Gavin Newsom wants to take smartphones out of schools
politico.com
politico.com
1. Use of phones in classrooms 2. Having phones present in schools, but unused 3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren
(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)
(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues. The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.
Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".
The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully phone-free quickly internalized the need for connectivity.
Raising children from a young age to expect and demand access to phone connectivity at all times is making this problem much worse.
No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen. The negative effects of perpetual connectivity are far, far worse.
Almost all humans (including those alive today) managed just fine to live life without a perpetual phone link. Teach children to do the same. The phone is a nice-to-have, not a necessity to merely venture out of the house on a routine trip to school and back.
That's a very polite way of saying "addiction".
In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarettes!
Even at that time, there was strong initial evidence of smoking's harmful effects. It was largely ignored in favor of short term feelgood outcomes.
Perhaps in 2080 or so, we will look back upon today's era of always-on connectivity the way people now look at chainsmokers in 1955: "Wow, how could they ever do that? Didn't they know this was so obviously bad for you?"
I'm actually starting to question whether smoking really was some huge public health success story. Or did it just go out of fashion? It's odd that we'd be able to tackle one thing like that then just completely drop the ball on it (see vapes) and not even begin to address other things like food/sugar and phones.
Almost never happen? There have been 464 school shootings in the US since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
And then there's the question of how a cell phone is actually supposed to help in such an emergency. If anything, I think it would be a liability.
Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.
Still a niche case
Your link shows ~600 people injured or killed in school shootings, across every possible education level (from kindergarten to college) in the course of 24 years. (Both injured and killed, the number actually killed is more like a quarter to a third of that).
That's an average of 25 people killed or injured per year.
Taking enrollment numbers from 2021 (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...) , it shows that in a given year, ~80 million people are enrolled in those same school levels.
That puts the odd of being injured or killed in a school shooting (if you're currently in school) at 1 in 3,200,000 per year.
So yes, odds of one in three million of your child being involved is "almost never happens".
many people shot are not killed. being a victim of a school shooting does not even mean you were shot.
That is to say, it almost never happens.
The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.
For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)
Teachers and staff have phones. I’d be willing to guess that most schools still have a hardwired phone in most classroom.
Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.
>"having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents
How could you possibly conclude that? Look at any timeline of a school shooting and there's often a lot of information going from 911 calls to inform the police on the number of shooters, the shooter's location, and where students are still alive/hiding. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin...
Disagree. Being able to communicate to your family or emergency services that a shooting is happening and/or that you are safe or not is invaluable.
On a practical level, "no phones at all" is just so much easier to enforce.
With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now. When kids make plans with each other they don't have to make a ton of arrangements, they can just fly by the seat of their pants; they can meet up with friends, or ditch them because they're feeling tired without it being a big deal or requiring a game-of-telephone approach to communication.
Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.
More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.
See e.g. https://kagi.com/search?q=summary+of+mental+health+outcomes+... -- there are far too many sources to even list here.
I'm not even talking about methodologies or replication or evidence or p-hacking (all of which are huge challenges to this sort of research).
On a much more fundamental level, the statement "unauthorized smartphone use in a classroom setting is objectively harmful" is a defensible statement. I don't need a study to tell me that, nor should anyone. The extraordinary claim in this case would be the opposite, for which I would have to see tremendous evidence, and which even then I would likely not believe.
Because it's fucking up your kid's education. That's why. That's what this thread is about.
I'm so tired of this "it's just the way the world is" technofetishist apologetics. It's a complete non-argument that says nothing, and this type "it's just the way it is" resignation can be applied to every injustice or shortcoming in society every.
I'm not saying "do nothing", I'm just not seeing a case anywhere of why phones in schools but not during class are "fucking up" anything.
You can make a serious case for banning phones in school as the easiest way to enforce banning phones in classrooms, and accepting the tradeoffs that this implies. But you can't just dismiss the fact that many people (myself included) see there being serious benefits of having access to phones outside the classroom setting without first addressing those arguments.
Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as if it were a response to itself:
Replying to "society has this problem X" by saying, "Well, X is just the way society is now."
is not responsive to the proposition. It is merely repeating it in different wording.
If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.
Then you don't know kids, because this is not how (most) kids work, certainly not at a young (pre-teen) age. And even in teenage years/puberty this kind of reductionist simplistic reasoning doesn't really apply (and is also one of those non-arguments that can be applied to everything).
And no one is argueing against all smartphone usage by kids. Or at least, I wasn't. Just saying people don't need to in touch on the way to and from school.
I'm the oldest of 5 siblings and have helped multiple family members, friends, and neighbors with their kids. I feel comfortable enough to say that I do know kids. In total, I'd say I've helped raise 15-20 kids in my life.
I wasn't allowed a phone or internet access by my parents until I was 18 and off to college, by then the iPhone 5 was out. Even when I did go to college, they refused to get me a phone at all, stating that the front desk of my dorm will walk up 5 flights of stairs to my dorm to tell me I had a call. My aunt had to buy me a flip phone.
You know what I (and my siblings) did when we lived with them? We would buy a schoolmates old iPod touch, PSP, or Blackberry Storm and hide it in our pillow cases. We'd ask for a specific e-ink Kindle because it had a button hidden in the settings to access an "experimental" internet browser.
Kids are creative, and if they want something, they will get it.
But when my daughter hasn't got home on time if I can check her GPS and see that she's in the park then I can relax a little.
If she needs to say she's staying out late, using a group chat to let the whole family know is easier than trying to phone mum, then dad, then grandma.
Or she can include a photo showing how much fun she's having.
My life is richer because of communication on things like family group chats. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose that
Yes, it's OK to not know exactly where a responsible older child is down to centimeter-resolution lat/lon coordinates at all times. Most humans, including most alive today, lived like that for all of history.
I disagree. For a few years I taught a university class and very much appreciated the kids having their phones in class. In discussions I would often task someone with looking up or confirming some pertinent fact or law. They would usually use their laptops but I didn't much care whether the used their phones. Students having ready access to information can be useful in a classroom.
One thing I hear a lot from parents of middle school and high school children (mine are just entering this domain) is that there's a deeper problem of teachers losing control of students -- even when they have these policies, the teachers and administrators are unable or unwilling to enforce them. I don't know what the solution to this is, though.
Outside very "leafy suburb" areas, this was a problem long before smartphones existed.
Always seems to boil down this way. There is no place for nuanced discussion in US school policy. "Zero tolerance" was just a crystallization of existing all-or-nothing trends.
A few years ago Apple blocked[1] some parental control apps because "they put users’ privacy and security at risk"
This actually came up with our school. They tried to use an app to control student phones but it was fundamentally limited by these Apple restrictions.
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/04/the-facts-about-pa...
And really if we're talking about having to enroll a device into some sort of managed device system, schools don't have the time or manpower to manage tracking every kid's phone that is in the school.
And if we're talking about something you don't actively choose to enroll, we're back to my fun and games.
Does your kid need group chats when they're in school with their mates?
When I went to the fall parent-teacher orientation night and they explained all this, it didn’t sound like phone use was a huge problem, but maybe they just didn’t want to talk about the problems. I did like that they had structure around phone use that included appropriate and inappropriate uses of the phone.
I totally get banning phones with young kids, but high schoolers should be treated more like adults as they progress through the grades. Some of the kids were entering the workforce or joining the military after their senior year. They should be ready for that.
High school is from the age of 13 to 18; big difference between those two.
School security guards would wander the halls and catch kids listening to walkmen, or playing with some other gizmo, and seize them -- recoverable only at the end of the year by the student's parents.
Cell phones technically existed at the time, but were too expensive and bulky for students to be carrying around. If people had them at all they were usually mounted permanently in a car.
