From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens adjusting to the smartphone ban
gothamist.com279 points by geox 2 days ago
279 points by geox 2 days ago
Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”
There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.
Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.
Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
At what point did school districts change?
When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.
Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.
I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
When smartphones first started coming out a high school teacher took mine away - there was no blanket ban but I had undiagnosed ADHD and I wasn't paying attention during class. As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars. I wasn't a rich kid and I got it on a contract with the phone company. I remember she got really stressed out and cried about it during class.
If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.
> As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars.
If that's the claim, I think an appropriate response would be to send the kid out of class (with their precious phone), or home. Can't have them not paying attention in class, and if they are literally a walking liability to discipline in any other way: fine, so be it.
Educators in general seem especially scared of the liability fairy.
The correct thing to do here is your teachers position is to laugh at the idiot kid telling them about their legal liability.
The school may be taking some on, but if it’s a school policy short of actual gross negligence by the teacher she had none personally.
Even if the school had liability the correct response to such nonsense is to tell the parents to sue them. Most will not, and you defend to the death the few that do so others understand the cost of bringing frivolous lawsuits for silly reasons.
This whole nonsense of entire school systems grinding to a halt and lacking any implementation of common sense due to made up liability fantasies is ridiculous. Let those highly paid admins do their jobs and take on risk.
My mother is a teacher, and her school has gone through many different lawsuits from parents. In theory the staff are protected from liability, but if you think that going through a legal case is not stressful for the school from the principal to the teachers and counselors I don't know what to tell you. It only takes one parent out the hundreds to thousands of students at a school to make a mark. They can and often will go after the school for any little thing, from dress code to phones, to teachers being too easy to teachers being too hard. Anything that they perceive as giving a disadvantage to their children or that they don't like they will go after if they think they have a chance.
That 'fantasy' is not ridiculous. Teachers are quite often (nearly always) in a financially precarious situation with management that doesn't support them and parents that abdicate all responsibility. All it takes is one spoiled kid with rich parents to manufacture a complaint (teacher stole my phone and broke it). That complaint could seriously derail their life. My wife taught for years even though I made enough that she didn't need to because she loved helping kids learn. She left the profession entirely because the death by a thousand cuts that is the American education system was giving her actual medical issues from the anxiety, at great detriment to the kids she would have helped.
We treat teachers like second class citizens at our own peril.
It's exceedingly overblown. I agree administration (not teachers) are the issue here, they are the ones who are terrified of the liability fairy and refuse to actually support anyone who is actually attempting education. They don't want to have to take a single risk and maybe have to either do some work or lose their cushy job. Much easier to do nothing and pretend they are terrified of having to deal with manufactured complaints. These school districts are large - they could trivially come up with a in-house legal defense team and strategy for a rounding error on their budget and kill these stupid things as a chilling effect.
I've watched it happen in real time. Administration terrified of totally nonsense complaints and pretending that they just can't take on the "liability" - most of which would be laughed out of court. Bury these people in legal bills if they want to bring such crazy to court. But there is no risk ever taken unless an administrator's career is the one on the line.
Phone breaks in the custody of a teacher and there is not actual evidence of that happening? Too bad. Sue us. No one is suing over a $800 phone unless it turns into a crusade. If the latter happens, put up the strongest legal defense possible and make sure anyone watching understands they are not an easy target for such things. Don't want your phone to "break" while in custody of the school? Easy. Don't bring it to school and violate school policy.
If there were a competent administrator they'd be having parents sign release forms at the start of the school year for the topic. First offense confiscation for the day. Second you get it back on Friday. Third at the end of the school year.
I don't disagree that we treat teachers like shit. They are the equivalent of a retail employee being put in the front line and forced to deal with customer's vitriol due to horrible corporate policies set by do-nothing executives making 20x what they are. I put nearly all the blame on incompetent and downright corrupt administration enabled by equally deeply unserious politicians.
generally speaking I don’t think they were ever really allowed, but if you tried to “take them away” the kids would just put it in their pocket and not give it up. and that was it.
the difference now is that we have things like the magnetic pouches so students physically can’t use them. the rule is the same, but now it’s actually enforceable.
100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
I'm expecting a newborn soon and thinking the same. What did you change?
Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions. Don't neglect that part of your life and you won't be tempted to scroll, or at the very least you'll be resistant to it. No other way out of this, especially because you're in for a very emotional time in the near future.
But don't fret: becoming a parent forces you to find strength you didn't know you had. Sounds cliche but there's really no other way to describe it.
Before kids I was glued to my phone. Now when we go to the playground I just stare at the sky like a chimpanzee released after years of indoor captivity.
Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions.
I see them more as pacifiers for adults.
Whenever I see some adult doomscrolling in public, I hear Maggie Simpson's little suck suck suck sound in my head.
Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example.
Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
Another problem is that this tool is constantly trying to distract you. As jwz nearly said,
Every app attempts to expand until it is social media. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
See:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/spotify-is-no-longer-just-...
https://www.wikihow.com/Hide-Channels-on-WhatsApp (tl;dr there is no way)
https://www.thepearlpost.com/1342/tech/pinterest-is-now-a-so...
https://gearandgrit.com/stravas-evolution-the-journey-from-a...
Separate from the phone and screen time discussion, you are at an important juncture of your life, a transition to parenthood that could change everything. I say "could" because I fundamentally believe that half of people who have children don't have the self-awareness to change and adjust their habits and emotional state.
