249: The Anxious Generation Review (Part 3): Should we ban cell phones in school?

Part of the reason kids are on phones is because we adults have designed them to be enticing. But kids are also on phones because phones offer what school doesn't, choice, agency, connection on their terms, and content that feels relevant to their lives. Taking away phones without addressing why kids want them is like taking away a crutch without healing the broken leg.

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Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Two episodes ago, we began a mini-series on Dr. Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, because parents keep asking me what I think about the book and the research cited in it. In the first episode, we looked at whether there really is a mental health crisis among teens and particularly among teen girls, and we concluded that while there is some evidence of changes to teens' mental health, it is not universal or as big as Haidt makes it out to be. In the last episode, we looked at the evidence for whether social media specifically is the cause of any of the decline in teens' mental health, and saw that for some particularly vulnerable teens, social media may have a real negative impact. But the evidence for a surge of suffering that is directly caused by screen time generally, and social media specifically, is highly contested. Reasonable researchers interpret the exact same data in multiple ways, with some arguing it's evidence of a crisis and others arguing the crisis is overblown. But let's just say that we are still feeling worried about our child's social media use. Maybe we read the second half of The Anxious Generation where Dr. Haidt argues for us “to return to the golden age of childhood when children played because that's what children are meant to do.” Maybe we live in one of the 21 states that he is studying or has already enforced a ban on kids' phone use like Florida, which was the first to ban cell phones during instructional time and restricted social media access on school Wi-Fi, or Louisiana, Virginia, and Indiana that have just finished their first year of a ban, or perhaps Oklahoma, North Dakota, and New York that have it coming down the pipe for the next school year. Banning social media, banning phones, should we support our schools with the bans that they're proposing? Before we get to that idea of bans, I want to consider this idea of the magical play-filled childhood that we're trying to get back to and whether bans on using phones and screen time are the best tools to get us there or anywhere else. So let's begin with this idea of play in childhood. So Haidt tells us that “play is the work of childhood and all young mammals have the same job, wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often. Hundreds of studies on young primates, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

Haidt goes on to quote Dr. Peter Gray extensively on this topic and I really respect Gray's work. Both Haidt and Gray fall into a bit of a trap when they're discussing their own childhoods. The Wall Street Journal says Haidt, 60 years old, grew up in suburban Scarsdale, New York. He spent his days riding bikes and going on neighborhood adventures with friends. It was important to him and his wife Jane to give their children the same kind of freedom.” Peter Gray describes his childhood in greater depth in a Substack article. He says “in the nineteen fifties I played lots of baseball, basketball, and football of the touch variety and some hockey on frozen ponds in Minnesota. None of it was organized by adults and in fact there were usually no adults in sight. All these games were organized by whatever group of kids showed up at the vacant lot or schoolyard or the pond where we played. Little League Baseball was created in nineteen thirty-nine but it didn't spread much until the mid-nineteen fifties. The nineteen sixties was a decade of huge increases and offerings of adult-directed sports. In addition to Little League there was biddy basketball, peewee hockey, and Pop Warner football. Parents bought into these even more than did kids and parents commonly drove kids to the events and stayed to cheer their kids on. We see here the intrusion of adults into what had previously been a children's world. Adults simply took over and the kids became ponds rather than creators. As I discussed in letter number nine which is another blog post, adult-directed sports do not offer the opportunities for kids to learn how to direct their own activities and solve their own problems that are endemic to kid directed play. I avoided all this as I preferred the informal play and my parents were wise enough not to encourage me. I did not take part in adult-directed sports until I joined my high school basketball and baseball teams but many of my friends joined such leagues which reduced the number of kids available for informal play."

So Greggy goes on to talk about how kids were gradually pushed out of public spaces that became spaces that children could only use if they were accompanied by an adult and the jobs that he held starting with mowing neighbor’s lawns and shoveling sidewalks in winter at the age of nine or ten. His parents ran a small-town newspaper and after they worked all night to finish laying it out, Peter would print it himself on a Thursday morning, skipping school to operate a machine that would crush your hand if you didn't move it out of the way fast enough after you fed the paper in. So where I think we get into danger with narratives like this that position the author's childhood and it usually is a White male author of a certain age as the ideal to which all childhoods must aspire is that these childhoods were actually something of an anomaly. Peter Gray says that his work experiences were “valuable not just because they gave me money that was my own but even more because they quelled whatever fears I might otherwise have had about supporting myself when I became an adult. I was trusted to do responsible jobs and was paid to do them. Today kids are anxious about their future partly because they have little opportunity to experience the work world. By the time my son was a kid in the nineteen seventies and early eighties most of the kinds of jobs I had as a kid were no longer available to kids at those ages and now none of them are”. But things were not always so rosy. In colonial times even very, small children worked alongside their parents. Child labor was not federally regulated until nineteen thirty-eight and before that many children worked in dangerous conditions. I found a Smithsonian Museum lesson plan pointing out that many people saw child labor as desirable after the Civil War. It was a way for poverty-stricken youngsters to support their families. The apprenticeship system had been replaced by industrial factories where children were relied on as cheap labor in textile factories, on land their families didn't own and in coal mines. Many parents lied about their children's ages to get around minimum age laws so their kids could work and those laws were rarely enforced anyway. Segregation, discrimination and poverty meant that many Black and immigrant children did not enjoy the same freedoms or safety in public play spaces as their White peers.

