Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It was by no means watertight -- many (most?) kids had a "burner" phone that was dead or broken or whatever that they turned in (because nobody would believe a highschooler who said they didn't have their phone with them lol) and they kept their real phone. But at least the expectation was set that you can absolutely not ever be seen using a phone in class.
Overall I think it was a good policy. I don't think it's workable at large schools.
In NYC at least you simply can't tell families that kids have to leave phones at home -- they are an essential tool for safety and travel, especially for younger kids. My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out. But they do not need to have them in the classroom.
(Genuinely asking, never lived in a place with a subway, but took the bus all the time at that age.)
Also, you get assigned a public school depending on where you live (the closest) so unless you go to a private school, you're going to the closest one.
(Yes, this means that a large part of housing prices in these urban areas is driven by parents or soon-to-be-parents fighting over the housing that exists in the catchment areas of the best public schools.)
This is usually combined in civic planning with a "service radius" around the school, to decide when new schools are needed (vs. just expanding existing schools.) For rural areas, the service radius is defined by practicable bus pickup loops (you don't want a bus that takes an hour to get to the school); but in dense urban areas, that radius is usually defined by walkability — on little child-sized legs!
The combination of the concepts of "catchment area" + "service radius" means that if you live in a city in one of these countries, it's almost impossible that you're going to live somewhere where your child fundamentally cannot walk to school (purely in terms of distance.) Which is a major reason why everyone makes fun of people in cities in the US (which uses both of these concepts in most municipalities) for driving their kids to school, when that school is by law a distance away that the kid could walk.
(I know that the problem in the US often isn't the distance, but what's between the home and the school — dangerous major thoroughfares with no sidewalks cutting through neighbourhoods and the like. Which is still the US being dumb; just on a different level.)
For follow-up education - and this is generally from age 16 onwards - you often need to head to a near city or provincial capital, but the government offers a free public transit scheme if you need to travel for that.
Personally, my preschool was literally around the corner (a five minute walk, although I had tiny legs), primary school was a 500 meter walk, secondary school was a kilometer, tertiary education one (associate's degree) was in the next town over (5 kilometer bike ride), tertiary education two (bachelor's degree) was in the province capital (25 kilometer bus ride).
IMO this is how towns and communities should be designed.
I grew up just outside of Boston and my parents let me take the commuter rail to north station and the T over to Cambridge with friends as an early teenager. It never felt like a big deal, you just learned to read a subway map and a train time table. If you got lost you asked for directions.
They have my number memorized.
I took a 30 minute ferry ride and then subway to school each day in NYC ;)
And kids still do it.
Heck, outside my middle school in NYC, they had a line-up specifically for regular transit buses that were scheduled to stop there just when school let out. The only kids that qualified for yellow school bus service were those that lived more than a half a mile from a bus/subway stop.
I was taking the subway to school by myself at 12 in Toronto (maybe a slightly less intense city, to be fair). I'm not sure about NYC but in Toronto it's possible to teach a kid a set of strategies where they'll basically never get dangerously-lost.
Just find the nearest bus, and get on it. Stay on it until it arrives at a subway station. Ask a transit worker at the station if necessary. Get on another bus or subway that gets you a little closer in the right direction. It can take a while but you can follow this algorithm rather blindly and it will get you there. (The system was designed that way, I think.)
I never got lost. And if I had gotten lost, I wouldn't have been in any particular danger. At a certain age they'll have to figure out "oh, there's no bus, what do I do?" on their own. (At the time, I did not like this whole take the subway on my own thing - scared the heck out of me. I had to be coached with multiple trial runs.)
The only place I’ve personally witnessed wide spread mass transit use for youth in school is Japan. Totally normal and feels safe.
Kids have been able to ride the busses around Seattle for free for many years now (and before that, during the summer for free). It's worked out pretty well. Or at least the program as continued, and I've seen a lot of kids using the city busses.
Definitely a better system than yellow school busses.
The NYC subway is on a whole 'nother level. Things like local trains suddenly running express because of crowding, or temporary service patterns like „the J-train is now running on the F-line between 22nd and 58th“ (u have to know from context thats Manhattan, not Brooklyn). And of course these announcements ate barely discernible, the loudspeakers require 15 years of training to understand.
"Banning technology from schools can be legitimate if technology integration does not improve learning or if it worsens student well-being. Yet, working with technology in schools, and the accompanying risks, may require something more than banning. First, policies should be clear on what is and is not permitted in schools. Students cannot be punished if there is no clarity or transparency on their required behaviour. Decisions in these areas need conversations supported by sound evidence and involve all those with a stake in students’ learning. Second, there should be clarity on the role these new technologies play in learning and on their responsible use by and within schools. Third, students need to learn the risks and opportunities that come with technology, develop critical skills, and understand to live with and without technology. Shielding students from new and innovative technology can put them at a disadvantage. It is important to look at these issues with an eye on the future and be ready to adjust and adapt as the world changes."