While it was pretty draconian, I get why the rule was in place, though I can also see why it would also be relaxed somewhat given the massive increase in the prevalence of personal electronics since the stone age I grew up in.
But I don't understand why it's turned into such complete wild west. Even during my time, if you kept it in your bookbag, you were fine. That students are wandering the halls, or sitting in class, on their phones, is mindboggling.
"But what about emergencies!", that was trivially handled by all parents having an emergency number, where they could call the school and summon the student in just a couple of minutes over the public address system.
I really fear for future generations.
Teens and kids are the most troublesome, whiny set of people adults deal with.
It takes a lot of patience and restraint to be a teacher but they aren’t even appreciated for it.
You can bring them but you have to lock them in your locker at the start of the day until the end of day.
If a teacher sees them they take them, kid gets it back at the end of the day on the first offense, on the second offense parents have to come to the school to get the phone, and from then on it works that way. (I like that this puts pressure on the parents)
It has worked pretty well.
So, banning might be a good option but not a silver billet.
If the FDA or schools try to somehow fix student choices outside of school, they will fail every time.
Definitely, and we should not wait for a silver bullet, but make progress where we can.
But I do have that this is phrased as moral panic around "social media". In general, I hate the entire term "social media" because it smooshes together consumption of user-generated content, production of content, consumption of social network and contribution to social networking.
These are all very different phenomena. Kids watching Tiktok, Reels, Shorts, or whatever, doesn't really bother me at all. Producing the content bothers me a little more, but mostly as a parent -- I don't like the idea of people leaving a permanent record of all the stupid shit that they thought when they were a kid.
The other side of it, social networks, are very much a mixed bag; I'm not certain that the rise of "cyberbullying" or spreading rumors via social media is any worse than it ever has been -- we just have more visibility into it, because instead of a he said/she said about a who started a rumor, you have the screenshot of the rumor being started or spread. Maybe this makes it worse because of the indelibility, or maybe it's ameliorated by the fact that these sorts of rumormongering is so widespread and easy to see.
My main concern with this is that it shows a very very unrealistic view of life. It's basically the old "unrealistic role models" debate all over again (and this applies to both boys and girls). Except worse because TV shows and such were at least presented as fiction, whereas this is presented as "real life", even though it's not. And "education" is not going to solve this, because intellectually knowing something and feeling something like this are two very different things.
There are some other concerns as well; here is what I got on YouTube some time ago when searching for "Alan Lomax" (famous for recoding obscure "regular people" playing music throughout the US): https://imgur.com/a/jTQ6xvM
This is just rage-bait designed to make your angry. It has nothing to do with what I searched for. I don't have an account, don't store cookies, and even if YouTube was somehow tracking me: I more or less only use it for music stuff, sometimes comedy or programming videos. Certainly not politics.
None of the above is strictly new per se. George Galloway was around with fairly inflammatory rhetoric before social media really took off, but level and amount of exposure do matter a great deal.
And while almost all journalistic mainstream journalistic outlets do care about some level of balance of viewpoints (even though this is not perfect), this is just non-existent for a lot of online stuff.
I believe infinite feeds to be a very dark feature for adults and kids alike. We should not get our kids used to mindlessly scrolling until their brain fries.
On the other hand, I am 100% with you on not mashing everything up into a single "social media" bucket.
We need to educate our kids to manage these tools and more importantly, themselves with these tools in hand. A blanket restriction/removal won't be very efficient in the end.
The biggest problem is that it's a massive distraction from learning and also enables cheating, especially now with AI tools.
If you're arguing for a total ban even outside the classroom, then I need a little more clarity on how it is a distraction. The cheating ship has scaled; even if you ban the outside the classroom, students still have a "home" where they do "homework" that they can apply whatever cheating mechanisms they want.
Jonathan Haidt on Huberman Lab said it clearly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csubiPlvFWk
Social Media has a clear detrimental effect on young people.
