Smartphones,Children and Schools: How Can Schools Make Bans Stick This Time Around?

Banning cellphones in school has gained momentum and it will only grow in the wake of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, making a persuasive case that “phone-based childhood” is contributing to the child and youth mental health crisis. We may be at a public policy tipping point because a majority of adults  – principals, teachers, mental health professionals, and parents now favour a severe restriction or outright ban on the so-called “weapons of mass distraction.”

Banning cellphones has been debated over the past fifteen years and previous policy initiatives in Canada and elsewhere have either stalled or fallen short in their implementation. Now that Haidt’s book is an international best seller, school authorities in the United Sates and Canada are under renewed pressure to rid schools of the “weapons of mass distraction” and to get it right this time around.

TikTok took over the teen world and mobile phone addiction grew from 2019 to 2022, according to San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge’s latest North American child and teen social media use surveys. It’s now harder than ever to capture attention let alone teach students in classrooms. Banning cellphones provides a temporary respite, but the problem is much wider and runs deeper.  For classroom teachers, the real solution lies in curtailing distractions and focusing on developing what Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion described as “habits of attention.”

Cellphone culture has permeated our lives and few are immune to its addictive influences. The re-wiring of teen brains, dubbed “TikTok Brain,” is emerging as a decisive factor tipping the balance in favour of outright school bans or school-wide systematic and enforceable restrictions. Leading educators such as researchED UK founder Tom Bennett and Doug Lemov were among the first to identify the problem – tiny boxes of kryptonite that erode the attention span of students in today’s classrooms.

Mounting research evidence supports initiatives to banish the infernal devices and reclaim the minds of students in schools everywhere.  Social media addiction and mobile phone dependence are definitely connected with soaring rates of teen mental health issues, all documented by Dr Jean Twenge and evident in surveys generated by Common Sense Media.  Pandemic school closures and social isolation from March 2020 to June 2021 made it far worse.   Haidt’s riveting book provides a compelling diagnosis of the problem confronting us in reclaiming the “phone-based generation” and weaning off- younger teachers ensnared in that same web.

School leaders and policy-makers are now far more attuned to the “great rewiring of childhood.” It’s no longer just a school system issue but a societal problem that needs to be tackled across the entire social policy domain – from public heath to education and social services. Momentum is building to roll back phone-based childhood, especially in elementary school and middle school because of the vital importance of protecting kids during early puberty when brains are still in development.

A broad prescription based upon affirming four fundamental social norms can be found in Jon Haidt’s bold and provocative new book:

1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law), and encourage parents to give young kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches;
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by child health and safety protection laws and regulations;
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can focus on learning, pay attention to their teachers, and interact with one another;
4. Nurture and develop more “free-range children” enabled by a “let grow” philosophy and imbued with a spirit of creativity, more resilience, and better prepared to assume their responsibilities in the real world.

Educational jurisdictions in Europe and Australia have a head start on us. Six years ago, France took the plunge with a system-wide ban on cellphones in class. The United Kingdom joined governments and education authorities around the world in January 2024 in  restricting the use of mobile phones in schools. Policy-makers in the U.K. may be more successful because they see it as an extension of the broader ‘student behaviour’ policy committed to ensuring calmer, safer and more productive classrooms.

The public policy needle is beginning to move in Canada, evident from province-to-province over the past year or so.  Starting in January 2024, Quebec has imposed new restrictions on the devices in schools, Ontario is reviewing its hole-ridden school-level restrictions, and British Columbia is moving in the same direction. What’s different this time is that governments are approaching it as a public health issue and preparing to close the loopholes in previous policy initiatives. Here in Canada, provincial Child and Youth Advocates, such as Kelly Lamrock of New Brunswick, are now coming onside. That will ensure that it is approached as more of a cross-sectoral movement.

Not much will change until the reclaim childhood from cellphone addiction campaign is seen as a public health initiative supported by significant political will. Only then will the cellphone be seen as the cigarette of the 21^st century.

Do smartphones need to be banished from today’s classrooms?  What happened to previous initiatives aimed at curbing their use over the past 15 years? Is it necessary to establish conclusively that excessive use “causes mental health issues” in children and teens?  Will the plan proposed by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation (2024) gain widespread adoption?

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Trauma-Informed Education: Where’s the Research Evidence TIP Works as a Whole-of-School Approach?

Trauma-informed education spread rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s now ascendant in Canadian K-12 education. Its origins go back more than two decades and were identified by British sociologist Frank Furedi in his powerful book, Therapy Culture, better known in the UK than here in North America.  Widely viewed as “an unambiguously positive development,” the therapeutic ethos and its offshoot “trauma-informed practice” (TIP) have, according to American policy analyst Robert Pondiscio, extended the reach of education into students’ lives and expanded the role of teachers.  While it’s recognized and openly debated in the United Kingdom and the United States, the phenomenon remains largely unexamined in Canada’s disaggregated provincial school systems.