In the summer of nineteen forty-five, Washington D.C. officially segregated public recreation spaces. Four Black boys were arrested when their ball hit a street lamp outside a park they were barred from entering. In nineteen ninety-five kids Iesha and Clendon Elmore went to play in an abandoned car because there were no playgrounds in their D.C. neighborhood. Faulty locks trapped them inside and they died from heat exhaustion. And Tamir Rice was killed in his neighborhood park in two thousand fourteen by a White police officer as Tamir played with a toy gun. For some kids parks and public spaces have never really been safe places. Girls always had less freedom to play independently due to cultural expectations as well and gender roles that kept them closer to home and under stricter supervision. Toys marketed towards girls throughout the 20th century focused on their role as homemakers who should primarily be concerned about their appearance and taking care of babies. When you look at advertisements for these toys it's hard to imagine the girls pictured in them playing pickup football or hockey on a frozen pond.

In the nineteen thirties concern over women exerting themselves in sports led to the few universities that had athletic programs to drop them and hold less strenuous fitness classes and game days instead. It wasn't until the nineteen sixties that research finally showed that women were capable of being athletes without having health or reproductive complications. I couldn't find any time use data stretching back to the nineteen fifties but in nineteen sixty-five women under the age of thirty-five and girls were spending about a third as much time outdoors on outdoor recreation and active sports as boys. Half an hour a week compared to just under an hour and a half for boys. By nineteen seventy-five the heyday of Dr. Haidt's idyllic childhood young men and boys were spending over three times as much time outside as young women and girls. Just under 45 minutes a week compared to over two and a quarter hours a week for boys.

The gap has slowly declined since then but has continued on parallel tracks with young men and boys spending 85 percent more time outdoors than young women and girls. Even today girls interviewed in England report that there's nothing for them to do in parks and they don't feel welcome or safe when boys are using the spaces. So the golden age of unsupervised outdoor play was indeed golden for a certain slice of the population but that is not necessarily the case for everyone. So I think the narrative that we want to return to that golden age is really problematic. I also think it's important to consider what's actually happening when kids play by themselves. We can actually see this happen in schools where kids are highly supervised during classroom time and then only supervised enough to make sure they don't kill themselves or each other at recess. And it's in recess where kids learn and pass on ideas about our culture from the older kids to the younger ones. Recess is where the boys take over the soccer field and grope the girls up if they try to play. Recess is where any boy who hangs out with the girls is ridiculed.

And I remember being shocked when I read Debra Van Ausdale's ethnography of a preschool classroom where some of the White kids were very distinctly trying on the use of power over their non-White classmates looking to see whether anyone would notice them calling out the non-White kids lower social status and if they would be confronted for doing this. And by and large nobody noticed and nobody was confronted. Many of you know that my daughter Carys attends a not school program three days a week which is a co-op model where there's a paid facilitator on the ground most of the time and parents provide additional support as well. I've noticed a few things happening in that group that I think are relevant here. Firstly, while the kids have a lot of freedom to go where they want and do what they want there is always an adult around to support them. There are usually two adults to 12 to 16 kids so there are enough adults to know what's going on most of the time. And the adults are doing really deep work being close enough that they can know what's happening in the dynamic between the kids but far enough away the kids don't constantly perceive that they're being supervised. When there's a conflict between the kids that adults step closer and help to mediate that if that's needed and step back where it isn't. Because some of the kids are six and others are 12 the adults are making sure that the younger kids voices are heard so they don't get steamrolled just because they can't articulate their ideas as effectively. They're making sure that even kids of the same age are truly listening to each other not just waiting for their turn to speak. Because of this sensitive work I don't see a lot of the same things happening in this community that I read about happening in schools. It's really common for the kids to have disagreements about who wants to be at a certain spot in a certain tree or who can use a particular toy but I don't see the kinds of systematic exclusion that parents whose kids are in school tell me that their kids experience because their kid doesn't have the right color water bottle. Cross-racial friendships are not just common but expected when this is often not the norm in schools. While there is a group of girls that hangs out together simply because the group is heavily female at the moment the boys participate in that group too. We've been part of various iterations of not school groups with different facilitators over the years and this experience has been a pretty common theme.

