I taught middle and high school for almost 10 years (2012 until 2022), and over those years, I found myself competing more and more for my students’ attention. It was not due to anyone who was actually inside the classroom, but instead, the device that they were almost constantly holding in their hands, the little computer that I’ve seen students become increasingly attached to over the years.
At first, the novelty of phones in the classroom was intriguing. As a world language teacher, Kahoots, for example, seemed like an ingenious way for students to learn their new vocabulary words while having fun. What I didn’t see then, and what I would guess many teachers didn’t predict happening, was that we as educators were slowly becoming more and more boring to their students, less of an authority, and eventually seen as the only thing that was standing between them and another round of Candy Crush. And as cell phones have continued to tighten their grip on our children, we as teachers, coaches, and parents are not only losing the battle of keeping our kids’ attention, we are actually beginning to lose our kids.
With anxiety, depression, bullying, eating and mood disorders, self-mutilation and suicide all on the rise in a significant way, it is critical for us as adults to start doing more to help our kids develop healthy screen habits. This may sound like a daunting task to some, a losing battle even. But we can’t afford to ignore this growing problem any longer, for the sake of our families and society on the whole. With this in mind, I’d like to share 10 reasons why establishing phone-free classrooms is crucial for our kids and their wellness, both physical and emotional:
1. Anxiety, Depression & Suicide Trends:
It is no coincidence that since iPhones were introduced in 2007, the rates of anxiety, depression and suicide amongst teens have skyrocketed. The depth of research showing a link between screen overuse and worsening mental health is significant and ever-growing.
Jean Twenge, PhD, author of iGen – Dr. Jean Twenge states: “Teens who spend more time on screens are more likely to be depressed, and those who spend more time on non-screen activities are less likely to be depressed.”
Letting students have their phones at school, when they are known to negatively impact their health, reminds me of my high school days when students had a smoking area outside our cafeteria. Unfortunately, kids’ developing brains often do not have the best decision-making capacity, and it’s the adults that need to help them keep their screen use down to a minimum.
2. Kids Raising Kids:
In a fascinating book about peer orientation in today’s society, Hold On To Your Kids – Dr. Gabor Maté Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Mate explain the negative impact of today’s peer culture:
“For the first time in history, young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role – their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.”
Until quite recently, transmission of culture has been handed down vertically, from generation to generation, from adult to child, and so on. In contrast, today’s culture is often being transmitted vertically, from peer to peer. It is unnatural for children to have become the dominant influence on each other’s development.
Nonetheless, we as adults often passively watch as young humans with underdeveloped brains, not to mention little life experience, perspective, and wisdom, try to instruct and guide each other on everything from education and work ethic, to values and sex.
In schools, we can help to keep the negative influences of peers to a minimum by keeping cell phones out of classrooms. By guiding children to orient towards their rightful attachment figures in the classroom, their teachers, we can have a better chance at being able to influence them in positive ways.
3. Devices of Distraction:
It is nearly impossible for teachers, lessons, and curriculum to compete with the tantalizing, high-dopamine activities that are just waiting at children’s fingertips. And we can’t expect that kids will have the foresight or self-discipline to avoid these activities in favor of listening to a tedious lecture on cell division or French verb conjugation. For the most part, their prefrontal cortexes are not yet developed enough to be able to make such decisions.
In an article from U.S. News and World Report from October 2022, Cellphones in School: What to Know | High Schools | U.S. News, Nicholas Ferroni, a high school teacher in New Jersey, did an experiment with students in one of his classes, in which he asked them to turn their notifications on so that they could track them. During a 40-minute class, they collectively received 600 notifications, which, in a class of 30 students, would amount to each student receiving a notification every other minute throughout the entire class. Even the most exciting, well-loved teacher can’t stack up against those levels of dopamine coursing through their classroom.
