure about efficiency of learning under duress. Compulsion brings aversion.
This, of course, is a purely idealistic view, assuming ideal high-skilled spherical educators in vacuum rather than actual real-world conditions. While there are always ways to captivate interest and steer it into productive learning, it requires some orders of magnitude more resources than what's available.
It’s more than that. You sitting in your living room watching Netflix instead of working is different than a classroom.
In a classroom environment, once one kid is futzing around on their phone, others follow. That creates issues for the teachers who end up policing behavior instead of their jobs. You also have the obvious issues with cheating.
When I was the president of a school board, a subset of active and vocal parents were against the ban, citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre. In some cases I had doubts with respect to the veracity of that argument. The parents are a problem too - many have an expectation to text or speak to kids throughout the day.
The school handled it well IMO, no phones until grade 5, then kids can have them in their locker and use them at specific times.
I bet it's the phone.
Even if you're interested a smartphone can distract you.
So no smartphone helps those people to focus on the remaining possibilities.
> I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me.
I mean there's a very broad spectrum here, and a slight distraction can be the difference between spending 5 minutes staring at a wall followed by three hours in flow state vs. spending three hours in mindless distractions.
And children don't have any experience in how to cultivate flow state in the presence of distraction. Removing distractions naturally provides more opportunities to find the flow.
I agree. An adult can ask themselves what they're doing and why and how it aligns with their interests so on (aka have that midlife crisis, haha), a kid probably doesn't yet have enough self-reflection capacity yet.
In my perception, distractions are ideally managed through interest management. Make the desired task actually truly desired - and you're guaranteed to not get distracted. And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working.
When you don't have someone to help with "why am I doing this and not that?", I guess it's true that next best option is to eliminate potential of distraction. It's not great, but is probably better than not doing anything about it.
So, as always, there is an ideal approach (that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment), and a working approach that's very contrary to the ideal way of doing things.
Hm... Maybe teaching kids (and adults) about the modern attention/spam economy actually works can help to lower the distractions. After you see through attention-grabbing tricks, scrolling through online feed wastewaters (or watching junk on streaming platforms, or playing "games" whose entire raison d'être is to make money on players) becomes much less interesting or rewarding. Just a thought.
It's amazing to me that people argue about this, using weak personal anecdotes or just strange self-righteousness.
I’m now going to a Third Place to get about half of my reading done. It’s silly to go somewhere and sit on my phone. I can sit on my phone anywhere.
I tried leaving a stack of programming books beside my pc while I'm working and putting my phone in another room. It does work. But I keep forgetting to do it.
I was considering trying a month of no I internet browsing unless it is required for my job or learning.
I did something like this for a couple of weeks recently. I call it 'no idle screen time'. Any activity that involved using a screen (phone, computer, or television) had to have a purpose. The purpose could be simple such as messaging friends, finding an answer to something I was curious about, or simply looking at the weather forecast. Usually it would be work related.
Benefits became clear almost immediately. I got more actual work done. I suddenly had way more free time than I imagined. I renewed my library card and started reading again. My focus improved. I actually started actively listening to music again (rather than just having it on in the background). I got more exercise. I took the time to prepare better food. A certain low-level sense of anxiety that had become all too familiar simply disappeared.
I did slowly regress. It started with watching a movie or show in the evening, that sort of thing. Now, here I am writing this comment. Probably time to give it another go.
Reminds me of my time in boarding school, my grades were awesome there and I read alot cause I can't play video games, unfortunately it didn't make me wiser so I struggled a lot with self discipline later on.
Managing distraction in an age where everything is at our fingertips is a hard task
It's not only distraction though. The phone is a window to the internet which offers all the knowledge of the world.
And in 'my day' I spent a lot of time at the library which was full of thrillers and comics. And spent most of my time learning about computers and electronics.
It's not an unprecedented problem and offers new offers new opportunities too.
Sure, but the quick dopamine fix that you can get from scrolling TikTok or Twitter is way more corrosive than reading long form content in a library.
Yeah still I'm much more drawn to long form content.
But I guess I'm an outlier like most people on this site that promotes learning new things though text-heavy presentation.
> But I guess I'm an outlier like most people on this site that promotes learning new things though text-heavy presentation.
Bold to assume this is what most people on this site are like!
I'd hypothesize you're still an outlier in that group in these regards. And that's great! But lots of the data points to people like HN's general demographic still being pulled away from long form text content and towards synthesized/aggregated content served via mixed media. There's still just such strong cultural elitism in the notion of reading a book to learn something, it's not super sexy to claim on a messageboard.
> Bold to assume this is what most people on this site are like!
Really, look at the front page of this site. If you're not interested in dense textual content you would have closed the tab within 1 second. I really love this site but most people won't even see the story titles, their brain just registers "a confusing jumble of text" and doesn't even try to engage.
> But lots of the data points to people like HN's general demographic still being pulled away from long form text content and towards synthesized/aggregated content served via mixed media.
And what data is that?