There's always a high ratio of adults to kids and what's important is the adults aren't telling the kids what to do. They aren't officially teaching the kids anything. There are no organized sports or lessons or anything. There are often offerings which are activities that any adult or child can make to the group and that anyone is welcome to take advantage of if they want to but nobody has to. So Haidt and Gray describe a shift from the completely unorganized world of kids meaning boys playing in whatever way they want to the world of organized sports where adults control every move the kids make as if these are the only two possible options. Either the kids run the show which they say is better or the adults run it which means children lose something essential to their experience. But what if that's not the only way? What if this third way where the kids make a lot of the decisions but the adults are on hand to offer support was actually better than both what's happening now and what Gray and Haidt want to return to? For this to be true we would have to believe that perhaps school might not be the best environment to support children. I know Peter Gray believes that already. Haidt does not. The last chapters of The Anxious Generation focus on what governments and tech companies, schools and parents can do about the problems the first part of the book raises.

So since we're with schools already we're going to go there in this episode. Schools have chosen to address the problem of kids using phones in the classroom by banning phones which Haidt says is a good thing. He says that “evidence that phones may be interfering with education in the United States can be found in the twenty twenty-three National Assessment of Educational Progress which showed substantial drops in test scores during the Covid era erasing many years of gains. But if you look more closely at the data it becomes clear that the decline in test scores began earlier. Scores had been rising pretty consistently from the nineteen seventies until two thousand twelve and then they reversed. Covid restrictions and remote schooling added to the decline especially in math but the drop between two thousand twelve and the beginning of Covid was substantial. The reversal coincided with the moment teens traded in their basic phones for smartphones leading to a big increase in attention fragmentation throughout the school day. But it wasn't Kurt Vonnegut's egalitarian dystopia where the top students had to wear an earpiece that disrupted their thoughts. Instead, it was the students in the lower quarter whose scores dropped the most between two thousand twelve and twenty-twenty. These students are disproportionately from lower income households with Black and Latino students overrepresented.” Okay so I want to pick all this apart. So firstly, we'll look at the NAP data since the nineteen seventies for reading and math because those are the scores that have been reported on the longest and that most parents are most concerned about.

It's true that test scores had generally been on the rise from the early nineteen seventies to two thousand twelve and pretty consistently is an accurate descriptor of that rise but this masks the reality that the gains were incredibly slow. Nine-year-olds across the nation scored an average 208 points on the reading test in nineteen seventy-one which gradually rose to around 215 in nineteen ninety-six. The first-year accommodations like extra time and small group test administration were allowed. Then the average rose a little more quickly to 221 in two thousand twelve so a total rise of 14 points on a scale that goes from 0 to 500. It then dropped by one point in twenty-twenty and five more points from twenty-twenty to twenty twenty-two. The math results are basically the same on a slightly more exaggerated scale starting at 219 points on the same 0 to 500 gradually rising to 244 in two thousand twelve dropping to 241 in twenty-twenty and then to 234 in twenty twenty-two. The data for 13-year-olds in both math and reading follows a similar trend with the slow gradual rise but a small decrease from two thousand twelve and a much bigger drop off during COVID and the twenty twenty-twelve to twenty-twenty drops are small not substantial. We're looking at one point in reading and three points in math for nine-year-olds. Three points in reading and five points in math for 13-year-olds again on a scale that goes from 0 to 500. A majority of students were not performing at proficient levels at any point so it's not like we're seeing a massive drop off from truly appropriate performance to inadequate performance. Haidt is correct to say that Black and Latino scores declined the most between two thousand twelve and twenty-twenty. These students along with American Indian and Alaska Native students definitely have lower scores than White and Asian students but they were by and large pretty flat between two thousand twelve and twenty-twenty.

