There has been a growing and justifiable concern about young people’s use of cellphones, particularly as the conduit to addictive social media platforms and websites.
America’s surgeon general has called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms, saying they are responsible for significant and growing mental health issues with adolescents. Even if one believes those concerns are overblown, it’s hard to dispute that cellphones are — for all ages — a distraction, that they impede face-to-face interaction and that they are hard to compete with for attention.
For all of these reasons, there is a movement among state governments to restrict or ban the use of cellphones by students in public schools. At least 15 states have done so already, and Mississippi is thinking about joining them.
Last month, a Senate task force appointed by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann took the issue up as part of its overall study of what lawmakers might do to address several mental health concerns.
Whether school districts really need a push from the Legislatures, though, is debatable. Many of them, I suspect, have already adopted cellphone bans or restrictions, or are leaning that way.
Curious what local schools might be doing, I made a couple of inquiries.
The Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District has a highly restrictive policy. Students are forbidden from bringing cellphones or any similar electronic devices on school campuses. Also teachers are forbidden from using cellphones during class time.
Pillow Academy, as a private school, would not be covered by any legislative mandate. Still, it has been trying to find the right balance with the ubiquitous gadget.
Having tried different approaches, the school has gravitated toward being more restrictive. Although it allows students to have a cellphone in their possession, the rule is the devices are not to be used in classrooms or any other indoor areas without teacher permission.
“Our policy is to protect the integrity of the classroom,” said Barrett Donahoe, Pillow’s head of school.
Pillow experimented with allowing students, when not in class, to use their cellphones in common areas, such as during lunchtime in the cafeteria. But this fall, it decided to revert to an all-indoor ban because the staff felt that the students were not interacting enough among themselves when they had their phones out.
“We wanted them to be more active in socially interacting rather than interacting on cellphones and things of that nature,” Donahoe said.
An old-school form of communication, a book, has been influential in sparking the more recent discussion among parents, educators and legislators about the dangers of smartphones and social media on developing brains and psyches.
The thesis of “The Anxious Generation,” written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and published earlier this year, is that a “phone-based childhood” is severely detrimental to a child’s development, mental health and happiness.
My daughter, Elizabeth, sent me a copy of the book this past summer. The private school in Nashville that her two oldest children attend has asked its parents to read it. The school is planning to hold discussion sessions about the warnings Haidt raises and the recommendations he makes to protect children from tech companies, whose business model — like that of Big Tobacco in the bad old days — is to hook people on their products before they have fully developed reasoning powers.
I haven’t had a chance to get much past the first few pages of Haidt’s book, but its jacket is intriguing. It says that he contends childhood has been rewired from one that was heavily rooted in play to one that revolves around smartphones. The transformation “has interfered with children’s social and neurological development,” producing maladies ranging from “sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.”
School restrictions on cellphone use may help combat some of these negative consequences, but as with most areas of children’s development, what happens after they leave school has the biggest impact.
It’s at home where the main difficulties lie. Parents aren’t in full agreement on when a child is old enough to have a cellphone, or when and how they should be able to use it. Some think their children should have them in school in case they’re in danger or there’s some other emergency. Some parents use smartphones as pacifiers with their kids. Those families that are more lenient with cellphone usage make it tougher on those trying not to be.
It was hard enough for parents in previous generations to battle with their offspring about watching too much television or playing too many video games. Smartphones are an even greater source of friction because they are that much more powerful, putting instantaneous communication and most all of human knowledge at a person’s fingertips.
I don’t envy this generation of parents trying to figure out what to do about these devices, which are both marvelous and wicked.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