One of the monumental realizations for me when I became a parent (not necessarily the first day but over the first 5-7 years) was distinctly what my parents did right and wrong. My dad told me on the phone one day that I shouldn't show my child my feelings, that I should hide any negative feelings and only show positive feelings. And now I see that this is what my father did to me and it constrained my ability to share negative feelings with my friends and family, instead leading to me bottling up negative feelings like anger and sadness.I realize that this is not the correct way to parent, your child should see the full range of human emotions from their parents and although you want to be careful to not put too much emotional burden and stress on them to create an anxious child, you want to also be sure they see you at your best and worst. They should see you discuss your feelings with others and with them and when you lose your temper, as we all do, you should also afterwards rationalize what you were feeling with them, apologize if necessary (and it's usually always necessary because there is no need for any human to lose their temper with another human that's been on the Earth for only a few years).
Any way, I think of parenthood as a journey of self-reflection and improvement, much like childhood. Just like some people have a negative painful childhood, parenthood can be similar. The goal for you is to be open and honest with yourself and your growing family, and to be constantly looking for ways to improve.
Apologies if this sounded like a lecture but wish you the best in what may turn out to be the most important job of your life.
Congratulations! Who knows what the world will look like when your kids are in middle school / high school, but I would recommend strongly resisting social media / phones before they are in high school.
This can be tricky if all their friends / school communicates through such mediums as your kids may feel isolated. And yes, many schools promote the use of apps / social media as a shared means of communication for clubs, sports, etc. - which is maddening.
And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
> And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
Speaking as a Dad of two (5 and 2), this is really hard, not because I don't read (I read a lot), but because every time I bring a physical book out the kids start grabbing it, so it's much easier to use my Kindle.
Additionally, I'd probably end up getting divorced if we needed to find space for all the books I read in the house (I've acquired about 1100 books on Kindle over the past ~decade).
An e reader seems obviously a different type of device than your phone. Spiritually closer to a book than other types of screen.
I have three kids, now just turning adult. My wife and I took the point of view that we are modeling a healthy lifestyle for our children. So, we only used technology as tools -- looking up stuff, scheduling, reading PDFs, etc.... AND we made sure they could see what we were doing -- no "hidden" screens or hidden computer time.
After doing this for the last 15+ years, I think it's turned out well. The oldest two seem to have a healthy relationship with their devices (as tools) and are just as happy to put them down and go outside or spend time with other people. The youngest is similar, but still needs to use tech a lot for his studies (by curriculum design). However, he'd also prefer to go outside or watch a movie than be on a device.
It wasn’t that big of an issue at first. While my kid had a cellphone from middle school onwards, it wasn’t until social media boom that she started spending more and more time glued to the screen. Around Junior (11yr) year.
I definitely think the scrolling scrolling scrolling has done something negative to society.
The social media boom timing pretty much matched the popularity of iPhones. So the problem is really they began to have a full computer/screen in their pocket at all times. The usage trends are always going to change when the new tech enables them, social media and constant messaging wasn’t really enabled on dumb phones that existed previously.
I don't agree, we had about 5 solid years before she was doom scrolling and using social media. The first iphones in the home were the first gen iphones of 2009. Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones. It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015 and by then we were on our iPhone 6's. This is when it started but it didn't become a "problem" until 2018...
> It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015.
This just doesn't hold up - FB ended Q1 2014 with ~1.3bn MAUs. I don't know when I would argue FB exploded beyond colleges but by 2014 it had already happened, long before.
> Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones.
Facebook dropped the "The" and became "Facebook" in 2005.
I'm prepared to accept an argument that social media has contributed, but these dates don't make any sense.
I'm from a lower middle class family in India. We didn't even have access to smartphones, just a core 2 desktop. My friends had one as well. It was 2012, we were 12 years old and we all had accounts on facebook through the desktop. Feature phones had the actually good java facebook app as well which ran on 2g.
iPhones weren't ubiquitous for at least a few years after the initial release. Parents of teens and younger weren't the first adopters but it came on relatively quickly. The Social Network movie came out in 2010 which Facebook had already opened up to general public in 2006. Also was 2006 that News Feed was released and introduced the concept of doom scrolling and constantly checking into things. Respectfully, if you did not experience it's popularity until ~2015 I do not think you are representative of the overall trends; they hit a billion users in 2012 and that certainly wasn't just college students.
This is it. You rarely see a grown adult making the decision to cut down their own screen time (including on the phone), so there's next-to-no chance they do anything for their kids.
Most people seem to be in a mass trance with smartphone usage. Everywhere I go, the majority of people I see at any given moment are on their phone. It's spooky. I don't look forward to the inevitable mental health crisis we're going to hit when generations who have always lived with a smartphone hit mid-life.
There's no need to wait, just look at the current mental health crisis.
it's a bit disingenuous to assign this solely or primarily to smartphone usage. lots of reason for todays teens to be depressed etc., maybe smartphone-usage is a symptom, not the root-cause.
it's a bit disingenuous to assign this solely or primarily to smartphone usage.
He didn't. You're the one that brought "solely" into the conversation.
yeah, my interpretation went too far, but even just attributing The Mental Health Crisis to smartphone usage, as if this really was a significant core-reason, is not right to me.
"Teens are sad because they spend all their time on their phones", then maybe ask yourselves why teens flee to their virtual spaces. (maybe look at what seems important to them and is at the same time being dismissed and ignored by the people older than them, while being told not to be idealistic and naive.)
As a barely former teen, what awaits in those virtual spaces is both worse than the dismissal and arguably feeds the naïveté causing said dismissal.
i'm not saying that it's healthy or good that teens flee into virtual spaces. i just think the mental health crisis isn't caused by smartphones - the problem is whatever is making them flee there.