I looked at all three groups of student scores in reading and math at grades 4, 8 and 12 and the only downward shift I saw among these students was a three-point drop in reading scores among Black 12th graders and again this is the 0 to 500 scale. Scores for all girls rose or fell by a point or two over those years across the grades and the two subjects but there's no massive decline among this group that Haidt says are the most affected by phone use and social media. Haidt points to the obvious smoking gun of phone use as the cause of this so-called decline in performance and ignores factors like unequal access to technology, the ineffectiveness of investments in devices and software rather than effective teaching and learning strategies in schools and the lack of training for teachers to use technology effectively in the classroom. In addition to the mental health challenges that Haidt himself describes in the first part of The Anxious Generation all of these could have impacted kids learning. Another factor he doesn't even acknowledge is that both common core standards and race to the top program were both implemented in two thousand ten which resulted in less teacher flexibility and more teaching to the test. Both of these programs were supposed to increase kids test scores. Together these programs might have cost between 10 and 20 billion dollars at the federal level plus billions more at the state level. Not all states implemented common core but the states that didn't implement it often did their own updates the majority of which seemed to have minimal impact on students learning if we can say that test scores measured their learning. We could argue that the common core and race to the top reforms would have improved kids learning much more if they weren't on their phones as much but if we do what Haidt does and compare the national data with the international data we see a real mixed bag. I looked at the countries that had a greater smartphone adoption rate than the US in two thousand thirteen. There were 13 of them because the US only had a fifty-six-point 4 percent smartphone penetration in twenty-thirteen. Then I looked at the PISA scores.

PISA is an international test for students and for those countries between two thousand ten and two thousand nineteen. So Singapore and Hong Kong held on to their very high scores or they improved slightly despite high rates of cell phone penetration. Sweden's scores reached a low point in twenty twenty-twelve and then stabilized. The UK, Ireland and Denmark had flat or modestly improving trends. The United Arab Emirates first participated in PISA in two thousand nine. Its scores had improved a bit by two thousand twelve and have been flat to slightly improving since then and it had the highest rate of cell phone penetration in two thousand twelve. South Korea, Norway, Australia and Canada saw declines but they were still above the average of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Saudi Arabia was third in cell phone penetration and well below the average of OECD countries with no change in this period. Israel stayed near the average with stable scores. I couldn't find any data on cell phone penetration in that period among teens specifically and it is possible that the penetration rate for teens is massively different than the rate for adults. But if we think the rate is similar for adults and teens, I'm really not seeing any pattern in the scores that indicates higher cell phone usage. Remember in the early days Instagram was only accessible on cell phones showing up in that test score data. Just as he did with mental health, here Haidt points to an outcome that we don't want so declining test scores and decides that there is a single cause and that's phone use inside and outside of the classroom instead of the much more likely scenario that it's phone use generally and social media use specifically combined with so many other factors happening at the same time. Haidt's number one suggestion for what schools can do about the so-called crisis is to ban phones from bell to bell. That doesn't mean no phones during class time, that means no phones during the entirety of the class day because if you just ban them during class time the kids hide them in their laps or behind a book during class and they'll be immediately back on their phones again once class is over.

He's not arguing for internet-free schools or students although other people certainly do make those arguments and we might pause for a moment to consider whether any declines we find in test scores might be as related to digital learning in the classroom as much as to distractions by phones which could be the topic of an entirely different episode but he definitely wants to ban personal devices that constantly ping with alerts which he says is “most disruptive to learning and relationships.” I only want to briefly review the research on smartphone bans in schools because the state of the body of research as a whole is about what you would expect if you listen to the first couple of episodes in this series. A quasi-experimental study in six Danish schools implemented a four-week ban on smartphone use but only during recess. The researchers observed students systematically and also had the students correct complete questionnaires and found a significant increase in moderate physical activity but vigorous activity decreased slightly. This effect was observed across genders, grades and both indoor and outdoor recess environments. The study took place over four weeks which is relatively long by the standards of this kind of study but that's still not long enough to know if the effects would hold in the longer term. There weren't any control schools so we can't be sure the cell phone ban was what caused the change. There were also some challenges in the implementation. At the end of the study 32% of students still confessed to using smartphones during recess so we can't really say there was a ban in place and the study only focused on recess not on classroom activities or overall academic or social outcomes. The study was done during the pandemic so they had a variety of policies related to outdoor recess that may have affected the results because kids activity increased the most in schools with mandated outdoor recess.