I kind of think of it as eating sugar cereal. Some is fine, but an entire diet of it isn't healthy. Teaching good media habits starts at a young age.
It's also such a clear political win that I'm shocked that Newsom of all people took this long to go after it
Until helicopter parents start complaining
No, Chromebooks and iPads are not needed for most things, and while we all like to pretend that we are using them for "studying", most of the time spent on them is wasted time that stifles creativity. Whenever you bring it up, someone points out the example of Timmy from Grade 4 who made a beautiful digital sketch on his iPad or something, conveniently ignoring the other 99 students who basically wasted hours on the computers with no intellectual stimulation.
We probably need fewer electronics in the classroom, and even for stuff like taking notes, kids should be practising the motor skills of writing with their hands.
Granted the rules are all coming back with gusto now.
Here in Canada a few schools have said no phones during school even lunch hour. The kids themselves have said they find they feel better and their studies are better.
A phone now would be like allowing comic books to be read in class say in the 1980s.
Default geofencing of ALL Apple and Google phones, to go into DND when entering churches, hospitals, schools, theaters, etc. with geofencing and maybe a Bluetooth signal this should be pretty feasible to have good boundaries.
Likewise, transition phone into school focus mode (calculator and Google classroom only, canvas etc) would be great.
Obv could be overwritten if you are an on call doctor or something, but at least a tool that could help.
Everyone still brought their phone, it just had to be silent and away during class. I don't see why that policy shouldn't continue.
In the cell phone track, kids are basically free to do whatever on their phone as long as it’s not actively disruptive to others. We basically had classes like that for kids who were not on an academic path and would spend class time doodling and passing notes.
At most, if kids phones were registered as "student" phones and registered to a school so that between certain hours, the phones allowed policies from the school to be applied to a phone while the phone is on the premises. Teachers could just disable them during class or allow for exceptions like if such and such kid was waiting for a critical call from a parent or something.. Classrooms could have beacons telling the phones they're in a classroom so if they go in the halls the phones could work... Or not.. Either way, there should be tech solutions to tech problems and teachers have enough to deal with, they shouldn't be further strained by having to police students always trying to find ways to sneak on to their devices.
Soon teachers might be a thing of the past and kids will just interact with an AI teacher anyway... The AI will be responsible for keeping them engaged and make sure they understand the material. At that point the AI can just shock them into submission if they whip out their phones... Muahahhaa... jk jk.
The phones are sold as leashes for insecure parents to constantly snoop on their kids.
Until that culture is corrected, not much will change.
> Why do kids need a phone at all? They especially shouldn't need it at school.
Part of it is that almost all the infrastructure for "not having a cell phone" has disappeared. At every school I went to as a kid, there was a landline phone or two for kids to call their parents. There were payphones everywhere. I remember biking around as a kid, getting soaked in heavy rainstorms, then biking to whatever school was closest to call my parents to pick me up to take me the rest of the way. I think even the airport (traditionally the pay-phoniest places in the world) now only has one or two payphones left, if any. So a kid with no phone today is probably less able to contact their parents than in the pre-cell phone era.
So a kid needs a call phone of some kind in the modern world, but certainly not a fully-featured unlocked smartphone. I'm thinking ideally that would be a locked down phone that has no web access, no ability to install apps, and can only send and receive texts from numbers on a whitelist (though I actually think it might be fine for the phone make and receive voice calls from any number).
We didn't even have a dedicated phone for that, although I'm sure I could have used a phone if I had need to. I think I may have did once or twice. I'm sure that's still the case in all schools, especially if they start banning kids brining phones to school.
Lack of payphones is more of a problem, although I would imagine that especially for a child or teenager it wouldn't be too hard to use a phone from a stranger or business or even a random house. But not all personalities would be comfterable with that.
Zero.
This is from a source that has a very liberal definition of "school shooting":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-...