One of the most trenchant critiques of contemporary social trends, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s 2019 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, tackled the contradictions inherent in education at all levels from pre-school to the universities. What the authors clearly identified was the “coddling of the mind” and the desire to weave a protective web of “safetyism” around today’s generation of students. Fierce critics of the rise of therapy culture in education like Furedi go much further, claiming that therapy culture draws sustenance from “trauma-informed” approaches, implants a culture of fear, and gives credence to claims that most students are vulnerable and need protection.

There’s mounting evidence to support the claim that education is now enveloped in social therapy culture. Over the past five years or more, public concerns about the effects of trauma—especially relative to school-aged students—have increased exponentially.  Fueling much of the discussion is a screening tool that was developed in the mid-1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) scale. It’s adoption as an early years intervention is a prime example of the priority now assigned to diagnosing and treating “trauma” affected children and introducing elementary school programs incorporating “mindfulness,” “self-regulation,” and suicide prevention.  Few of these initiatives or programs have been properly evaluated and validated as effective in the field of teen mental health, and mass application in congregate settings carries certain identified risks

Overdiagnosis of children and teens with broadly-defined “mental health issues’ may well be an unrecognized problem. More than two-thirds of American students, according to Health and Human Services survey data, reportedly suffer one traumatic event before their sixteenth birthday. In the case of Canada, leading experts like Rosalynn M. Record-Lemon and Maria J. Buchanan, routinely claim that statistics show 76.1% of Canadians will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Many and perhaps most children and adults, before COVID-19, were said to be facing “psychological trauma” and life situations that “overwhelm the individual’s capacity to cope.” Maltreatment, family violence, bullying, natural disasters, illnesses and personal loss were linked to “pervasive psychological, physical and developments impacts.” All of this is commonly used as a rationale for the widespread adoption of Trauma-Informed Practice (TIP) in publicly-funded schools.

Two recent metadata reviews of trauma-informed approach in schools have damaged its claim to be evidence-based practice. The best-known study, conducted by St. Louis University social work professor Brandy R. Maynard and her research team, under the auspices of Campbell Reviews, examined some 9,102 potential research articles, and identified only 67 of the articles were independent research studies. None of the 67 articles met evidence-based research criteria:  49 articles did not use random controlled trials or quasi-experimental design methods; 12 did not examine the effects of a trauma-informed approach; and the remaining five examined only one aspect of a trauma-informed approach. These authors reached a rather stark conclusion:  no school-based, trauma-informed research studies over the past ten years that were conducted using sound research methodologies such that the programs investigated could be objectively determined to be effective in addressing the trauma-related needs of school-aged students.

An authoritative research March 2019 article in Review of Research in Education reached similar conclusions. When three Kentucky researchers, M. Shelley Thomas, Shantel Crosby and Judi Vanderhaar, studied trauma-informed practices in schools over two decades, they found plenty of initiatives dedicated to reforming teaching practices, school climate, teacher training and ongoing professional development. “Empirical work” was “less established,” little of it came from education researchers, and, again, there was a lack of evidence demonstrating “the effectiveness of school-based supports” or their consistent application in schools.

The theoretical gaps, research deficiencies and questionable effectiveness of social-justice-centred trauma-informed school programs has also been exposed in a literature review in the 2021 International Journal of School Social Work. The three New Mexico University researchers, favourably disposed to such approaches, concluded that “the current theory of impact linking trauma-informed work and social justice work is not supported by evidence.” What was missing was “a socio-ecological model of trauma’ (SAMHSA 2014)” integrating psychological strategies into a broader initiative demonstrating an “understanding of families and staff as well as students.”

The Pandemic education crisis was accompanied by a profound catharsis transforming school systems, over two school years, for months on end, into protective spaces adhering to COVID-19 public health directives, and focused on providing a semblance of rough equity and support for students from disadvantaged or marginalized communities. In Ontario, it’s even spawned a new educational administration venture into “trauma-sensitive school leadership.”

What comes next? As families and schools gradually recover from “learning loss” and the collateral psycho-social effects, the almost exclusive emphasis on trauma-informed practice will likely subside. When it does, let’s hope that we see a revival of the effective schools movement holding out the promise of more focused, meaningful, purposeful and effective teaching and learning.

What explains the proliferation and staying power of “Trauma-Informed Education” in Canada’s provincial school systems?  Will it survive the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? Where is the evidence-based research in support of school-wide “trauma-informed” approaches? Should we be targeting such interventions where they will make a difference?

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Early Childhood Education: Is “Play-Based Learning” Imperiled – or Alive and Secure?

One of the most intellectually stimulating books of the fall season is Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Coddling of the American Mind. It is a formidable and persuasive critique of recent changes in American university campus culture. The new orthodoxy of “safe spaces” and “no platforming” was ripe for serious analysis and the authors have diagnosed the sources of what is termed “safetyism.”  Young people are being taught to “trust their feelings” and to call out the “goodies” and “baddies” in contemporary society. In a strange twist, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker.”