A cross-sectional study compared 30 English secondary schools with restrictive phone policies meaning phones weren't allowed for recreational use and permissive policies meaning phones were allowed for recreational use in certain times and places. The study did not find any significant differences in students mental well-being, anxiety, depression, academic achievement, disruptive behavior, sleep or physical activity. The so-called restrictive schools often allowed students to keep phones in their bags or their lockers so students actual access to phones may have been quite different from what the policies intended. The restrictive policies did reduce in-school phone and social media use but not kids overall daily or weekly use which was my first thought when I read about phone bans in The Anxious Generation. Isn't it likely there will be a rebound effect where kids just use their phones more outside of schools and this indicates maybe yes that can happen. A study in Hungary compared students’ anxiety and class engagement on regular days and an experimental mobile free day when students didn't have their phones during classes and it found that kids’ anxiety increased on the mobile free day especially for students with high attachment to their phones and class engagement did not increase either. This isn't super surprising because a one-day change is not really enough to get over the effect of giving up the phone and getting used to the new policy. A meta-analysis of five studies on smartphone bans found a statistically significant benefit for social well-being and a tiny insignificant benefit on academic performance. Some of the studies talking about bans may have included partial restrictions or inconsistent enforcement and confounding factors like socio-economic status and school climate were not consistently controlled across the studies. A study by Yondr, the company that makes the tamper-proof bags that many schools with restrictive policies have kids put their phones in, found a significant increase in academic success and a 44% decrease in behavioral referrals after implementation. Teacher surveys suggested there were fewer classroom disruptions and more classroom engagement. Sounds pretty amazing but remember this is a study sponsored by the company that makes the bags the phones go in.

There was no control group and the analysis does not control for issues that could have confounded the results like changes in teaching staff, curriculum or other school policies. They just assumed that any improvement in grades was due to the implementation of the Yondr pouches. The study methodology is barely described and the statistical analysis looks like it was written by a marketing expert. New York Magazine reports that Yondr is actively paying lobbyists to push for phone bans in schools and gave away pouches at the New York State United Teacher Union's conference. We can hardly say that this research is impartial or trustworthy. So overall the research shows mixed and pretty small impacts on academic performance except in studies with more comprehensive enforced bans. There's also no strong evidence that bans improve student mental health or well-being but all of this could be a result of a ban being a reduction in access rather than an actual ban. Honestly it really shouldn't be too hard to figure out whether banning phones help children's mental health. I hope that a whole lot of researchers in the 21 states that have implemented or are considering bans are setting up really robust studies right now to compare what happens with children who live in those states with the ones who live in states where phones are not banned. Because if phone bans really do make a difference we're going to see the effect of that right? We're going to start to see mental health indicators improving and test scores rising and disengagement with school dropping. I hope that at least some states cannot implement bans for at least five years so we can do some robust comparisons although with the pace that changes are coming right now, I imagine it's going to be hard to maintain that sample.

What I'm ultimately more interested in than bans is, why we need bans in the first place. Dr. Haidt has started hosting blog posts from other authors on his After Babel blog. On May 30th twenty twenty-five After Babel reposted a Substack post from public school PE teacher Gilbert Schuerch whose Substack is called Fit to teach. The post is called my school banned phones for the year here's what happened and I want to examine this closely because I think it perfectly illustrates what is really happening with kids and phones. Remember from our second episode that kids report using phones to meet needs for autonomy and connection and that the research shows family relationships academic pressure and school environment are much bigger factors in teen well-being than screen time well let's see how that plays out in a real classroom. The blog post begins with a conversation between Schuerch and the kids in his class who report spending eight, twelve, even seventeen hours a day on their phones over a weekend. Schuerch reports that the school tried banning phones but kids were still allowed to carry them in their pocket so the ban was effectively useless because the kids couldn't resist looking at their notifications. Then they tried Yondr pouches the same ones from the study I just mentioned. Each kid put their phone in a pouch in the morning and the teacher engaged a locking mechanism. The students carried the pouches and the teacher unlocked them at the end of the day. I'll read you the next stretch directly because it's funny in a not really funny kind of way. The Yondr pouches worked initially. The first day of school a senior mentioned to me that he had “resigned himself to a year of boredom. He said this while idly looking at his pouched phone. For three days teachers enjoyed bliss.

The ability to teach without saying the words put your phone away was something some teachers hadn't experienced in over a decade. Then the kids started getting creative. You see even though they couldn't access their phone they still felt the dopamine burst whenever they felt a vibration go off in the pouch. They had to know. They had to see. It drove them mad. Students started taking pens and stabbing through the fake Kevlar pouches. Other kids started using their keys to saw the locking mechanism off. Others would bring two phones to school. They would let the dean watch them pop their old phone into the pouch at entry and keep their main phone in their backpack until the coast was clear. One kid even got entrepreneurially about it. He went on Amazon and bought the magnet that unlocked the phone pouches for 50 bucks. Then he charged kids a dollar every time they wanted to unlock their phone”