Outright bans on smartphones in schools are no different from the video game, TV screen time, "kids will only play games on computers" and other related superstitions that were in vogue back in the early 2000s. All they did was make parents feel validated (without having to put in the work to understand their child) and make life difficult for most kids while building resentment.
As with most things, the decision of smartphone access for kids should come down to having parents actually understand their child, his/her needs and ability to handle the associated responsibility.
Especially as a teenager, pursuing my interests in computers was nothing but constant arguing with my parents because they were constantly being supported by outsiders (who had never seen what I was doing) on their anti-computer superstitions of the time (due to which they wholesale refused to understand that I wasn't gaming the vast majority of the time).
Back then kids were not watching tv or playing video games in the middle of class.
I remember when I was in school people were texting on their flip phones, I can't imagine the extent of distractions in school today. I used to pay attention in class only because there was nothing more entertaining to do. If I had a phone and could play minecraft while my teacher lectured us on US history I would not have learned anything.
Laughs in GameBoy.
Seriously, you have to be elder gen x or older to exist in a time where handheld consoles of some flavor were not available. And there’s always been other forms of entertainment, be it passing notes, talking, or daydreaming.
Also, if your argument is "gameboy existed". People just did not use it as much. Today smartphone usage in class is rampant. Also gameboy games were not anywhere near as addicting as games and social media are today.
Well, how are teachers supposed to enforce a ban on smartphones, then?
Have you never played Tetris? Any Gameboy game where you have to level up (like Final Fantasy) will also be a severe temptation as you have something productive to do while the teacher yammers about stuff you either already know, has nothing to do with you (e.g. talking to another student), or don't care about (like really I do not care about the difference between "predicate nominative" and "subject complement").
Also the original Game Boy was a bit too big to bring into a class and not get caught, but Game Boy Advance SP was perfect.
None of this is new. Children being distracted in classrooms is nothing new. If there's children, there's socializing, playing games, and ignoring adults for the much more interesting other children.'
Cell phones are just the new boogyman, like CD players and walkmen and gameboys etc. were back in the day.
No, but we can take the electronic device and log it into the office so that a parent has to come retrieve it. And if I happen to forget a couple of days and only manage to log it in on Friday so that they don’t get it over the weekend, well, I’m a forgetful chap.
That threat alone, not having a phone over the weekend eliminates 90% of phone issues in my classroom.
73M children, 118M gameboys.
Hell, parents call their kids in class just to chat.
Gameboy was risky in class (never saw anyone do that), but several of us did bring our NDS to assemblies and used the wireless chat feature.
Gameboys just weren't very common. I grew up in a pretty well off area, and I only knew a couple of people with them.
Whereas, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of teens have smart phones.
The one where I played NES emulator on the lab computer and blockdude on the ti83.
There is something to be said for focus.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
C'mon man.
A small number of kids having the ability to restrain themselves and not stare at their phone all day is not a great reason to keep phones in the classroom.
The distinction is that tvs and video games are indeed banned in school. Banning smart phone usage outright is different from banning smart phones in school.
It only feels different to you because you have the benefit of hindsight on one of them but not the other.
School-wide and broader bans actually fix this problem of social needs, by leveling the playing field.
Perhaps you have not experienced how tech-illiterate smartphone kids are today? They d most likely struggle to navigate HN because it lacks notifications and likes.
I think we should be making a distinction between phones and computers always
An outright ban will make their job easier.
i think no outright ban in classrooms will ever exist in the US because a large % of parents will insist that their child have uninterrupted access to their phones for all sorts of valid reasons.
With TV and video games, the fear being pushed was that kids would talk about them in school instead of about studying and that they would be distracted by thinking about watching TV or playing games instead of paying attention to class.
If individual schools (or even individual counties etc) want to try a ban like that, they can experiment. I don't know whether it's a good idea or not.
But I do know that a global ban is beyond silly.
I believe this is just an appeal to school authorities worldwide - asking them to recognize the downsides and take concrete measures in their own way to keep smartphones away from learners in the classroom setting.
If enough school boards agree and take such a stand -- others are likely to emulate / follow, parents and kids will come to accept it and adapt, and it becomes a defacto global ban.
I guess, somewhat similar to how public smoking has now become near universally "banned" or at least shunned.
Sorry this was just bragging, but from what I've seen this applies equally to all the kids at her school.
Except that far too many parents don't do this. I don't think its because they don't care, but rather they care more about their child "fitting in". This is why our local middle school is full of 12-year-olds with iPhones. The thing is a status symbol and a Pandora's box that you cannot shut once its open.
Look - the plain and simple of it is that mental health among teenagers is plummeting, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that smartphones are the culprit. Schools can't solve social problems. But they can at least not encourage them.
There's a reason the creators of these toys don't allow their own kids to play with them.
Do you think it is dumb to have a global ban on cocaine in schools?
Also specially in the US with all the school shootings, banning kids from having phones that allow them to call for help seems like a really bad idea.
Run the numbers. This isn't a justification for much, really.