4. Kids’ Brains on Screens:
Victoria Dunckley, MD is the author of Reset Your Child’s Brain by reversing the negative effects of screen time and has worked as a psychiatrist for many years. As a practitioner, she began noticing a trend in her teen patients, who were exhibiting alarmingly difficult and defiant behaviors. Her suspicions that these behaviors could be linked to overuse of technology prompted her to begin prescribing “screen fasts” for these patients.
Dr. Dunckley found that after a 30-day screen fast, her patients’ developing brains were actually given a chance to rest and even physically heal, and many of their symptoms improved and/or disappeared. She eventually coined the term “Electronic Screen Syndrome” to describe the disorder that is occurring more and more frequently amongst our teen population. Some common symptoms of this disorder may sound very familiar to a lot of parents and teachers today:
- Irritable, depressed or rapidly changing moods
- Excessive or age-inappropriate tantrums
- Low frustration tolerance
- Poor self-regulation
- Disorganized behavior
- Oppositional-defiant behaviors
- Poor eye contact
- Insomnia
- Learning difficulties
- Tics, stuttering, hallucinations
What’s even more distressing is that neurodivergent children, those who suffer from ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, depression and a variety of mood disorders, are even more susceptible to the negative effects of screen overuse.
5. Destroyers of Focus:
Having the stamina to focus on difficult tasks, like learning, is becoming a lost art. The number of kids who are being medicated, due to complaints of ADHD, is at epidemic proportions. Healthcare providers are also finding that many children and adults alike are exhibiting “ADHD-like” symptoms because of the vast array of stimulation that our brains are being exposed to on a daily, even hourly basis.
Our brains were not meant to encounter the amount of stimulation that comes from the technology at our fingertips, and the resultant hyperstimulation causes us to crave more of it, thanks to the feel-good dopamine messages that it sends to our brains. This potentially endless feedback loop, in turn, causes difficulties in concentration and feelings of boredom and monotony when we do so.
In contrast, without the near-constant distraction of phones in classrooms, students learn how to sit with the initial unpleasantness of less stimulation, which over time helps them feel better, more relaxed, and more connected to the people and world around them. It also helps them learn to once again appreciate more traditional, lower-dopamine activities, such as building a puzzle, reading a book, or simply having a conversation with a friend.
6. Boredom Busters:
Have you ever had a really good idea while completely zoning out, maybe on a long car ride or on a hike in the mountains or even in the shower? This is no coincidence, and in fact, letting our minds wander is one of the best ways for us to help our brains solve problems and come up with new ideas.
On the contrary, when we are engrossed in screens, we are in the state of consuming, which makes it nearly impossible to think creatively and outside the box. We need to help our students recognize and even welcome feelings of boredom, as it is actually exercise for our brains and helps to stimulate ideas and creativity.
7. Discipline Disasters:
Have you ever tried to take a cell phone away from a teenager? If so, you most likely understand the difficult power struggle of trying to part an adolescent from their beloved screen. And for good reason, when one considers what is happening in their teenage brains.
Frances Jensen, author of The Teenage Brain – HarperCollins explains that oxytocin, which is a feel-good hormone, is released when we engage in stimulating activities with our phones, much like the oxytocin released when a mother holds her newborn baby. The purpose of this hormone release is to strengthen the bond between mother and child, and yet, when an adolescent experiences this as they interact with their device, a similar connection is occurring. It is no wonder, then, that it is not unusual for teens to go ballistic when adults attempt to confiscate their phones.
It is becoming a more and more common occurrence that teenagers are being hospitalized because of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and tragically even suicide completions, as a result of having their phones taken away. This begs the question of why we would allow such devices in our classrooms, when they have the potential to bring on such drastically negative consequences, in addition to being the source of a multitude of discipline problems.
8. A cheater’s right-hand man:
Cheating is on the rise with cell phones in classrooms. And understandably so, with most students carrying devices in their pockets that seemingly have the answer to almost any question. A national poll recently revealed that 35% of teens admit to using cell phones to cheat at school, while 65% say that they have seen classmates use their phones to cheat.