> There's still just such strong cultural elitism in the notion of reading a book to learn something, it's not super sexy to claim on a messageboard.
I don't think I'm elitist or sexy. Just different. I hate video content because I can't consume it at my own pace (usually much faster than the content offers because video is tailored for the slowest possible denominator). And it's difficult to build context ("where am I within the story") when skipping forward or backwards. In text this is pretty seamless.
I don't tend to consume textual content in a start to end sequential manner. But I jump around. Because some stuff I already know, some i really want to deeper dive on, some I need to refer back to later. This is much harder with video.
I simply don't use either. never have, never will. they do not serve my purpose, so they are irrelevant to my life.
Then it is important for you to recognize that you are a unicorn.
I think that’s only the case if you only meet people through TikTok and Twitter
Your comment is totally irrelevant to the conversation regarding schools, though. Smartphones are massively corroding kids' brains these days, and YES, this is much worse than TV or video games back in the day.
That's not a fact, it's a point being debated.
You've definitely used Twitter, even if just to see an announcement or something. Too much important information has been posted there over the last decade for anyone online a lot to have been able to avoid it.
I've seen screenshots of Elon acting like a loser, that's about it.
So you've never clicked on Twitter links, even when they have been submitted to HN?
And yet, you’re still on here posting along with the rest of us.
Having instant access from your pocket to an infinite source of entertainment is literally an unprecedented problem.
It's not all the knowledge. Frequently I have searched for something and not found it
Or we are at the fingertips of everything else..
This is why I think managing notifications is so important.
I personally balk at the idea that everything is at our fingertips. Yes, a lot of information is readily available, but it is mostly very shallow, poorly referenced, and in short form. It is actually very hard to find in-depth, long form content on the Internet these days. You have to look very hard. Almost the only way to find it is by crawling dedicated forums and getting links that way. It's still much easier to find information in books.
> It really can't be underestimated either for children or adults how much we are dependent on ease of access.
nit: If you mean to say these groups are so dependent on ease of access it's impossible to estimate correctly to what degree, you mean it can't be overestimated, not underestimated.
I use my phone to look up words/concepts/references all the time while reading - I couldn't do without it, flipping through a dictionary or walking up to a computer to read a quick Wikipedia intro to a concept/person/place/etc would just get me far more distracted.
There’s always a reason why we “need” our phone at all times, isn’t there?
For the purposes of public policy (where schools are concerned), or even holding a meeting at work, what should be the best recourse?
Let the schools make rules, just like they do for a thousand other things.
If you make it a “public policy” issue, it will become another partisan football for the authoritarians among us to create drama about.
I find an eink tablet with no browser or a digitizing pen good for taking notes in this tech era.
Weelll....
I did that, and I use my Remarkable 2 mostly for reading epub novels and even leave the pen at home by now... :(
Okay, knowing myself I never thought I would use it much for creative work to begin with (and I was right).
I still think I did my best programming and learning about computers when I did not actually own one. East Germany, 1980s, I was in school. All programming happened with my head and paper,
oh no.
do you have a case so it's convenient to have the pen with you?
I got the cheap standard case of the very first iteration (I was an original pre-order customer for the RM 2), not expecting to carry it around much (I was working from home most of the time anyway). I have to stick the pen somewhere else in the bag.
I just looked, they don't even have that cheap model anymore.
yeah I have something like https://a.co/d/3JUuMjd so the pens harder to lose
Sometimes when I'm reading a paper book I miss the easy access to a dictionary that I get on my ebook reader, but I have found I can just keep reading and infer enough to not interrupt my reading. I keep notes on a post-it and I check those later.
I'm not suggesting you do the same, is just that I felt identified with your comment.
Yet somehow we all survived before smartphones. If you have a question and raise your hand to ask, everyone else benefits from getting the answer as well.
Do you think that's useful? The old school way would be to jot down notes about questions and followups. I'm curious if the old school way relates to better retention of both the questions and answers. My suspicion is yes. I should do this myself more.
Write those down on a list and look them up every 15 minutes.
Nonetheless I did it all the time as a kid and it was fine using a dictionary. Is it much easier on a phone? Absolutely, but then I also get caught up reading the etymology, looking up on Wikipedia the Greek roots of the word, ending up at some Greek wars' battle in 500BC and what's the current geopolitical situation of the region, how did they vote on the last Greek Parliamentary election, etc.
For my curiosity it's amazing, not so much for getting shit done.
Maybe it's a translation issue, but it seems in this article that the effect on school work (i.e. tests, quizzes, reports, homework assignments, etc.) was not studied, as I think the title of the article implies it was. Rather, they studied the phone ban's effect on school culture and bullying.
To be clear, I believe a phone ban in schools would have a positive effect on academics, and that that would show up if it were studied. It's just that it doesn't seem like that's what they did in this case. Thus, arguing about whether phones affect attention span, memory, even reading time, is not relevant in the context of this article.