They're a shameful occurrence, but the odds of a kid being present during any kind of shooting at school (gang member standing in the parking lot and firing at someone not on school property, and not a student or faculty member; targeted jilted-lover killing of a teacher; targeted crime-related [think: beef over drug territory] killing of one student by another, with a gun; and yes, also mass shootings) at any point during their k-12 education, are low. Present, not killed or injured. Indiscriminate mass shootings are very far from being the most common kind of shooting at schools, so that's even less likely—being present at all, that is, not hurt or killed, that's vanishingly unlikely over all 13 years of school. Nb that's assuming even-odds of shootings at all schools, which isn't the case.
So you're harming all kids' educations and exposing them to some messed-up stuff (talk. to. some. teachers. What you think I meant by that? Shock images or something? Not as messed-up as I actually mean) in case they're in a mass shooting (rare) and also their having a phone makes a difference in the outcome (narrowing the slice of this-was-a-good-idea circumstances even more)
It's awful that they happen, absolutely, and they are one small but striking feature of our messed-up gun laws and culture and we really do need to fix all that, but perceptions of how common they are are completely out of phase with reality, which leads to bad decision-making.
Whenever I see arguments like these, I always feel that the person likely isn’t a parent of a teen.
There is a real sense of isolation and exclusion that teens feel when they don’t have cell phones or aren’t allowed to use them. The consequences are likely (for some parents/teens) worse than letting them have them.
Only when phones are more widely seen as shameful or unhealthy to have before adulthood will that not be the case. Until then, some other form of banning seems to be the only way to level the playing field and make it less isolating.
A recent study did a survey[1] of parents who had allowed their teenage kids to use social media. The results were pretty significant. Every parent in the survey said it was a big mistake in retrospect. Lots of problems, from addiction to depression.
[1] I don't recall what the N was.
Often times, the anxiety is the beginning of a cycle that inhibits learning (people turn to their devices for anxiety-relief in math class, causing them to learn less math, causing them to be more anxious about math, and suddenly there is an increase in "math anxiety" except for the small minority socialised into math from a young age)
If I had a gameboy (as some others in this thread mention) on me in middle/high school, I'd be at least engaging with something where the input informs the output, probably realise it's not worth the effort, and start paying attention to class.
It's also worth noting that social media platforms are expressly designed to not be understood; you don't actually learn anything about technology or gain an interest in computing by watching Reels; it's not like the teachers are the dumb ones and the kids are all discussing the merits of glibc vs musl on IRC or something
I understand that HN is mostly inhabited by those from a more techno-optimist era when most administrative positions were held by boomers who thought that the monitor was the computer, but this isn't that. This is qualitatively different.
I guess at some point teachers gave up trying to enforce the rules. Or the idea of being away from your phone for hours at a time became strange to everyone. Or maybe teachers thought they could incorporate phones into lesson plans.
Anyway, I think we were better off not being allowed to use our phones in class.
The teacher's process was to put a slide on the projector and have everyone write it down. Repeat until class is over, maybe with minimal discussion.
I just snapped a picture of a slide and told the teacher to move to the next one, I already sent it to everyone in class =)
But very few people can write down a slide, listen to what the teacher is commenting while reading it aloud and ALSO make notes about what the teacher said simultaneously. Some people even resort to recording the audio of lectures to keep up (afaik some note-taking apps on iOS actually support it directly + sync it with the written notes).
But this wasn't the case, copying the slides WAS the whole class pretty much.
I can speak from experience in teaching, and being married to a teacher who both have seem the implementation of smartphones and the consequences thereof.
It's not the students, it's not the teachers, it's the parents. Students are usually salty, but understand if you have a no phone policy. It's the parents. They DEMAND to be able to contact their child at all hours of the day, regardless of whether the child is in class. They EXPECT the school to support them texting and/or calling their kid to discuss trivial nonsense throughout the day.
The ability of people to trust that their kids are safe in schools is gone. The ability of people to understand a message that MUST be sent right now versus one that can wait is gone. The ability of people to deal with any amount of not being connected is gone.
It's, honestly, disturbing. I don't know what it is about it that bothers me so much, but it frightens me.
It's the constant connection, I think. I feel like maybe it's fostering a societal inability to be independent. As an example - people have questioned my parenting because my son goes into the woods by himself (we live in a rural area). They have questioned how much I actually care about him because I don't follow him and/or know everything he's doing all the time. I'm a firm believer in independence fostered safely. School and playtime are two places that this independence needs to be fostered, and parents today have completely forgotten that their kids will have to exist without them some day.
This might come across as a little /get off my lawn/, but it's my experience across decades of working in education.
The relationship parents have with kids is way too much and people need to tone it down. Banning cell phones is a good first step.
This 24 year old called his mom to ask if it was okay if he drove some people in his car. A car that he owned. His mom said he could drive one person.
We said "nevermind, dude, we'll just all take a cab". This was 2013.
It's the attitude that kids can't make mistakes, no matter what, and that any mistakes are a direct reflection on the parents. It's exhausting.
I want my kid to mess up. I want him to fall out of a tree and break his arm. I want him to grow up and drive somewhere three states over with his friends and break down and need me to come get him.
