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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Disrupted Classrooms: Can We Reclaim Kids with “Tik-Tok Brain” to Focus on Learning?

Schools and classrooms have changed after successive years of educational disruptions, shutdowns, home schooling isolation, and massive experiments in remote teaching. Serious gaps in student learning, psycho-social impacts, and academic achievement setbacks are now more visible from province-to-province in Canadian K-12 education. What’s less recognized and largely unaddressed is the profound impact of students’ near-total fixation with cellphones and complete absorption in cyberworlds.

Reading, in particular, is severely compromised in revved-up multi-task environments. Today’s elementary and secondary school students are essentially immersed in distractions. It’s next-to-impossible to learn or read with comprehension while keeping one eye on a phone, scrolling for videos, and being constantly interrupted, while attempting to pay attention to your teachers.

Promoters of ed tech have sold classroom teachers, parents and policy-makers a bill of goods.  Today’s students may be far more adept at accessing and using tech toys, but they have been profoundly affected by total immersion in constant connectivity, texting, and time-absorbing social media best exemplified by the incursion of Tik-Tok. Multi-tasking has been normalized and it comes with serious side-effects impairing students’ abilities to concentrate with adverse consequences for teaching kids to read.

Multi-tasking is being exposed as a myth. New evidence-based research is emerging which connects the proliferation of advanced cellphones with distractibility in workplaces and schools contributing to more frequent errors, higher levels of stress, reduced cognitive ability, and lower productivity. Focusing exclusively on banning or limiting cellphones sparks much debate, but it often misses the point.  Teachers are now facing an up-hill battle to reclaim the attention of the pandemic generation of students.

Identifying the impact of mobile phones and social media is not new, as Teach Like a Champion founder Doug Lemov recently reminded us. American research generated by  Jean M. Twenge and others found that teenagers’ media use roughly doubled between 2006 and 2016 across gender, race, and class. In competition against the smartphone, the book, the idea of reading, lost significant ground. By 2016, just 16 percent of 12th-grade students read a book or magazine daily. As recently as 1995, 41 percent did. Meanwhile, social media was on the rise. By 2016, about three-quarters of teenagers reported using social media almost every day

The onslaught completely transformed teen culture with some detrimental side-effects.  Some 47 % of teenagers use the phone whilst on the toilet, double that of adults. Students who perform a task just in sight of their phone (regardless of if they are using it) do about 20% worse as it still distracts them. In addition, students who are on their phone more in class get worse grades, regardless of gender or previous grade average. Some 60 % of male and female U.S, college students, surveyed in long before the pandemic, reported feeling very agitated when they could not access their mobile phone.

The Pandemic has only made matters worse. When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, virtually everything that might have been competed without smartphones suddenly disappeared. A recent Common Sense Media study found that children’s daily entertainment usage of screens grew by 17 percent between 2019 and 2021—more than it had grown during the four previous years. Overall, daily entertainment screen use in 2021 increased to 5.5 hours among tweens ages 8 to 12 and to more than 8.3 hours among teens ages 13 to 18, on average. These trends were even more pronounced for students from low-income families, whose parents were most likely to have to work in person and have fewer resources to spend on alternatives to screens.

Leading researchers like Twenge sounded early warnings that excessive smartphone use would likely have catastrophic consequences for teens’ well-being, and those seemingly alarmist warnings have been borne out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Teenagers’ reported mental health concerns have spiked with only 47 percent of students reported feeling connected to the adults and peers in their schools. Some 44 percent of high-school students reported feeling sad or persistently hopeless in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

School disruptions and closures had a big effect.  Students who said they felt “connected to adults and peers” at school were almost 60 percent less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness than those who did not—some 35 percent of connected students felt that way, compared with 55 percent who did not feel connected to school. The socio-emotional distress students are experiencing, according to Lemov, is as much a product of the so-called ‘cellphone epidemic’ as it is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The explosion of Tik-Tok fad is not only a prime example of the pervasive impact of mobile phone culture, but demonstrates how today’s kids can get hooked on continuous social media feeds. Peering inside the “Tik-Tok Brain,” neuroscientists have shown that “the dopamine rush of endless short videos” makes it hard for young viewers to switch their focus to slower-moving, teacher-guided activities. “We’ve made kids live in a candy store,” is how it was described a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Screen time is crowding out teaching and learning, most notable in declining reading proficiency. Spending so much time on mobile phones, even without social media, adversely affects attention and concentration skills, making it harder to focus fully on any task and to maintain that focus. When students are simply unable to focus or pay attention, learning to read through systematic literacy programs or tackling more rigorous academic tasks in higher grades becomes doubly difficult for teachers in today’s classrooms.

Banning or severely restricting cellphones in class is more of a quick fix when the problem is far wider in societal culture and runs much deeper in schools.  “If you want kids to pay attention,” Cincinnati pediatrician and literacy specialist John S. Hutton advises us, then students “need to practice paying attention.” Turning the phones off is wise, but only the beginning in the post-pandemic struggle to foster what Teach Like a Champion calls “habits of attention” and to reclaim today’s students.

How have successive disrupted school years made reaching today’s students a bigger problem for classroom teachers?  How much of the change is the result of remote learning and the further proliferation and dominance of mobile devices?  How can today’s teachers compete with “Tik-Tok Brian” to reclaim students?  Why is curtailing cellphone use, by itself, unlikely to make much of a difference?

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