It has always felt absolutely bonkers to me that smartphone bans weren't put into place instantly across US schools as soon as they started becoming common.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. If I'd brought a handheld game console like a Gameboy or something into class, it would have been confiscated immediately. Sure, I get it, that's not the same thing; obviously phones have other uses.
But there is absolutely zero reason a kid needs their smartphone during class. All educational materials should be provided by the school. Kids do not need to be and should not be communicating with anyone outside class. If parents/guardians need to get in touch with kids during an emergency, they can do it the way they've done it as long as we've had the telephone: call the main office and have someone walk to the class to bring the kid to the phone.
I do expect that smartphones could actually bring something useful to the classroom -- after all, they grant access to more or less all the world's knowledge -- but the downsides of allowing them far far far outweigh any possible upsides.
There’s a lot of reasons where possessing a phone in school is legit. In cities, transit passes are commonly phone bases. Some apartments require smartphones for gate entry.
In class, different story of course.
It’s not hard to have a little checkin locker by the teacher’s desk as kids come in. Just make sure they turn the sound off before sliding it into it’s temporary home
why can’t a student leave their phone in the locker? or the teacher has a large bin where all students must put their phone into (powered off) before class starts.
Agreed, and they shouldn't need to be instituted, because they were already policy, weren't they?
I had a CD Walkman during high school. Was smart enough to never to bring it out unless everything else in class was done and neighbors had nothing to say.
I swapped my high school son’s iPhone for an Apple Watch w/cellular for school days and his grades and social life improved significantly.
I’ve been saying the Apple watch needs to be advertised as a solution for phones in schools more.
And here our schools don't allow smart watches, depriving me of this (wise) choice.
Can't you just give them a dumb phone?
Also, why do parents these days need so much that their kids have some an instant communication device?
When I was a kid I could phone home from a pay phone.
Can’t do that nowadays.
Now I feel reminded of Monty Python' sketch "The Four Yorkshiremen" - https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc
Back in my day we didn't even have a phone!
1980s East Germany, many homes did not have a phone. My parents could have gotten one, their job was important enough, but they did not want to be disturbed at home so they never asked for the great privilege of having a home phone.
While they're at school, they can use the phone in the school's main office to call home if there's an emergency.
Smartphones can be left in a locker (or somewhere else inaccessible during the school day) for use on the way to school and home if something happens.
It can be challenging to make your way to the school’s office once the facility has been taken over by an armed gunman, which is a great reason for kids to have comms at all times, if not one that commonly arises.
Once when I was 10, 11 years old, I needed to call home from school.
I had never used a payphone. I had perhaps rarely used our rotary home phone to dial out.
Of course it was after school hours, and a stressful personal crisis already, and no adult was hovering nearby to explain anything.
I figured out how to put in the coins and enter the number on TouchTone, (just like I'd seen on TV) but I didn't know what a dial tone or ring tone sounded like, nor a busy signal, and the line was in use at home, so indeed it was a busy signal that I patiently listened to for several minutes. I believed it was ringing and nobody was picking up.
By the time I was 21 and working at my first job, I was promoted and given a cubicle with a phone on the desk. I was quite anxious that it would ring and I wouldn't know what to do with the call. I was working for an Internet provider!
At the school by me every day is a line that stretches for blocks of parents picking up their kids at 3pm. All of these cars and human time was previously handled by a school bus and one driver.
Why does this craziness happen?
People are paranoid for a variety of reasons about their kids.
Also, culturally, parents don’t let kids walk home. When I was a kid in NYC only the kids bussed in from the hood had busses, the rest of us from the local neighborhood walked. State aid only reimburses for trips beyond a certain radius.
A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school.
Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.)
But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home.
The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine.
It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids.
---
Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on.
Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting.
So what changed?
To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home.
But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.
Because clearly a school bus is too expensive. /s
My school had to ban Tamagotchis back in the day…
Ban smart watches but not phones?
They require students to deposit their phones in a storage thing when they enter the classroom.
That makes sense and seems reasonable
On the reading question raised by another comment: I went to school recently enough that we had smartphones but before tiktok. You were allowed them but they'd be confiscated if seen in lessons or corridors.
On balance I'd probably try and get rid entirely, but vividly recall my academic/engineering/whatever awakening being from downloading huge quantities of textbooks and the like onto my phone at the age of 14 or 15, so I wouldn't go stray too far away from modern technology in some sense.
I could also argue that this made me quite distracted but (say) also meant that it was the best part of a decade until I would see something, conditioned on that I found it interesting, that I hadn't seen before in formal education.
I think the question “how do we encourage digital exploration without causing phone addiction” is the defining question of our generation.
> the question “how do we encourage digital exploration without causing phone addiction” is the defining question of our generation
One component seems to be not providing them with a networked general-purpose computer out of the gate.
thoughtful guardrails are important.
Punish companies that make addictive algorithms. Pre-social media, websites were no where near as damaging
I definitely plan to limit my kid’s exposure to certain algorithms as much as possible.
That implies an underlying assumption that we need digital exploration. Do we?