So apparently the school has a ban on the Yondr pouches and students hand their phones during the entrance. Phones go into safe boxes that students can't access until the final bell, so there are no notifications constantly reminding them they're missing something, and no pouches to crack open. So Schuerch goes on, Consequences for smuggling your phone past entry are high. Immediate detention, call home to parents, and a personal visit from the dean mid-class. There was some pushback in the beginning, but we teachers stuck to our guns. Every staff member made an immediate phone call to the dean team the moment they saw any kid with tech. That included AirPods, Apple Watches, iPads, and anything kids could use to connect to the internet." Then Schuerch goes on to describe the spectacular results. Teachers are not fighting an impossible battle against tech, students talking to each other between classes and at lunch, teachers covering material faster, and bullying has decreased. I want to read you one more extended section of the blog post that describes a typical exchange in Schuerch's gym class.

“A student is seated with their back against the wall and they don't want to participate. I choose one of my various talking points. You know participation is how you pass my class, right? You know you have to pass this class to graduate. All you have to do is try. I'm not asking for a serious feat of athleticism. Exercise is good for the soul, man. Your team needs you. Or, my personal favorite exchange, Do you like math class? No. But you have to do it, right? Yes. Same deal here. You have to do it even though you don't want to. But I'm not feeling it. Yeah, I know. But guess what? Do you think I was feeling it when my alarm clock went off at 5 in the morning? Do you think I was feeling it when I took an hour 20 commute on the train? What? You love it here though.

You're always so loud. You're always so enthusiastic. You're so extra all the time. I give a lopsided grin. That's because I'm faking it. It's the most adult skill you have to learn how to do. You have to learn how to do the things you don't want to do. Ugh. Look, here's what I actually want right now. I want to be home on my couch watching Netflix with a girl on my left arm and a girl on my right. Two chicks. Then I want to cook them dinner. That's what I want. But here I am because we have to do the things we don't want to do. This exchange usually gets a laugh and it usually works. At least this year it has.” To me, this article telling us that phones in schools are the problem has instead neatly illustrated what's really the problem. The sexual innuendo that Schuerch describes is completely inappropriate in a classroom setting, using a word that objectifies women and reduces them to decorative props in his fantasy. But the bigger issue for our current conversation is this. Why are kids so drawn to phones? Yes, they're designed to grab our attention, but how do they do that? The apps on the phones both promise and deliver an easy way to meet some of our core needs for autonomy and for connection. We all want to make decisions about our lives that we think are important. We want to do things that are meaningful.

We want to be connected to other people. Kids are turning to their phones because they can't get those needs met at school. They can't make decisions about things that are meaningful to them. They can't get real connection with each other, so they use their phones. And our solution here is to prohibit them from using phones to meet their needs for autonomy and connection without ever addressing why the kids are on their phones in the first place. Schuerch tells us this is what life is about. Life is about not making any real decisions for ourselves, but doing things that we don't want to do and faking enthusiasm for them. This is what the real purpose of school is, is to get our kids to do things they don't want to do and to look enthusiastic about it. And any time the kids protest, any time they come up with a new creative way to snatch back a little autonomy, the teachers are there. And they punish the student by taking away recess, by getting them in trouble with their parents, by embarrassing them in front of their peers with a personal visit from the dean mid-class. The teachers stuck to their guns. They didn't budge.

And Schuerch goes on to say, and the student body eventually accepted their fate. I get that this is written to be funny, but I'm having a hard time seeing the funny in this practice of metaphorically beating students down. I'm imagining the practice of breaking a wild horse, and instead of training it through mutual understanding, the human overwhelms the horse with force and fear and control until the horse stops resisting. The goal is not a partnership. The goal is obedience. And it might produce outward compliance, but this comes at the cost of internal motivation and trust and true connection. Which is the needs students were trying to meet through their phones. So I wondered, what would it have been like to approach Schuerch's story from a different perspective? Perhaps from a perspective that sees students as autonomous beings who want to shape the environment, they spend so much time in. So here's the story I wish he had told. At the start of the school year, we knew tech use was going to be a big conversation. Students come to school with phones, smartwatches, iPads, devices that are part of how they connect and create and get through the day. We also knew that nonstop access to tech can make focused learning really hard. So instead of handing down a no phones policy, we invited students into the process. We asked them questions like, what role does tech play in your school day?