That's part of growing up.
Now for the part that I'm not sure isn't just me being a grumpy old man -
I'm honestly afraid we're raising a generation that doesn't have proper coping skills and won't be able to effectively function in society. My proof is that college students today will remove themselves from opportunities that are too stressful - which includes just needing to call people on the phone. I have seen massively competent, not socially anxious teens turn down amazing opportunities because they had to speak to someone they don't know on the phone.
It's amazing.
I'm in my mid-30's and I feel like I've seen the change in my time. Some parents of kids my age were of the helicopter variety, but that was more of an exception.
Most parents I know now have kids that would have been considered stunted or even developmentally challenged when I was their kid's age. I don't know how to describe it except to say that they lack any sort of agency and act about half their age (this may say more about my expectations). I think there are a lot of factors that go into this, like having a 24/7 tether to your parents with a smartphone (and parents that encourage this), social media and news cycles that emphasize fear and anger (that affects both the parents and the child), the "safetyism" of post-Columbine-and-9/11 America, growing authoritarianism across the political spectrum, slight deviations from behavioral norms being medicalized and requiring adjustment, and children generally being deprived of autonomy and responsibility at nearly every opportunity by removing almost any potential for things to go wrong or get difficult (IMO, dealing with these situations may be the fundamental life skill).
Most kids these days have no grit and they shut down at the slightest whiff of adversity, it's like learned helplessness, except I don't think they ever learned to help themselves in the first place because their parents prevented it. They need some sort of authority figure and to be told what they're supposed to do, think, and feel.
I know some people in my age group that are like this. They had helicopter parents, and it's like they completely stopped developing as a person in their teens. They practically can't wipe their own ass without calling their parents and asking how.
There are dedicated terms for those, ie helicopter parents, control freaks etc.
The simple fact is, internet/mobile/information revolution came too fast, caught whole world by a massive surprise, and people had to cope with completely new benefits and drawbacks of this new aspect of their lives on their own. As with everything else, some cope better/smarter than others, and as usually nothing is black & white.
You are doing fine (judging solely from your description), don't worry what others say - its their problem.
I was always resentful in high school when teachers said you wouldn't have access to informational charts or calculators in the real world. At that time I considered my integration with some electronic devices an extension of myself and an external index, it was like having a bunch of additional limbs for problem solving. Not having access to my tech devices was equivalent to being artificially lobotomized. And kids growing up will have access to even more powerful tools thanks to LLMs.
Societies that adapt and integrate tech devices as part of the educational experience will have a competitive advantage in the long run.
Banning personal smartphones and forcing kids to focus on the class is the objective, not to be arbitrarily Luddite.
Taking away a student's most powerful tool is crippling their development capabilities. Education should focus on integrating and leveraging existing modern tools to empower student capabilities and problem solving skills.
A trite example: imagine a student has to solve a word search. For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually. But younger students could learn how to scan the grid with OCR tools, and then write a simple script to search for the words. Ideally students would be familiarized with a full set of advanced capabilities and programming tools to be able to outperform someone doing a manual search. This example is basic, but it can be extrapolated to far more practical real world problems.
Instead of giving students basic problems, unleash them on more complex domains without instructions and get them to engage with LLMs and other tools to try and solve the problem. Then if they get stuck, help walk them through arriving at the solution. This is what education should be about.
I want students to learn to leverage all of their tools to maximum efficiency. The goal isn't to get students to pass some stupid exam, it's for them to be able to solve complex problems in the real world.
An analogy. If we had a tree-climbing competition, where some students are allowed to use their hands and feet while others are only allowed to use their feet, I bet you that the ones that are allowed to use both hands and feet will be far more effectively at climbing. And the ones forced to just use their feet will be left wondering why they weren't allowed to use their hands.
It's quite possible the purpose of the word search is to train the child on their own visual pattern recognition, not their problem solving. Solving manually and writing an OCR program are teaching to two very different skillsets.
But more fundamental to my point is this: "There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok."
Yes, but without administrative-level filters and lockdowns, social media and garbage are inseparable from the phone. The solution would be for the school to offer a standard issue mobile device with whitelisted resources for the purposes of teaching.
Allowing students to have their personal, unrestricted phones out during class is to invite them to distract themselves from lessons and learning. It is to invite them to learn how not to focus on meatspace.
When I was in school we had multiple seminars on how to navigate library systems and research data. Because it's not obvious to kids what capabilities are available from existing systems unless someone teaches them.
The problem with banning smartphones is that it will limit development of problem solving capabilities to the same tier as prior generations and fail to teach students how to maximally leverage the tools to which they have access.
Educational systems must adapt and evolve. The older generation is responsible for developing new tools and getting children acquainted with their usage.
If you were to be overly reliant on phones for easy problem solving, or even medium problem solving (more and more enabled by LLMs), you’d not be building the underlying skills to deal with novel but simple problems that the internet/LLMs don’t know about. And you’d not build the foundation to help you with solving harder problems.