Despite its flaws, HN is some of the best digital exploration there is. At least some teenagers spend time here and I’m glad they do.
I say we do need digital exploration.
> downloading huge quantities of textbooks and the like onto my phone at the age of 14 or 15
I also used the internet to get interesting tech manuals (and plenty of other books) from IRC channels when I was young
But that was before social media, which has IMO destroyed (not entirely, but largely) the positive aspects of internet connections for teenagers
A phone is now primarily a source of always-on entertainment (in 10 second bytes).
Yes. That's in the before fore.
Social media is far more addictive now. And doom scrolling is far better tuned. I see my kids and those of my friends. It's not at all what it was even 10 years ago.
This is only getting wise as engagement is the only metric these companies care about. I support the social media ban under 18.
As essential as smoking ban. I won't be surprised to see this expanded to adult situations
It should've been expanded into driving a long time ago. There are laws against distracted driving but I still see people weaving around like they're drunk on the roads. When I look into the car they're usually holding a phone (on speakerphone) or holding it up to their ear.
People suck at driving enough as it is without driving one handed and distracted.
Isn't it already illegal in most places? (sure peolpe do it anyway, but if you're caught there are heavy fines)
Last year in Michigan it was made a primary offense. Driving was really pleasant for a month or two and they realized nobody enforces it where it would help most.
Montana is still legal apparently but I'm sure cops could write you a ticket for the infractions you commit while on your phone, just not for the phone itself.
Do you have proof there have been more car accidents since phones entered the driving arena compared to the before times? I always hear people claiming the roads are more dangerous but I’ve not seen any more accidents than when I was younger. Just a quick perusal on the web shows fatalities per 1 million miles has dropped significantly since the 1990s
In addition to the added crashes and deaths caused by mobile phone usage, state and federal leaders should be setting agendas that reduce car usage altogether to prevent deaths and injuries and pivot toward safer and by far cheaper modes of transit.
In the daily downtown crawl at 5PM I count about one in four drivers on their phone. Is there a way to tell apart the adaptive cruise control cars from the ones without ? ACC is the only way I can explain why there isn't a crash every 5 minutes.
ACC won't engage under 25 mph. The reason for the lack of crashes might be that driving isn't that hard for most people.
Seems to vary across models. Googling for Honda Civic: "And the Low-Speed Follow function can bring the vehicle to a complete stop when a vehicle detected ahead slows to a stop, and it lets you resume operation by pressing a button or the accelerator."
This is illegal most (all?) places in the US, but as with many things, it's poorly enforced.
They’re not even talking much of the time, they’re texting (or worse, scrolling some social media)
God, I’d love to see the smartphone/no smartphone sections in restaurants.
What would be the point of a no smartphone section in a restaurant?
A concert would make sense though IMO.
> What would be the point of a no smartphone section in a restaurant?
It elevates the experience. Going back to the class thing [1], cell phone on the table or cell-phone use during dining is a noticeable thing between e.g. Michelin-starred restaurants and diners. (And I’m only counting N > 1 tables.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820633
> It elevates the experience.
For who? Not for the people who might want to use one, and for the people who get annoyed seeing someone else using one, that's their problem.
The band Tool does this - they ask for no phones and no photos during the show (except the last song)
smartphone-free cafes are starting to pop up [0]
[0] https://www.facebook.com/reel/1041312411329542
I'd like one for my living room. Can we just watch the show together? Otherwise we might as well be doing our own totally separate activities.
You (plural!) can make your own rules in your own living room.
Imagine walking into a restaurant and being asked, "Smartphone section or no smartphone section?"
I'd prefer to be asked "loud music, or no loud music?"
Your comment would only make make sense in a dictatorship IMO. Smoking, nor mobile phones should be banned for adults.
Weddings in particular seem to have evolved "check your phone at the door" policies. Though perhaps mostly to keep folks from ruining the professional photographers shots by constantly diving into the action with cameraphones/flashes blazing...
Don't invite those people.
> "check your phone at the door" policies
No, no, no. A device in a (near-)stranger’s unsupervised physical possession for hours is a compromised device. No.
Is your threat model really that people whose wedding you're attending are trying to exploit your phone..?
Conceptually I like the idea of giving everyone a locking pouch to put the phone in, with the ability to unlock it provided at the end of the event. That way the phone never leaves your person, but is unusable.
But at the same time this sort of thing would also make me kinda annoyed (as I have no problem, generally, keeping my phone in my pocket, on silent, when having it out is inappropriate0.
Not really, a phone in first boot not unlocked state is secure against most threat models
Not really, not if you secure your phone adequately, which these days is easier than ever.
It's unlikely there will be state actors at this wedding or whatever ready to open up your phone and swap out a chip.
Do people not have courtesy and decorum anymore??? I won’t give up my phone because I’m not stupid enough to take it out during a ceremony.
I’ve been to several wedding ceremonies of somewhat large size where no one took their phones out, and certainly not for photos.