Update: 17-Year-Old Student Deceased After Shooting at Garfield High School - SPD Blotter, Thu, 06 Jun 2024 - https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2024/06/06/detectives-are-inv...
Maybe the parent texts "I won't be able to pick you up today because something came up, so take the bus home, and there should be leftovers for dinner in the fridge."
Or maybe the kid texts "There's been a fire at school today, and so they're sending us home early. Can you come pick me up? If not, let's talk over the phone over what to do."
If I needed to let my kid know something, I called the school office and told them. They gave the information to her.
If the school needed to let parents know something, they used an automated mass call/text system to notify us.
Problem solved without allowing every kid to have their own smartphone.
After school events?
Kids with the autonomy + maturity to change + confirm plan changes after school with their parents or caregivers?
Kids with complicated home situations?
I 100% agree they are a distraction in the classroom and should not be allowed in them. But these laws and these rules should NOT grant the school administrators another black + white so called "zero tolerance" rule to lord over the kids and mindlessly enforce without compassionate understanding of the individual situation.
Now there are no pay phones whatsover. They used to be ubiquitous. Its cell phones.
Our school system has the parents and kids sign a cell phone policy. But the teachers in high school classes allow kids to use their cell phones too.
Edit: [1] I am simplifying here and ignoring a lot of geographic variability.
I think setting clear policy with personal expectations of no phones out in classrooms, with personal repercussions of not following that policy is fine. No need to use bans to make schools any more prison like than they already are.
When's the last time you've been in a high school, it's like giving an addict a pile of cocaine and telling them to wait until after work to use it.
The current generation of kids are very cognizant of healthy phone discipline - moreso than many adults imho.
When you set policy, clear expectations and crisp repercussions treating the kids as equals, you get better results than treating kids like addicts with medical problems or subhumans for that matter. You very much receive the respect you put out; and bans are imho disrespectful of personal responsibility and autonomy.
But a clear policy of no phones out in the classrooms, but carried on their person would be fine.
this isn’t an exaggeration. so many of my parent friends think this way. “they can’t bike to school because what if they fall and need help? they need a phone”
why as humans do we create more barriers and goalposts?
A side-effect of this is that as real threats dwindle and disappear, brains will naturally fill the gap with progressively more paranoid and unfounded fears.
I was sort of imagining a neighborhood and school near me that does actually have great sidewalks with a single conflict-producing crossing that is managed by a guard in the mornings. I admit this is totally our of the ordinary though, especially for a public school in the SE USA.
That said, you’ve just described my neighborhood. We’re about 2 blocks from my son’s school. One major road, with a crossing guard at school time. The 2nd-to-last day of walking him home from school I come up to the guard who’s calling in a driver who blew past her.
As an aside, I’ve begun to notice cars leaving huge gaps between them and the car in front of them. In every case I see the driver looking down, oblivious to the 20+ feet between them and the next car.
Ugh. Are you alright?
Parents are the Tour de France cyclists: we expect them to do the impossible and are then surprised they're all doped up. Surprised Pikachu.
The real reason: Phones keep kids distracted so parents are then free to browse TikTok/IG/FB/etc themselves.
So it's not for their wellbeing, it's for parental anxiety.
Can someone put me in touch with Sam Altman? I just had a great idea for an application of ChatGPT.
Sorry, genuinely trying to understand your perspective here.
> Address the root cause
It would still be the case that sometimes children die in freak ultra-low-probability events, even if there were zero school shootings.
I ran the numbers and it was firmly in “not even worth a thought” territory. I cast the net of the definition of “school shooting” as wide as remotely reasonable, and made the criterion present at the building for, not hurt or killed, and it was still not worth worrying about.
The odds are even better in the kinds of schools HNers are likely to send their kids to, since a ton of those shootings are drug- and/or gang-related.
But we don't design our lives around those unlikely events. Nuclear war is extremely serious, but extremely unlikely in the short term. By you logic, we should all be living in fallout shelters basically all the time, just in case.