The two academics demonstrate a sound grasp of the “culture war” enveloping campus culture and correctly point out that “safetyism” poses a real threat to academic freedom on North American campuses.  As a child of the radical sixties, I was there when students fought to make the universities more open to new ideas, controversial speakers, and more democratic practices. Racism, bigotry and intolerance should be resisted and rejected. Having said that, it’s disconcerting to see today’s university students so quick to take offense and so inclined to silence those espousing different viewpoints.

While Lukianoff and Haidt correctly dissect the problem, they miss the mark in diagnosing the state of early childhood learning. The “decline of play” is plainly observable in today’s schoolyards and playgrounds. Overly protective parents, known as “helicopter parents,” are easy to spot in affluent and upper middle class school communities — and gravitate to independent schools.  It is simply wrong, in my estimation, to assume that “play learning” is endangered in pre-school, kindergarten, or early years education.

“Play-based learning” is ascendant in Canadian Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 3 education and is in no danger of disappearing. It is no exaggeration to say that “play learning” is the current catechism espoused by faculties of education and accepted, without question, by provincial education ministries. Since 2010-11, early leading has emerged as an education priority and provincial education departments, one after another, have changed their names to become the “Department of Early Childhood Development and Education.”

Where did Lukianoff and Haidt get the idea that “child’s play” was threatened in the primary grades?  Their primary source appears to be Erika Christakis, a Yale University child study professor and author of the 2017 book, The Importance of Being Little. Judging from her writings, she is an unabashed constructivist who sees great potential in “little children” and idealizes them “watching bulldozers on a construction site” or “chasing butterfies in flight.”  Surveying today’s preschool and kindergarten classrooms, most likely in New England, she claims that “learning has been reduced to scripted lessons and subject metrics that too often undervalue the child’s intelligence while overtaxing the child’s growing brain.” 

She is, in all likelihood, well acquainted with Ivy League prep schools. High and mismatched expectations, she contends, “wreak havoc on the family.” “Parents fear that if they choose the ‘wrong’ program, their child won’t get into the ‘right’ college.”  Such fears are “wildly misplaced,” according to Christakis, because young children are not only natural learners, but “exceptionally strong thinkers.”

Unstructured free play is good for little children and it does help to prepare them for the real, ‘rough-and-tumble’ world.  Where Christakis, Lukianoff and Haidt all go wrong is in setting up ‘free play’ in opposition to any form of early learning incorporating explicit teaching of core knowledge and skills. Claiming that it is harmful flies in the face of a great deal of recent education research informed by cognitive science.

Australian teacher-researcher Greg Ashman has effectively demolished the two essential claims about early learning made in The Coddling of the American Mind.  Free play may well be essential in learning social skills, but that does not mean it suffices for academic learning. Renowned Canadian education critic, Andrew Nikiforuk, once put it this way:  “If learning is so natural, why do we go to school?'”  The implicit answer: to learn something.

Pyschologist David C. Geary makes the helpful distinction between two types of learning, biological primary and biological secondary forms. Play is probably the best way to learn social skills, such as learning to work together, but not for learning academic abilities and skills.  The weight of research evidence, drawn from cognitive science, suggests that most children require more explicit instruction because learning requires some prodding, practice, and persistence.  Some students, particularly those with learning difficulties or socio-economic disadvantages, simply do not grasp the key ideas or master the fundamental skills without a measure of teacher-guidance.

Lukianoff and Haidt, citing Christakis, are critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the “Common Core Curriculum” and very much opposed to student testing in elementary grades. That may be why they are so inclined to see “testitis” creeping into the early grades.  While there is some evidence of it in American elementary schools, the same cannot be said for Canadian schools.  No homework is given in Kindergarten and only modest amounts in Grades 1 to 3. Provincial testing is administered starting in Grade 3 but it cannot be described as “high stakes” testing of the kind found at higher grades in the United States. 

Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind  offers a telling critique of what’s gone wrong on many university colleges.  Children from advantaged backgrounds may, from an early age, be subjected to academic pressures and discouraged from engaging in free play.  Parents with two degrees and homes full of books give privileged kids an early immersion in learning and, in many cases, have the added benefit of parents providing explicit instruction to fill gaps in understanding.  Over-parenting can and does produce coddled children , but it’s a stretch to claim that this is the real life experience of children from less favoured circumstances, raised in disadvantaged and marginalized communities.

Early learning programs in Canada, with few exceptions, are “play-based” and place considerable emphasis on nurturing social skills and supporting ‘student well-being.” Few Canadian early learning researchers would recognize the pre-schools and kindergartens as depicted in Lukianoff and Haidt’s otherwise impressive book.  In fact, it’s tempting to hypothesize that Canadian primary years programs are actually the nurseries for a younger generation who are so bubble-wrapped that “skinned knees” are treated as calamities.

Where’s the evidence that “play-learning” is imperiled in today’s pre-schools and kindergartens?  How prevalent is “helicopter parenting” and is it directed toward raising standards or to ‘school-proofing’ kids?  Is it fair to suggest that play learning and academic learning are mutually incompatible? Is “safetyism” what is actually being taught in kindergarten? 

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