Did trust in society hit a new low while I wasn’t looking?
Just as smoking restrictions reshaped social norms around public health
I don't dispute the facts in the article, but this question kept popping up in my mind: how do they define reading time? I mean, in a too-pedantic sense, smartphone screen time is roughly divided into reading, viewing (photos/videos), and gaming. Given that they are not allowed to take the phones, it seems unlikely that the school knows a student's primary usage mode. For example, a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone, thereby reducing their time in the school's library.
In other words, how holistic is the metric "reading time?"
I'm a high school teacher. Not for long, but for a few years now.
Never have I ever seen a student reading on their phone. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it must be a vanishingly small fraction that I have not yet encountered. When my students are on their phones, it's games, or it's (primarily video-based) social media. A smaller but notable fraction is background media consumption, either music or movies.
That's not to say I don't have kids who read, though they're much rarer than the music listeners, just that the readers seem to prefer physical books.
So at least in my experience, I wouldn't expect that metric to be vulnerable to this particular flavor of distortion.
Thanks for the reality check. I was worried about how I could be conflating my own personal view as a parent with the popular narrative of "kids these days and their Instagram/TikTok." Probably says a lot more about me, but I vastly prefer the reading experience of a thick book on a phone than as a physical copy. And I have since I was a teenager (and it was just PDAs and clever TI-89 hackery).
I used to read on PDA and then later on Nokia Internet Tablet. But never in school even if I had one where. At those times it was just games(Bejewelled, Space Trader, DopeWars) or graphic calculator software.
> games(Bejewelled, Space Trader, DopeWars) or graphic calculator software
Snake!
Most people don’t have the patience and attention span to read thick books in the first place. That’s something that you have to develop with practice, and kids who have access to TikTok aren’t going to get that practice.
I read a lot on my phone as a student.
I know I’m an autist and Wikipedia addictions are not the norm, but how can people not enjoy reading?
I got in trouble all the time in school for reading (real books) during class time when the teacher was lecturing about things I already knew. Do kids like this not exist anymore? I thought autism rates were going up!
Seriously, no one reads? I thought kids were getting all political and woke, presumably from reading progressive things? I guess it’s all TikTok mind control?
I categorically oppose phone bans on the grounds that it harms the “brilliant lazy”, and that these forces are exactly the kind you want to cultivate. (insert the famous bill gates and 4 types of German officers quote about this here) - but if this class of people has evaporated from the school systems than who am I even defending?
I do have readers, they're just not as common as the other distracted students, and long you they prefer physical books.
I hear you, but not all “reading time” is equal.
> For example, a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone, thereby reducing their time in the school's library.
That would be a great exception, but very much not the norm. Most kids are not reading long-form books or fiction on their phones.
Also, all reading time in the school library won’t be equal. If the school insists on only certain reading time being valid they ought to just force kids to read a specific set of books. (My personal preference would be for fundamentally less coercive education.)
Sure. But I can pretty much guarantee the likelihood of finding worthwhile reading material in the school library is significantly higher than the likelihood of finding it on TikTok or X.
My kids have dedicated reading time with physical books and, if they want to, they are always free to read more long form text on their devices (not likely -- that's just reality unless you have a dedicated reading-only device).
> smartphone screen time is roughly divided into reading, viewing (photos/videos), and gaming
My kids are avid readers, but even they won't read on a phone or a pad or a computer. If they got hold of a phone, they'd always choose either games or viewing videos.
Phones make for poor reading devices. My girlfriend spends a lot of time reading light novels on her phone, and I don't understand how. The small format, constant scrolling, and the presence of ads on many apps and sites makes the experience look miserable. I don't know how many kids are using the paid versions of their reading apps, let alone reading long-form content at all.
There's been a few studies suggesting reading on paper is better for retention than reading on screens, and I've found one suggesting the size of the screen makes a further difference, but it looks like the latter may have some conflicting findings as well.
I taught at the high school level for a decade. I would occasionally have students review their usage stats and 1) they were regularly a bit shocked by the number of hours they spend on their phones, and 2) the vast majority of that time was games and social media.
Personally speaking, myself and my friend group used our phones mostly for reading in high school in the mid-2010s. It's the exception but certainly not unheard of. Those interested in writing are likely to do a lot of reading, and there are many amateur writing communities online that are populated mostly by teenagers.
> a student could be reading a bunch of fiction on their phone
It's a nice thought, but I have kids that age and never have I once seen this happen or heard of it happening with any of their friends/classmates; that's not what phones are for according to GenZ/GenA
According to everyone, I think. E-readers exist for that precise reason, although actual books are the best according to me: no battery, more resilient, can be lent. Phones are great as dictionaries (notably foreign language dictionaries).
I find most ereaders to be absolute garbage and just read books on my phone.
Man, I love reading, but I simply can't focus on reading a long book on my phone. There are too many distractions, too many urges that are way too easy to satisfy with all sorts of time wasters. So if I, as somebody who reads a lot of books and has been an avid reader since childhood, can't resist wasting time and focus on reading on my phone, then I can't imagine any significant number of kids would be able to.