Plus, while computers are great for allowing us to “know” much more information than before without actually knowing it, it is still a different kind of knowing. The things you know in your head you can internalize and use to build connections between ideas, a more accurate world view, quickly connect disparate ideas. You also, even if you don’t remember all the details, know the general gist. If you rely too much on the internet, you don’t know that some concepts even exist, and you can fail to internalize or truly understand something.
I’ll give you one example: sometimes I look up programming stuff on the internet if I get stuck. If I immediately jumped to that every time I had a problem, I would not learn very much. Since I treat this as a last resort, I have learned a lot about programming from the process of figuring things out myself first by reading code. This has allowed me to build the skill of seeing an answer and thinking “oh, they got the general gist, but what they suggest is actually a bit over complicated” or “this is a good answer but for a different problem than the question/I am asking” - something noobs don’t discern as well.
Is this realistic? Any experiences?
Your kids will be excluded from a lot of conversations and events. They will feel ostricized socially and will inevitably be frustrated at you because of it.
Having no phone versus a dumb phone would make the resentment worse. No idea what the best answer is beyond all of society collectively realizing it's a bad idea to give smartphones to young kids.
:-(
Raising your children is the most important thing anybody does in their life. It's not something you do alone, but there is a hierarchy on who should have the most say in raising your children. The hierarchy is something like this:
1. The parents
2. Close family
3. Other parents in the community (if you have such community)
4. Close friends of the parents
5. Tutors, coaches and teachers
6. Responsible and respected adults in the community
7. Any adult
8. Any teenager
9. Criminal gangs
10. Television and Hollywood
11. Silicon Valley companies
12. Government workers
Now, if a child gets excluded from not having a smart phone, it seems that everybody above number 11 are somewhat or blatantly neglecting their duties. Get together with other parents and start taking control back from number 11 in raising your children.
Did you miss my original question?
> Do they get any input in what technology they derive value/enjoyment from, or is that entirely dictated by adults in their community who grew up 20+ years ago?
You literally didn't give me one, what on earth are you talking about.
> You seem to make up an image in your mind that I'm disregarding the child's own personality
I don't know where you're getting that I've 'made an image up in my mind'.... I asked you a question about how you weighted your child's input / freedom when it comes to technology, and you've done nothing but deflect lmao. I'm not "fighting a battle"... I asked a straightforward question that has still received no answer.
I can't tell if I'm talking to a human or a chatbot at this point.
A family member dated a school resource officer for a few years, and it was really jarring to hear stories about stuff he had to deal with from high school students which weren't big issues 5 years prior. Tons of cyber bullying, revenge porn, fake calculator apps that were fronts for encrypted storage, students with multiple phones, etc.
Phones were also way less powerful back then. By the time I went to college, companies were making apps multiple times bigger than at the beginning (like 1-5 MB commonly going to 20-50 MB). I could only have ~5 big apps on my phone before I was out of memory, and the phone died for good on the 2 hour drive to college.
Phones are cheap, kids are clever, etc. Unintended consequences seem like a guarantee
Granted, I'm not a parent
If you just hold it over their head, they'll go find some other kid whose parents' entire parenting philosophy is "give iPad". You should make sure to explain to them why you're restricting the tech (and be open if you think the kids are mature enough to understand). "You could download bad things that spy on you or get exposed to bad content - it even happens to a lot of adults" is a much better explanation than "ooo spooky bad stuff on internet".
My final suggestion, and what I wish my parents had done, is allowed me to use the internet freely, with supervision (and an adblocker). Instead of letting them go on YouTube or Reddit to watch random streamers, let (and encourage) them to try learning Spanish, Python, electronic music, whatever. It would have been extremely fun for me as a kid to learn about "advanced" stuff like coding actual websites or messing with the terminal instead of playing with the sanitized block-code websites. They'll also pick up useful skills in the process, and be entertained in a productive way. Much better than restricting or allowing everything imo.
Also, the fact that you're considering this makes you a better parent than half the population nowadays. Keep your kids from consuming garbage and they will thank you later!
School can be boring and a smartphone is just a too welcome distraction.
I don't think there is 1 rule that would be simply the best solution for every single kid out there. Understand your kids, how they approach learning, stimuli, how they react, how much patience they have (and encourage the good bits obviously). And adapt approach correspondingly, continuously.
But yeah giving small kids phones is a recipe for disaster, even static glowing screen is often more interesting to them than colorful books. Also, lead by example, kids want to mimmick their parents for quite long (usually puberty is stopping this). Same situation here btw (kids, 2 and 3 years old) and we talk about it a lot. We see around us some failures of unrestricted access to computers and phones, but without time machine its hard to say how things would be different without them
If your goal is for your kids to not have access to smartphone apps, dangers and distractions, I fear it'll fail spectacularly.
If your goal is to build self reliance and problem solving skills, you may succeed in unintended ways.