When do you think it's helpful? When does it get in the way? What kind of classroom environment helps you learn best? How can we balance your freedom with everyone else's ability to focus? The conversations were messy and honest. Some students admitted they use their phones to escape boredom or anxiety. Others said they relied on them to stay in touch with family, especially during tough times. Some worried that a ban would be disrespectful, like adults didn't trust them to manage themselves. Together, we co-created agreements. Some classes decided to keep devices in a basket during certain periods with designated tech breaks. Others agreed that as long as phones stayed out of sight and didn't disrupt learning, it was okay to have them. We also talked about what would happen if someone didn't stick to the agreement, and students had a voice in those decisions too. It wasn't perfect. Some students struggled with the agreements we created, and we had to revisit our processes to include more voices. But instead of escalating punishments, we went back to the agreements and the relationships.

Students weren't submitting to authority. They were upholding shared commitments. And when they didn't, we treated that as a chance to reconnect and revisit what wasn't working. By trusting students with real input, we didn't just reduce phone use, we built trust. And that made all the difference. But that scenario could never have happened in Schuerch Classroom. Because in a classroom where kids are seen as the architects of their own lives, the idea of a teacher telling a student a sexist joke would be so out of place, it could never happen. Everyone would know it didn't fit. Because that would be a classroom and a school with real belonging. Not the fake kind of belonging the kids were trying to get through their phones. Not the fake kind they're getting now in their post-phones, still very much power over classrooms. But the real belonging they've been craving all along.

And this connects directly to what we learned in our previous episodes. Part of the reason kids are on phones is because we adults have designed them to be enticing. But kids are also on phones because phones offer what school doesn't. Choice, agency, connection on their terms, and content that feels relevant to their lives. Taking away phones without addressing why kids want them is like taking away a crutch without healing the broken leg. When you ask Jonathan Haidt what's behind kids' declining performance on standardized tests and disengagement with school, we can imagine the answer. It's the phones, stupid. Sometimes researchers actually ask kids about this instead of just studying test scores. And the teens themselves tell a very different story. They say that school engagement is fostered by supportive relationships with teachers and staff, opportunities for real choice, relevant and hands-on learning, and classroom environments that focus on individual growth and effort rather than just test scores or grades. Strict punitive rules are associated with teens' disengagement, along with irrelevant or boring curriculum, peers who are disengaged or who exclude other youth, lack of respect or unfair treatment by adults, and limited autonomy. David Deal, who was then at Pepperdine University, asked formerly or currently incarcerated Hispanic men with gang affiliations about their elementary and middle school experiences for Deal's PhD thesis.

Many of the men described experiencing a profound sense of alienation as early as elementary school. Deal says, “the angst of being humiliated, excluded, or misunderstood by their teachers was clearly unforgettable, wielding a strong influence on their sense of belonging within the school setting." One man was bullied in second grade and turned to gang members to get the protection he needed. Another found a sense of love and belonging that he couldn't find in his own family or social circle. The theme of respect came up often. When children don't believe they're respected in school or by their peers, they turn to gangs to get that need met. Many of the men shared experiences of specific teachers with whom they connected and whom they identified as caring and trustworthy. But very often these were isolated experiences, remembering one specific teacher in 15 years of schooling, indicating that most of their teachers were not able to create this experience for them. Some researchers in Spain worked with middle schoolers in several different schools to co-design ethnographic research on the middle school experience.

One student said, “I learn little in school. I spend most of my time looking for information. I look for things not explained at school on the internet. In class, I listen, but not too much because just being attentive, you get the picture. I know too much. I learn to produce videos, movies, songs, the camera. I know a lot about videos, effects, how to assemble a video and so on.” An adult researcher on that project observed, “what the students learn in school somehow helps them to understand the outside world. But what they learn outside is not usually incorporated and taken into account at school. Only in a very few classes, teachers’ pay attention to their children's experience, knowledge and understandings. At school, they learn things to pass exams, but once passed, they find difficult to remember them. They tend to remember what they learn outside because for them, this learning is more meaningful, is more related to their experiences, interests and social and emotional relationships. Although digital technology is increasingly incorporated in classes, it is used differently inside and outside school. Within, often it's used places them as spectators and recipients of information. Outside, it's use increases their responsibility, agency, ability to scan information, to communicate and to express.”

So if the alternative to using phones is to resign yourself to a year of boredom that you didn't choose, punctuated by demands to do more activities that you both don't choose and don't like doing, is it any wonder the kids want to keep their phones? And what if this idea that life is about doing things you don't like and faking that you do like them? Really? Is this the highest hope that we have for our kids' lives? The goal of doing things you don't like and pretending that you do is so important that that's what we spend the vast majority of time in school training them to do? And I know you worry, if my kid doesn't learn how to do things they don't want to do, how will they make it through life? And to that, I say, when your child comes across something they don't want to do that happens in service of a goal they very much want, they will do it. I'm thinking of a specific example that happened in our home a few months ago. So my daughter, Carys, has started her own pet sitting business. We started out by emailing our neighbors and asking them to let us know if they ever needed help with pet sitting or dog walking. And our timing was awesome because several of them went away for the holidays last year and she earned about $450 in three weeks. So early this year, she decided she wanted to take her business to the next level and start marketing to people beyond just our neighbors.