What is equally concerning is that many students don’t even believe that what they are doing is cheating. There is much drama and debate amongst students and their parents and teachers these days, about whether school even really has a purpose. Teens question why they need to bother studying for tests, when anything they might ever want to know is only a few swipes or clicks away.
There is a big difference, of course, between the ability to answer a question and actually learning about something. Authors and former teachers, Joe Clement and Matt Miles, provided a helpful analogy to this line of thinking in their book, Screen Schooled.
They suggested picturing the brain like a water pipe, and new knowledge akin to specks of dirt floating in the water and flowing through the pipe. When the pipe contains no sediment or other dirt particles inside, the water just washes these little specks right on through, as they have nothing to hold on to.
On the contrary, if there is a decent amount of buildup in the pipe, each new speck of dirt that comes through will more easily hold on to what is already there. In other words, learning begets learning. The more foundational knowledge that we have, the more that new information learned will have something to connect with. In essence, the more we learn, the easier it is to learn the next thing.
9. The Modern Bully’s Weapon of Choice:
Cyberbullies are rampant in the online world and they come in all shapes and sizes, both adults and minors alike. We wouldn’t think of letting people with nefarious intentions and ill-will into our homes or classrooms to hurt our children, and yet, that is exactly what we are doing when our children go unsupervised on screens.
The statistics are grim:
https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-cyber-bullyin
- 37% of kids ages 12-17 have been bullied online at least once and 30% report it happening more than once.
- 23% of students report that they’ve said or done something mean or cruel to another person online.
- 60% of young people have witnessed online bullying, yet most do not intervene.
- 81% of these kids say they would be more likely to intervene if they could do it anonymously.
- Only 1 in 10 students will inform an adult if they are being abused online.
- Young people who are bullied are at greater risk for self-harm and suicide.
- The FBI has recently reported an explosion of sextortion cases, with boys being the victims in the majority of these cases. Over the span of one year, the agency has received over 7,000 reports of financial sextortion against minors, and tragically, more than a dozen suicides have been linked to such schemes.
We need to provide a refuge from bullies for our young people as often as we possibly can, and providing phone-free classrooms is certainly one step in that direction. Keeping in mind the fact that many children do not have adults in their lives who help them to limit their screen use at home, school may be the only break that some may have from their devices, and potentially the relentless torment of cyberbullies, over the course of a typical day.
10. Social & Emotional Learning Blockers:
The buzz in recent years about social and emotional learning is old news by now. But what’s shocking is that in light of all of the time and money spent brain-storming, strategizing and planning to help our children in this regard, we are still allowing students to hold onto the biggest obstacle to their social and emotional growth at school – their phones!
Any time a kid is looking at their phone during class, in the hallways, or even in the school cafeteria, they are doing the equivalent of hanging a “do not disturb” sign on their forehead. It’s an easy way for an anxious student to avoid having to go through the discomfort of face-to-face interactions with other students, teachers, or staff.
This is the exact opposite of what students should be doing in schools. Their social skills have been stunted, both from Covid-19, as well as an overabundance of time alone with their technology, and we need to help our young ones practice having conversations where they actually have to respond right away. It is much easier to converse over text, where kids can think about and formulate responses, but they need to learn the skills of having to think on their feet and have a back-and-forth conversation.
Many teens today don’t have a problem with “popping off” online about whatever topics are trending, and aren’t afraid to take a stand and vehemently disagree, argue, and even bully others who don’t believe the way they do. In contrast, many of these same teens are too nervous to ask for an extra ketchup packet at their local drive-through because they are so anxious when it comes to face-to-face interactions.
By keeping cell phones out of classrooms, we are giving our children the space to form genuine social connections with their peers and teachers. We are also helping them learn how to use their own minds and ideas to problem-solve, imagine, create, and dream. Abraham Lincoln once said that the best way to predict your future is to create it. And I truly believe that we need to take back our classrooms so that we can help our students do just that.