I was born in 1979. I touched my first computer probably at age 6. I programmed in GWbasic when I was 10 or so, started turbo Pascal and oracle db lessons when I was 11. War started when I was 12, my dad got wounded when walking to work, and I was basically a fully fledged prepubescent adult partially responsible for family survival. And I am not special. (This is lateral to the meticulous way I built a flame thrower at 12 as well:)
Point is, 12 and 13 year olds are smart and resourceful and have a lot of time and motivation to outwit you. We somehow forget our 12 year old selves when we become adults. I reread enders game when I need to remind myself (my initial reaction to the book was "what a horribly unrealistic way to portray kids, they think like adults", followed by the realization I did think like that as a kid! We just start telling ourselves weird tales of superiority as we get old).
You are not repeat not going to successfully keep your kids from this stuff until they're 14. My 12 year old niece who is like the most innocent person I know taught me more about dark Web than I knew. You don't raise your child in isolation. They'll learn from you but also hundred other kids. You can hope to be involved and maybe, maybe guide. I fear that by not giving them access yourself in a guided fashion, all you'll be doing is ensuring they have it in unguided fashion.
(Fwiw I have a 2 and 4 year old and struggle with exact same questions coming up)
And sorry to inform you, but you’re damn special.
That is hilarious.
I agree with you. I feel about as clever now as I was at 13. Might have been even more so then, just with more facts and experience to make up for it now.
My dad (an IT guy) tried but couldn't keep me from accessing the internet while he was at work. I spent entire summers indoors. Which was terrible for my social life, but I was a damn good video gamer and eventually video game hacker. He had to disconnect and take the modem with him, which he did for two weeks once as punishment for viewing porn. So I called up my friend and went to play video games in his basement. It was a lot of fun actually. I learned about the value of socialization and we're still best friends to this day.
Croatia might be a factor only because prevalence of smartphone use among teenagers there might be lower. Just guessing.
My kid has had an iPad from age 1 or so, with kiosk mode enabled and a baby game that made funny noises when they slapped the screen.
They got a phone at age 7, just before starting first grade. No Youtube, no TikTok and screen time enforced per category and per program. The only one I "cheated" the age with was WhatsApp, because it's the default communication tool over here.
It's about 5 years later and I've still managed to keep them off Youtube by giving more screen time in Netflix/Disney+/our PBS equivalent etc, where the content is actually produced and not some youtube elsagate horror show or a screaming influencer hawking off whatever a sponsor is telling them to sell this week.
At this point asking for screen time with good grounds is a habit for the kid: "Homework is done and I read The Trials of Morrigan Crow for 30 minutes, can I get screen time?" It's also used mostly for background noise, iPad is on a stand somewhere with a random show running and they're drawing or doing some crafts while it's playing.
The rule we follow is that every 15 minute slot spent reading (comics or books) is given out double as screen time.
But if the options are no reading and 15-30 minutes of reading every day, I'll pick the latter even if I need a screen time shaped carrot to achieve it.
Just being able to read a full book without having a subway surfers video bouncing next to it is a superpower for under 15 year olds today.
Sadly, babies which are underexposed to stimuli often display developmental delays compared to peers.
Having said that, you are early enough that you still have time to convince the other parents in their grade cohort to take a pledge like "Wait Until 8th" https://www.waituntil8th.org/ (In the US, 8th grade is 13-14 years old.) This provides a kind of "herd immunity" as long as you get enough families on board.
And if your school does not already have them in place you can advocate for anti-cell-phone policies which minimize classroom time as a potential vector.
Be forewarned that you may not be successful unless you are also willing to cut social ties with families who cave in and give their kids phones before then.
or your kid might turn out like me. you don't think there are ways a clever 11, 12, 13 year old can get a phone, and hide it from you?
I reckon if they can maintain enough income to cover that, they're ready for one.
Still can't have it late at night, though. And if they do anything too dumb with it, it's gone, and they can buy another when they graduate.
She is not yet addicted though because appart from instant messaging she doesn't have access to social media apps and I limit strongly the amount of hours of use and outside of her small quota the phone cannot stay in her room. So she is still using it to discuss with friends asynchronously.
I'm not sure what the modern equivalent is, and there are certainly plenty of other ways to gauge responsibility and honesty, but there are phones that can't be used for much except calling and texting specific people.
In general, if someone is old enough to seek something out, banning them from it isn't going to work, anyway. I don't support the iPad/YouTube model of parenting, but I also don't think kids who grow up with things are as/more susceptible to them because of when they were introduced.
My son is 11, and finally got a phone, but with a talk and text plan, no data. He can take it to school but only if he thinks he is going to go to a friend's house after, so he can ask us/tell us what he is up to.
We fully understand he can just walk to the community centre to get WiFi, and recenlty told me how to access the School Board's WiFi LOL. In fact, he worked the AV club there managing all their gear for the school play. We fully understood he has the "knack" and we can't stop him, so we helped him, and by doing so, it built trust, and we explained why bringing the phone in the class is a distraction. It's not that the phone is bad, it just takes away from learning.
I have saying at home. When we eat, we eat. That means we do that one task, and nothing else. So in the class, when you learn, you learn.
They have their scheduled video time, weekends are 1hr morning, 30min afternoon, and 1 hour evening. If we take trips or go with friends, the time is gone. There is no "banking" your time.