There’s a bit more than rough categories.
Phones and certain services like social are made to capture, retain and redirect your attention.
Students come more out of this tie of constructed consumption origin.
The default state is often not idle, boredom, it’s consumption.
Relative to that..
There’s productive time and non productive time.
Passive consumption va active learning or active creating.
It’s easy to see what services accessed at a network level per devices.
There’s also digital health built into android and iOS that tracks app usage by time.
Another option is apps like opal which help manage things.
Even if you were watching them, you don’t know that they don’t have an app that plays a game frame at 1 Hz that they sync their minds to while you see the other 59 frames at 60 Hz and think you’re seeing a book.
Without root access to the device and blinkers to ensure they aren’t looking at a second device strategically placed out of sight, you can’t conclude anything.
Speaking for myself (a grown-up) I do read a lot on my phone, but it's almost all "brain junk food" like Hacker News comments :) instead of something which slowly develops a complex idea like a book.
Doomscrolling is not reading. And is the one behaviour above literally any other thing that phones force you into. Their form factor and their apps have converged on the perfect device for "making you keep meaninglessly looking at the device" while reinforcing that behaviour.
A lot of interesting debate on phone bans right now. Including a great discussion on twitter about how some of the research being used to justify bans is using some dodgy stats: https://x.com/MatthewBJane/status/1843795198109000034
Some schools ban phones but allow laptops and tablets. It is the phones specifically that are the problem, not social media. (apparently)
My phone usage dropped after I got a personal laptop and an eBook reader. So did pretty much every one else's. The phone is just really inconvenient for anything other than doomscrolling.
In my opinion, the lack of alternative activities is overlooked. It is a ban and a prayer that the problem will solve itself.
> t is the phones specifically that are the problem, not social media.
disagree; it's the social media that's the problem; the phone just makes it possible to access it at all times
remove social media and you won't have kids on their phones all the time (or, if you're very lucky, they might use them for something productive)
> remove social media and you won't have kids on their phones all the time
This is a testable hypothesis. We shouldn’t conclude either way without more evidence. As it stands, enforcing a phone ban has advantages over an app one.
Small sample size but already tested in my household. Block the social media apps and website and phone use is greatly reduced.
FYI: Schools have firewalls that block social media, but kids learn to use VPNs.
Firewalls also do nothing if the kid has a decent data plan.
Mobile operating systems are designed to engage and distract the owner. Lost your attention for a few minutes? Screen dims and threatens to darken! Oh no! Touch its face and keep it alive! Notifications from everything. Alarms that won't shut off until you do something about it. Pleading with us to recharge the battery. Insisting that radios be turned back on and sensor access be granted.
Every app, every website you visit is infested with dialogs and pop-ups that you're brushing out of the way, trying to get something accomplished.
It really tests your resolve and concentration, to see if you finished that one task you had in mind when you unlocked your phone, without going into 5 more on the side, or whether you can tame your phone sufficiently to be an assistant or productivity tool, rather than a firehose of marketing from dozens of companies to you, the consumer.
Yeah in computer class in high school the normal kids were on MySpace or chat in the computer lab instead of doing the boring work.
Phones are ok as communication devices though, even if it's only "lunch half twelve 2nd floor canteen?" to a coworker. Whether schools need that or not is another question, though "Mum can you check did I leave my maths book on the desk?" via whatsapp seems to be a thing these days.
Bring back alpha-numeric pagers!
Going back to blackberries would be ideal imo
All the way back to the Blackberry 950.
Glorious physical buttons!
Without that, the ban becomes more of a hope than a solution
There's nothing magic about phones that makes them bad. It's mostly the content on them: social media. Which people here earn money hand over fist making more addictive and then wonder how it all happened. I was in high school right around the first iPhone. Kids got good at T9 texting but it wasn't anything like now I guess.
It isn't magic but they are different than laptops and desktops in important but subtle ways.
They are (generally) always on your person. They discourage the creation of text. They always have an internet connection. They are usually charged right next to your bed, so they are the first and last thing you interact with every day.
One great thing about phone bans is that it brings equilibrium to teachers.
A teacher has a bad day and a kid films the teacher crying? It's all over the socials and teacher is mocked.
A kid has a bad day and throws a chair through a window while the teacher films it? Teacher is likely sacked for filming kids at school.
> A kid has a bad day and throws a chair through a window while the teacher films it? Teacher is likely sacked for filming kids at school.
Assuming the teacher doesn't post that video, and only uses it as evidence for what the student did, why would they get fired for this?
I have a middle school student and have observed this trend personally. Our school is considering a cell phone ban during school hours (can still bring the phone to school, goes in locker, get it on the way out), which I 100% support.
We use parental controls on iOS but those are buggy (and Android even worse from what I heard).
This is how our school works, and I wouldn't have let my kids go to school with a cell phone if they didn't enforce such a policy.
