Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, which outlines the correlation between the advent of cell phones and a rise in teen mental health issues, has reignited a national conversation around banning phones in schools.
Haidt argues that the introduction of apps to phones in 2010 and of likes and push notifications to social media platforms in 2009 have led to the replacement of a play-based childhood with a phone-based childhood. He argues that giving teens access to phones when their brains are developing the fastest and are most vulnerable is particularly harmful because phone use decreases the unstructured time teens spend with their friends in person, disrupts their sleep schedules, decreases their attention spans, and leads them to develop addictions. He argues that all of these factors have caused the sharp increase in teens self-reporting high levels of anxiety and depression as well as increases in suicide rates and hospitalizations for suicide attempts or self-harm.
Banning phones in high schools would ultimately be too costly for something that would likely do nearly nothing to actually address the widespread cultural epidemic of teenage depression and anxiety.
The correlation between increased depression and anxiety among teenagers and the advent of cell phones isn’t exactly set in stone (I think this article does a good job of summarizing a lot of the counterarguments). However, I do think Haidt’s basic premise is right. The way phones provide such constant access to near-infinite amounts of information is both a blessing and a curse.
One of the main ways Haidt suggests solving this issue is to ban phones in schools, an idea many people have latched on to. However, banning phones in high schools would ultimately be too costly for something that would likely do nearly nothing to actually address the widespread cultural epidemic of teenage depression and anxiety.
Being able to stay connected to others through social media, tracking what’s going on across the world through news updates, or even communicating with people about urgent tasks through email and group chats seems like a good thing, but anything digital is always a distillation of what online platforms claim to be facilitating. Likes don’t mean someone actually likes what you posted, headlines can’t tell you the entire story, and online communication rarely resembles actual conversation. Superficial metrics like this existed before phones, but phones have only served to make them more central to the information people consume which leads people to doomspiral and become trapped in artificial views of their self-worth.
Even without this distillation, and perhaps more importantly, the way in which phones provide such near constant access to information is incredibly damaging because it leads people to feel like they can never take a break in fear of missing out. According to a recent study, the average teen receives around 140 notifications on their phone per day. Even if we banned phones in high schools, though, teens would still have access to this information as soon as they step outside of school and would likely still spend their free time—arguably the time that is most important for their development—staring at screens. Banning phones in schools also wouldn’t help students get more sleep or increase the unstructured time they spend hanging out with friends.
Unless schools also banned computers, most students would also still have access to nearly everything they would otherwise use their phones for. Students are already just as—if not more—distracted by playing games on their computers during class as they are from using their phones. If phones were banned, they would easily transition to using social media and texting more on their computers.
Teens would still have access to this information as soon as they step outside of school and would likely still spend their free time—arguably the time that is most important for their development—staring at screens. Banning phones in schools also wouldn’t help students get more sleep or increase the unstructured time they spend hanging out with friends.
It might seem like banning phones in schools couldn’t hurt and that anything that could get students to spend even a fraction of their time off of their phones would be worth it—even if they would still be distracted during class and even if they would go back to using their phones the second they got out of school. However, banning phones in high schools is easier said than done.
Simply telling students that they aren’t allowed to use their phones doesn’t work. The only schools that have proved to have successful phone bans have had to invest in systems to back these policies up. Some schools have bought every single one of their students “dumb phones” as an alternative to smartphones. The more popular approach is to require students to place their phones in Yondr pouches, which are locked at the start of the school day and unlocked at the end of the school day at the entrance of campus.
Even at schools that do implement these policies, many students will lock up a “decoy phone” and continue to use their normal phone throughout the day, so schools must also be willing to enforce consequences for students caught using their phones anyways.
This isn’t something that would be easily accomplished for schools that don’t have as much funding and already have issues with student discipline. Schools that have extra time on their hands and lots of funding can feel free to experiment with phone bans but this isn’t the case for the vast majority of districts. These districts need to prioritize efforts that actually have proven benefits for their students—increasing teacher salaries is just one example of many.
While there are several examples of schools that have implemented anecdotally successful phone bans, the trend is much too recent to be able to tell whether these transitions have actually benefited students. Banning phones is not like administering a vaccine, it’s something without much precedent and that would have societal impacts that are difficult to predict. It’s more akin to schools transferring to distance learning except, unlike COVID, phone use doesn’t spread at an exponential rate, so we have more time to test phone bans. Haidt himself suggests running a two year experiment on a group of a couple dozen schools to see whether banning phones would actually significantly help students.
While there are several examples of schools that have implemented anecdotally successful phone bans, the trend is much too recent to be able to tell whether these transitions have actually benefited students.
And as much as phones hurt students, they’re still very much here to stay. It’s a cliche argument, but an education system that aims to teach students the skills they need to succeed in life needs to teach them to be able to use phones responsibly. Students should—by the time they get to high school—be able to refrain from using their phones in a class where a teacher asks them not to and learn that if they look at their phones the entirety of class they won’t be able to absorb the content they need to in order to do well in school.
There’s a very good chance that I’m wrong and that banning phones in schools really would help students, and I hope I am, but as of now there isn’t enough evidence to prove that banning phones in schools is going to address the symptoms of our generation’s phone addiction. Haidt’s other solutions—requiring social media companies to verify that users are older than 16, encouraging parents not to buy phones for their children before high school, and giving people more independence at a younger age seem much more promising, but the widespread changes that would be necessary to ban phones in schools across the country aren’t the battle we should pick when tensions over what’s happening in schools are already so high. While it is surely frustrating for teachers to have to remind students to put their phones away at the start of each class period, at least for now, this seems like a better solution than implementing an all-out phone ban.