The other interesting thing, and this was confirmed by my friend who is a high school teacher, is that Parents were the ones calling their kids the most during classes! Of course, there will be a boyfriend here and there, but overall, it's Grandma calling, or mom/dad.
Back on topic...we use an iPhone, because we can control which apps he can install, and it notifies us to approve/deny. This helps a lot. Also, Discord is a nightmare. Luckily, his account is installed on all of our phones, so we can see the chats, and some chats were REALLY bad. So we had a talk about them, and he even sided with us! SHOCKING!! I guess what I have to say is, if you are there with them in this journey, you are more likely to be able to guide them along, and be sure not to make a big deal if something bad happens, like a chat where someone posts inappropriate pictures, e.g. Porn, etc, and just direct them to the correct path.
Btw, my 11 year old can change my car tires and use all my power tools. He really has the knack. So that's why we knew banning wouldn't work. My younger son hasn't shown the same maturity, and generally follows along the rules that his big brother follows. So the effort you put in one kid, could be reused after. Although I don't think we will get our youngest a phone as early as our oldest, as he is happier playing active sports. He tends to be grumpy and doesn't handle losing at games, and doesn't know how to fix a controller that stops works. So his view of technology is not the same as our other son. So be aware that every kid is different in skill and cognitive abilities.
(In the US, kids typically turn 14 before or during 8th grade.)
I have friends who's kids use those to go to school on their own. I feel that is a good compromise between parents anxiety and kids autonomy. Provided you make it clear to them that the watch enables you to track them.
I don’t have children let alone teenage ones so maybe I shouldn’t have an opinion on this, but it seems that we adults complain way too much about teenagers and almost never consider that maybe we have structured their lives in a way that isn’t great for them.
Singling out smartphones or binge drinking won’t fix anything at the root.
It stems from "children" (aka under 18) having absolutely no rights, and the parents having all. And the schools are in loco parentis, so they can do mostly anything they want.
And I find hilarious that this country extols republics and democracies as the best forms of governance, yet 2 places we humans spend most of our time in (school, work) are dictatorships. And we usually are powerless in choosing schools, and only have some power to choose which company to work at.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/teen-d...
This is totally unprecedented. It is likely that the addictive quality of smartphones and social media are the cause. They are replacing physical contacts with virtual ones. There is a serious argument to be made to outright ban teenagers from owning smartphones until the age of 16, similar to laws on smoking and alcohol.
There is a serious argument to be made outright ban smartphones not just for teenagers but for everybody that can't handle having a non-stop distraction device in their pocket. But that argument will fail because we tend to allow people to do stupid stuff as long as it doesn't affect others.
The future seems to involve some sort of macro Tesla aesthetic where more than you thought reasonable has been removed, what is there may not be executed well, and what displays etc there are in one physical region all go through one single point of control/truth attestation with other devices banned. In the case of a school that will be the school IT which they may outsource.
I don't understand why phones can't be put in lockers. If you really need to use the phone for an emergency, you could get a pass. And in the past isn't that what the office was for?
Thankfully the last school I worked at did back the teachers - at least to some extent - but it was so annoying having to deal with parents who never showed up to parent-teacher conferences, never contacted me (or answered my emails/calls!) come up as soon as their kids got sent to in-school suspension for misbehaving or for having too many missing assignments or getting a bad grade.
There's also an anti-punishment trend prevalent in education research. Which I truly get, but sometimes kids need to know the limits and you have to do something with the bad ones so the others can actually learn. It's a lose-lose situation (and part of the reason why I left, though I really do miss it and am considering returning, though maybe at international schools).
We also did "just fine, if not better" in my role at the bank (vaguely) before digitization. I assure you, the efficiency upgrades of advancing technology pay for themselves many times over, even if there are hiccups and new learning to match.
Phones enable more education than ever before. The limiting factor is now motivation.
Phones aren’t some magical solution to better education. They are just a source of digital candy, digital crack, that pollutes minds with harmful or vapid ideas.
If you want an advanced teaching device, build one from scratch and make it nothing like a phone.
portable calculator: fair, but why write problems that rely on calculators
searching things up: just note it down for later
taking pictures of slides: teacher can just post the slides
Contrast that to mindless consumption of corporate controlled media channels which is what smart phones inevitably lead to.
Think about how these mega companies are making billions of dollars by robbing your children's attention thus their education right in front of you. 100% ban the phones.
Kids these days suck.
Our rule in our family is that smart devices are a reward; finish your chores, get x number of minutes on tablet; do a good dead unasked get x number of minutes on tablet, that sort of thing. The one major difference in our family is that all smart devices (save for GPS) are banned on road trips/car rides. Boredom is essential to the developing mind and fosters imagination and creativity. I am convinced of that.
Recently, we had some of our child's friends over for sleepovers around his birthday. We live in a rural area, so playing in the woods and dinking around outside are sort of standard. Some of the kids' parents were uncomfortable with us just letting them go tear ass around in the woods, so I went with them to supervise (another issue entirely). I noticed that the games they played fell into two categories; those influenced by smart devices and those not.
