The smart phone: Proven very bad for kids

Making schools productive again: A Minnesota middle school has found that banning smart phones from all students during the school day has improved behavior both in and out of the classroom while improving the learning and social environment.

“I believe (the ban) is game-changing and will have lasting impacts on our students for years to come,” Maple Grove Middle School Principal Patrick Smith told WCCO. “There was no cross-the-table conversations, there was no interaction in the hallways,” he said. “And let’s be real, with these devices, our students – especially our teenagers – there’s a lot of drama that comes from social media, and a lot of conflict that comes from it.”

Last year, school officials banned student cell phone use for the entire school day, from 8:10 a.m. to 2:40 p.m., following a variety of issues at the school tied to the devices. “We have a culture and climate concern. We see issues that kids are getting on their phones through interactions of bullying, of setting up fights, just the gambit of a lot of the negative things kids are going back and forth on social media,” Smith said on the Chad Hartman Show, adding that the distraction from learning was also a major concern.

After a year school officials and parents are enthused by the results. Not only has the social atmosphere improved at the school, parents are reporting improvements in learning in their kids.

None of this is a surprise. Smart phones and most of the big social media outlets are designed to feed the worst emotions. For example, Meta (which owns Facebook) is specifically programmed to make its users more addicted, which with young children this is the worst thing you can do during their developmental years. They do not yet have the independent judgment required to resist such manipulation, and are therefore easily damaged by it. In fact, evidence now shows it is so damaging that Meta is being sued a coalition of almost every state in the Union.

In October, 41 states and the District of Columbia filed litigation against Meta as reports of record high levels of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and suicide, continue to surface. Studies have shown that American teenagers have experienced a significant rise in depression over the last two decades, as the share of teens experiencing major depressive episodes steadily rose from 7.9% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2018. Since then, the persistent increase has continued unabated. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three out of five teenage girls felt depression and one in three had seriously considered suicide in 2021.

That coalition is remarkably bi-partisan in this very partisan age, including attorney generals from both parties. They have all recognized the horrible mental health trends among young people that began almost to the day smart phones were introduced, and are now trying to do something about it.

This Minnesota school however has a better plan than lawsuits and litigation. It — with the apparent enthusiastic support of parents — has simply taken responsibility and done the job it is supposed to do, provide a good learning and social environment for the children under its care. And while the public schools have well-documented problems of their own (see for example Maple Grove’s own “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging” statement and the commitee running it — with pronouns declared!), and are far too often bad places to send your children to get educated, this action at Maple Grove is at least a good first step in improving that public school environment.

Sadly handed to the government, though kids were never
supposed to be owned by the government. There are — and
have always been — their parents’ responsibility, entirely.

While there is now a political push in Minnesota to expand this program, parents everywhere should heed its lessons and impose their own smart phone limits. There is no reason for anyone under eighteen years of age to have a smart phone in school. The reason parents give kids phones is so they can have easy contact should an emergency arise. Such need does not exist in school because the school can contact them should any problems occur.

In fact, such need doesn’t exist in almost all cases, and when it does exist a smart phone is overkill. All the kids really need is a simple flip cell phone. If they need to talk to their friends they should talk to them, not text them. And kids certainly do not need to be endlessly scrolling through Facebook, TikTok, and X feeds. Such things are not only wasteful of time, they are passive activities that negatively impact learning and social communications while feeding children a warped sense of the world.

This is not rocket science. If you are parent, do your job. Keep that smart phone away from your children until they are old enough to pay for one themselves. By then they should be mature enough as well as sufficiently educated and socialized to handle it.

Before then you are doing them harm if you let them use one, indiscriminately. And we can now see the consequences of this now almost daily, as much of the social framework of our culture appears to be collapsing.