To do that, she wanted to have her own website. And when we talked about the things you can have on a website, we listed out the qualifications she already has, which have mostly come through the training she's done at the shelter where we volunteer. We realized that if any of the pets in her care had a medical emergency, then she wouldn't know what to do. So we found that the Red Cross has a pet first aid course. She signed up for it and she started the lessons. And let me tell you, this course was an utterly miserable experience. So we've learned over the last few months that Carys is likely dyslexic. She can decode individual words, but she has challenges with her working memory. So she can't both decode and retain the meaning of what she's reading at the same time. And that Red Cross course was entirely written content. So I wasn't willing to read the whole thing to her. So we investigated screen reader options.

The best one that we found required that she copy and paste the text from the page into the reader, and then it would read it back to her in a mechanical voice and it would stumble over every single contraction and every single acronym. The course was also trying to teach CPR from written descriptions, which is a complete waste of time. There's just no way you can understand how to do it without practicing it, or at the very least, seeing somebody else do it on a video. Luckily, I'm CPR trained. So I taught her how to do it on a big stuffed elephant, because otherwise she would not have known any more about how to do CPR after the course than she did before it. The multiple-choice tests were awful as well. They weren't the kind of tests that tried to test your knowledge. They were the kind that picked up on some minor detail and tried to catch you out by seeing if you could distinguish it from a bunch of other minor details to see if you were paying attention. The whole experience was so miserable that at times she was literally rolling on the floor, moaning about how bad it was.

But she got through it. She really wanted to build this business. And we've talked about how adults don't trust children as much as they trust other adults. So, she has to do extra work to prove that she's trustworthy. And she knew that having this certification on her website would help her to build her business. And it has. We get a consistent stream of people reaching out, and she has several hundred dollars in a retirement savings account. And she's saving for a freeze dryer because apparently freeze-dried Skittles are amazing. I think it's really important to see that Gilbert Schuerch isn't being totally honest when he says that life is about doing things that you don't want to do and pretending that you like them.

Because Schuerch got to choose to be a teacher. Maybe he doesn't love his commute, but he can also choose to live somewhere else. He could choose another career if he wanted. Kids in school have very little agency. They don't get to make choices. So, taking away the way that they get most of their need for agency met, and replacing it with yet more things they don't choose, while thinking the whole thing is a game where we all work together to break the kid's will, that's pretty amusing to the teachers, may not end up helping kids much either. It's possible that involving them in the process of choosing how phones should be handled in schools could teach them way more than anything else that they would learn from a curriculum. Schuerch even concludes that school phone bans won't completely address kids' challenges. He described the process of giving phones back to the kids at the end of the day where they descend on the dean like a “crowd” of hyenas catching the scent of stinking flesh. He says, the kids are not all right whether we ban the phones or not. And I assume he's referring to school bans here. Because kids are going to use phones outside of school too, which brings us to the last main idea in this series of episodes, which is what we should do with phones at home.

This brings us also back to full circle to something we established in part one, that the problems kids face are complex and multifaceted. Academic pressure, family stress, economic uncertainty, social isolation, these are the factors that research shows have the biggest impact on teen wellbeing. But phones are much easier to regulate than those deeper issues. The question really to me is, are we choosing the easy target because it feels like we're doing something even if it's not a very effective thing? If you missed the last couple of episodes where I dug into the research in The Anxious Generation on the so-called teen mental health crisis and whether phones are causing this specifically, you may not also have heard that my daughter, Carys, is about to be 11 and she doesn't have a phone. She's actually never asked for one.

And when someone we'd just met commented recently about how kids these days are always on their phones, she said she didn't want to have one and she wouldn't want to have the kinds of interactions where kids sit next to each other and text each other. She does have a tablet that she uses to play Minecraft and other games, but she doesn't use any social media and she doesn't have any interest in it either. So I'm personally coming at this issue from a bit of different perspective than parents who might be seeing their kids spending a lot of time on social media and who are worried about those changes they're seeing. And I'm essentially trying to put myself in your shoes and address this question from your perspective. The topic of whether we should ban phones or social media at home, and if so, how should we do that? And if not, what should we do instead? We'll form the final installment of our series on the anxious generation.

Hi, this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned, and don't forget to head to yourparentingmojo.com to record your own message for the show.