Has anyone here tried the Haidt recommendation of "no smartphones till high school, no social media till 16" with their children? Is it better than just banning them in school?
The problem is if the school doesn't ban it, it's a lot harder for the parent to enforce. The child will either complain constantly about their friends having it, or just do it behind your back.
If there is a school ban, then enforcement happens at school too, making it harder to do behind your back, and the bulk of their social circle isn't on social media, avoiding the FOMO issues.
Having personally not had a smartphone or laptop through most of college back when Facebook was still cool (smartphone by choice, laptop by crime), I can say that social media on a library computer is a very different beast. You get most of the social benefits (I'd argue all of the important ones, is instant chat really needed?) while avoiding most of the distractions.
So I get the complaint, but I feel like even if kids sneak around behind your back (been there too, lol, I rooted my iBook G4 when my parents added a password) the added friction makes a difference. In other words, kids will be kids, but that shouldn't stop us from setting healthy boundaries.
Edit: Bit of a tirade, but I'm trying to say I agree with you! Just trying to add interesting context.
There used to be a Silicon Valley parents versus not divide in my personal observation of kids with smart phones/tablets. It’s now generalised to a class division: the children of the rich tend to have tight restrictions at home and, increasingly, at school, around device use.
We need statewide rules if we’re to avoid creating a generational gap in cognitive and social competence.
That's not surprising. Rich people can afford childcare for all or a large part of the day, and can instruct their nanny to actually engage the child rather than pacifying them with a tablet screen.
Parents who can't afford that will resort to anything to occupy their child when they need a moment of peace, and it's hard to blame them, honestly.
If we want to avoid creating a generational gap in cognitive and social competence we should outlaw private education ad significantly boost state education.
ChatGPT can only be used for homework now.
I was hoping some good studies would come out on this topic.
it's not the phones
Wow! Interesting how this change not only reduced phone use but also led to improvements in school culture and social engagement. But I think the success of such a ban lies in its careful implementation, with collaboration between students, parents, and staff.
This is the principal of a school saying his policy works but he has no data to back it up. Seems like not a story.
Qualitative observations can often also be useful, even if they can’t be relied upon as proof.
It could also be the students hide them better, because they aren't allowed to have them.
When I visited one of our offices in India there was a phone ban. Employees were given a locker for their phone (and other stuff if they wanted), where the phone was to remain while they were in the work area. Being a visitor, I complied, but then quickly found out almost no one else did. They all secretly had their phones out doing whatever when the boss wasn't looking. I stopped locking mine up after a bit as well after seeing this.
That’s possible, but harder to hide for students than employees. Employees are given, generally, a bit more trust than students are. At a lot of schools, students aren’t even allowed to leave for lunch.
Sure but not when there's a direct conflict of interest. I'd also wager he has loads of data on things like test scores and if he says there's nothing conclusive it likely means the data shows no change.
I’d wager he has less data than you think, and even less knowledge of how to analyze it. Like most local school programs, I can pretty much guarantee this was a “let’s see how it goes” and the success metrics were qualitative, not test scores.
If students were more attentive, more enthusiastic, etc., those would not be numbers that you could report, but would absolutely be positive results.
Glad to see phone bans become more popular. Jonathan Haidt had it on his list of suggestions to parents, to avoid the anxiety generation continuing. He had a longer list but the four big ones were:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
No phones in schools
More free, independent play
Jonathan Haidt has also been critiqued by his peers [1] for looking at the data with a foregone conclusion instead of getting his conclusion from the data. He's another one of those moral panic peddlers and should not be trusted as a reliable source. [2]
1. https://www.youtube.com/live/Ewxe4pWOH-I 2. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1647639025879064579.html
You seem to dismiss anyone who claims a "moral panic" while relying on a source that claims multiple moral panics as the issue, such as "the fact that we're living in a late stage capitalist hellscape ... [without a] social safety net...as climate change cooks the world".
Furthermore, your backup includes 'X can't be caused by Y because X happened before Y existed'. This ignores that possibility that X can be caused by Y and also caused by something else that existed before Y.
Climate change is real, so it’s not a moral panic. I am not interested in sharing sources about this with you in 2024, because this has already been debated to death in the years prior. If you are not convinced of its existence, then that’s more your concern than mine.
Late stage capitalism’s reference is a touchy subject and probably hyperbole in most cases, but it is also a specific reference and does not require the complete abandonment of capitalism to repair the problems. Referring to it does not necessarily equate to a moral panic in my definition of the terms.
I do not ignore the possibility you cite; I find the reasoning of it existing prior far more convincing.
Some things don’t need data for us to take action. This is one of them. You can ignore the problem if it isn’t a big thing for you, but to many adults the reality of the anxious generation is right in front of them. Waiting for drawn out debates is not acceptable to them, and these actions have almost no downsides.
Picking the first offered action to a potential problem is a moral panic. Without intending it, one can potentially introduce different long-term negative effects. I am a parent of three and am fully aware of the anxieties of parenthood.