I call bullshit on this one. I think it's something someone said because who is gonna push back on that one and then it caught on.
Don't accept that.
People far from a problem deciding how you should solve is like a boss telling you how to solve a coding issue. They aren't close enough to understand important details that affect the decision.
It would be a win-win.
The cause isn't some mutually exclusive binary like that. It can be both at the same time and the proportion can vary between families.
"As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid."
I accept that it's understandable that we did the experiment, because it was a new device, but it offers no significant benefit to the parents and children (in fact playing into their neuroticism), and allowed companies a new way to go after those children to exploit their insecurities for money. It's moronic that we got rid of Saturday morning cartoons because they were just longform ads aimed at kids (but they were fun!), yet we allowed this contagion in school.
They shouldn't even be on Wikipedia in school. There's a teacher there, speaking, and a book. Look at Wikipedia at home. The teacher is expensive and only available at certain times, Wikipedia is cheap and always there.
Adults need to stop regurgitating 1970s era neuroscience tropes long proven false as if they were facts. You come off like someone pointing at their monitor declaring the internet is broken because the monitor is set to the wrong display input. Not even wrong. These extremely scientificially incorrect memes re: "dopamine" and "screens" are far more dangerous to society than looking at screens ever could be because they're used to justify use of physical force against human persons in contexts where there is no force or coercion or fraud.
Can you explain why they are all false?
Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking. It needs no special disproval; the burden of proof is on such a wild unphysical claim. Screens are not, and cannot be "addictive". That word has a medical meaning and it does not cover screens. You may object and say, "But what of gambling?" to which I respond, the DSM5+ and ICD10 both have it as "gambling disorder" because it's not an addiction and it's a grandfathered in disorder at that; all by itself. Additionally, the DSM spent the last decade addressing the potential issue of "screens" and each commitee returned with the same conclusion: not enough evidence for inclusion (latest was 2022).
If you really do want to learn the nitty gritty details and see the references I suggest starting with Kent Berridge's lab on affective neuroscience and his review papers, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/
> Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking.
Or at least it's not the damning point you're making it out to be. I think there is an issue with smartphones, attention, and development, but I don't claim that screens are anything other than an audiovisual medium. Nor do I think they need to increase specifically "incentive salience without intrinsic pleasure" to be a problem.
Do you not see gambling addiction as an issue in real life? Do you not see massively decreased attention statistics as an issue in real life? It feels like you're arguing against a position that is both incorrect and irrelevant, when the rest of us are talking about things that are obviously an issue in real life, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with this approach.
Do you not struggle with anything like what is being discussed here, or see it in others?
My personal experience and emotional response has no relevance to the neuroscience involved. As for your continued use of "gambling addiction": There is no such thing as gambling addiction medically as I explained. It's a social meme without basis that is overloading the word mostly for profit in non-medical "addiction" treatment centers. This is far more dangerous than the very gambling disorder it hopes to mitigate.
This is not some "Oh, curse these wretched novels, polluting the minds of our children with fiction!" This is the recognition that we have released a technology with an addiction cycle that has been intentionally built and tweaked to engage users and keep them on their platform as long as possible, and the human brain is not evolutionarily equipped to deal with that, least of all the developing mind of a child. They have neither the self-control nor the awareness of what's going on to determine that they're feeding an addiction that their parents enabled. Getting Entertainment Boxes™ out of places of education is a great first step in that direction.
Well said, and I concur. I think we are precisely the right age to have seen a decent amount of the transition, too.
Isn't removing cell phones during school use a step in the right direction?
There are plenty of other examples, such as default features they can put into place to protect children from harassment that they simply do not do.
Why is that the only people responsible for their children in any way at all whatsoever are never held accountable?? It is always, 100%, in every and all cases, the parent's fault. Either they're too stupid to know better, or they simply don't care.