The kids who had little- to no-access to smart devices built dams, played forts, looked at bugs and tried to figure out how to make them fight - the sorts of outdoor activities you would expect to see on Leave it to Beaver or some other old show like that.
The kids who have constant access to smart devices played as if they were in fortnight or some other videogame and were narrating their experience/acting like a streamer in more and more outrageous ways to get attention from their friends.
It's not that they weren't creative, but they were creative within incredibly specific parameters established by a videogame company.
So, I don't know that they obliterate creativity, as much as they focus it into something that is different sorts of creativity. Good, bad, or indifferent I don't really know. I think it's probably bad, but don't know for sure.
Not much difference than pretending to be the thunder cats or GI Joe when I was a kid. But the whole shouting for attention thing is disturbing. Someone here once pointed out that kids emulating influencers is giving kids the same mental issues that hollywood actors have from maintaining social images. It's disturbing.
Kids without harmful social media influence will often go into careers where they do useful things.
Kids who watch rich influencers all day think about how they can make money making YouTube content, or playing video games or acting like an NPC, or even just starting an OnlyFans.
On one dimension they are a tool (like a Sheika Slate in Zelda).
On the other dimension they are a toy.
The problem for schools is that the tool and the toy are packaged together.
A further problem is that smartphones are consumer electronic devices, so businesses will strive to make them as addictive as possible and are unlikely to support creating some kind of separation between toy and tool.
So I agree that a ban is probably the best solution at this point. A ban with legal backing so schools can focus on education and not combating distraction.
Teaching how to combat distraction should maybe be a part of modern education.
But yeah you're quite right. Optimistically I'm hoping non-toy smartphones (like Light Phone, BoringPhone, WisePhone, etc) gain some market share.
That seems like a no-go. What are they wiping, exactly?
If you don't share this view, you don't know what's going on. That's all there is to it.
Isn't that just making the best of a bad situation? I am guilty myself, but at the same time I forget that I even have a device when not subject to such drudgery. Addiction usually implies a greater compulsion.
Which, too, explains why this ban is only targeted at schools and not in general like drugs. While there are some skillful teachers, most aren't worth your time. As such, the phones come out as a distraction. In my pre-smartphone youth we were doodling in our notebooks, or what have you, instead but the motivation was the same.
And the best thing you can do is model the behavior of putting your phone away and out of sight for things like meals and family time.
I'm not saying that addicted people should just be thrown aside. At the same time, since addiction implies an altered mental state like insanity, addicted people are clearly a burden to society that can't be reasoned with. In general, people have their circumstances that lead them to do what they do, but addicted people may stay addicted even if their circumstances are somehow resolved. Addiction is a costly affair to individuals, their friends and families, and the state. We should try to rehabilitate addicted people and we should try to tackle the root causes (much easier spoken than done), but it's a lousy situation in the first place.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db428.htm#secti...
Most people know this, but many of those who seek out opiates are in a particularly lousy spot already where they don't care if it will ruin their life.
For other drugs that are used recreationally, the rate of addicts is comparable to that of alcohol users, if not lower.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db428.htm#fig4
How do you expect someone to stop binge eating if they have the kitchen full of prepackaged foods?
How resisting the temptation of using a phone AT SCHOOL, a place where most kids don't want to be, will be rewarded so they can learn the benefits of self control?
It makes no sense!
It is already hard for most kinds understand that school is good for them to make it more difficult already and force them ignore the temptation of the phone.
Really, most people who talk about exercising self control or improving it have never had to had self control in the firt place.
Gotta teach self-control.
I'll also add that I've yet to see a single use case where a student's phone was a necessity at school (remember that school offices have phones for emergencies!)... yet I have seen dozens (hundreds?) of instances where the phones produced a negative outcome: cyber bullying, playing games, texting each other, sexual harassment, disruptive ringtones and notifications, and the overall shortened attention span from kids who "secretly" need to check their phone every 5 minutes to check the latest tiktok or Reddit reply or upvote or Like or blah blah.
Probably subversive material.
If kids could learn effectively and become educated citizens with zero adult curation or guidance, you'd be right.
Allowing kids to use smartphones freely in schools 1) will act as a very good filter and 2) will keep the most annoying kids entertained thus allowing the kids who pass through the former filter to learn without interruptions.
The way it works now, we're just going for the lowest common denominator. The results are obvious.
Also, fun fact: phone confiscation (except during midterms/finals) is a punishable offense at my university.
Worked perfectly fine.
I only ever had one class (which wasn't an elective) where computers and phones weren't allowed even during lectures, which was ironically an intro class on programming in C. Was a waste of time because the professor sucked and for me doubly so because I had already been using C for many years by then. Attendance was also mandatory so I just sat in the back and mostly slept through it.
Optional education for students is fine if we don't utilize self-government.
"Filtering" kids more easily distracted or less motivated leaves behind a lot of decent kids who just need more support than a self-starter. It's a horrible idea.