I once held a similar position of anxiety about this issue until someone wrote a response to me that was very similar to my own in this thread. I’m trying to share something similar with others: to inform those concerned that banning is not necessarily the only or best option.
So essentially, the early 90s?
As a kid for part of that time, I have to say my gut reaction is supportive.
Three of the most important consequences of your above were (1) creating boredom, (2) promoting independent in-person social interaction, and (3) emphasizing present-ness in the moment.
All in ways that are very difficult for children to experience today.
Many of my most impressionable and favorite childhood moments came from hanging out with friends, being bored, and getting engrossed in whatever we came up with...
... nowadays at that age, we probably wouldn't even get together and would immediately fire up our consumptive dopamine bricks to banish the first hint of boredom.
No TV and no video game as well before 16?
We're doing "no internet connected games", which seems like a reasonable balance.
That makes me a bit sad to hear as a good portion of my social interaction as a kid was via multiplayer games. And all that time spent ended up leading to a career for me. It's a tough decision for you though, games and life in general are quite different now.
The nature of online games has changed. There's a huge difference between the predatory nature of modern multiplayer games vs Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Quake, AoE2, etc.
Even that’s a little unfortunate, because in my experience the older generation of straightforward competitive multiplayer games can be a productive and mostly safe experience.
My 8 year old plays Fortnite sometimes together with his friends. I am a bit jealous, they seem to have a lot of fun.
Sometimes one of his buddy brings his Switch home to us and they can play together in the same room (I have a PS5 my kid plays on).
Weird my experience as a teenager in the early 2000s was being told how much everyone had carnal relations with my mother on multiplayer games on the internet.
That’s just socializing with other kids, not being preyed on by an abusive game industry.
It was still a form of abuse, just not backed by multimillion corporations. Boys will be boys, but it’s less toxic when it’s in real life with kids you actually know and can see, vs. anonymous strangers over Xbox Live.
Trash talk during competitive games is normal, harmless behavior, not abuse. Boys back then weren’t sheltered and overprotected the way they are now so they could handle it.
Yeah, different games had different cultures. That’s why I hedged with “mostly safe.”
I don't have kids, but now I am thinking about possibilities of setting up some old Windows PC with collection of DRM free relatively age appropriate zip or installer files. Preferably with mostly random filenames and only some list somewhere. Then allowing kids to just pick anything from there.
All very sensible points. I would add no TV at home till 16
While I can understand that some more extreme parents might go for this (I imagine there were some like this even before the internet and smartphones), that seems... well, a bit extreme?
Certainly sitting in front of a TV all day is bad for you, but I think policing TV use for a child to ensure it doesn't become a problem is a lot easier than policing smartphone use.
You just get hooked to radio and get a weird fetish for voices ;-)
I don't get this. I have very little love for programmed television and news channels these days, but I mostly feel that way because I grew up around them. Reality TV sucks, the news is gruesome, Marvel movies are all the same, HBO just airs different flavors of sex and violence. If you're not exposed to this media and the inherently pulpy context it exists under, you're training your children to treat it as exotic and desirable. You owe it to your next-of-kin to show them the news and global politics in the same way too, lest they fetishize extremism in their late age because they weren't exposed to moderate opinions.
On the flip side, I lived in a rural area and my parents would frequently take me to play with kids that had no TV or internet access. Words cannot describe how thick these people can be. One of them was a pair of history buff brothers that weren't allowed to read anything their parents didn't vet - they didn't even know what the Civil War was when I mentioned it. There was a family that lived on a farm, where every time I visited their kids would ask me what weed looks like, what porn was and how alcohol tasted. There were the kids that asked me to recite Newgrounds videos verbatim, explain who "Iron Man" is and even ones that (tragically) didn't know the Mormonism their parents loved was a cult. Rejecting social media is a smart thing to teach anyone, but you have to be extremely careful to not use it as an excuse to shelter them.
Sometimes I worry that HN creates a "growth hack" mindset for parents that inhibits them from thinking rationally about how a child develops. It's not a new phenomenon but it seems fear overrides our willingness to empathize with the events of our own childhood. It all feels reminiscent of when people played Mozart for their baby because an unreviewed paper correlated it with higher IQ. Missing the forest for the trees, a bit.
It’s a little funny that everyone talks about this as a “phone ban” when surely you really only need to ban like 3-4 big tech apps/domains.
Let's see... Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube... and that's just off the top of my head without thinking. There are more, many more than 3-4.
And unless you block the browser (parental controls on mobile are garbage), they're going to get to those sites anyway.
> when surely you really only need to ban like 3-4 big tech apps/domains
What are you basing this one?
(Semantic note: “surely” implies an internally-reasoned versus evidence-based hypothesis. It wasn’t always that way; maybe it’s because of its frequent use in reverse.)
It's extremely weird to me that phones weren't categorically banned in schools until the recent trend. When I went to school in the 90s and early 00s, phones were banned from class, and in some schools I went to, even on campus.