Are Phone Bans In Schools Good for Parents?
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Another school year is underway, and smartphone use is banned in more schools than ever before. So far, 13 states, including Louisiana, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, have either passed laws or initiated policies that will ban or restrict smartphone access in schools. Some New York City schools already have policies of their own, and a statewide rule is expected to be announced in the coming year.
These new bans seem to be largely influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s blockbuster book from last spring, The Anxious Generation. Whatever you might think of Haidt’s science, his was one of those rare books that appealed to people across the political spectrum, and over the summer administrators and parents groups busily digested its message that our dependence on smartphones has kneecapped kids’ development. But as these bans come into place this fall, parents will have to adapt to new circumstances, both emotional and logistical. Are we ready?
In the last decade it seems to have become a foregone conclusion that parents are entitled to reach their children at all hours of the day. This assumption — you could even call it a new norm, one that has rapidly coalesced and hardened into place — is very hard to call into question. Former mayor Mike Bloomberg once banned cell phones and iPods in city schools, but Bill de Blasio rolled it back, citing how much parents opposed it. Some parents are justifiably reluctant to let their kids go to school without a phone given the real threat of gun violence. (Perhaps parents in states like Florida and Louisiana, where phone bans are in place, could use this as a point of resistance: We won’t let our kids go to school without their phones until you ban semiautomatic weapons.)
But our everyday habits have a big role to play too. For many parents — myself included — phones are an extension of our nurturing selves. During the first year my son had his own phone, he was forever forgetting to charge it, or leaving it at home. This was, I knew, “good” — it meant he wasn’t very interested in using it. But it also enraged me — why was I paying for this device if he never answered my texts and my worries about his whereabouts could never be assuaged? I felt vaguely idiotic, scolding him about leaving his phone at home. What I was basically asking him to do was to use his phone in a very specific way (answering his parents’ texts, promptly please) without giving into the phone’s black-hole opportunities. It was like giving him a sports car and expecting him to drive it only in a parking lot.
For parents whose kids are in close contact via text, phone bans are emotionally complex. Phones are deeply embedded in their daily caregiving practices. Subtracting any aspect of caregiving, whether it’s done through a smartphone or not, feels counterintuitive, even distressing. All parents are as attached to their children as their children are to their phones. None of us feels easy about letting go.
One mom I spoke to from suburban New Orleans said that her daughter’s anxiety disorder is eased by access to a phone and that a full ban seemed severe and unnecessary. Another mother I spoke to, from Montreal, said that she didn’t love the idea that phone bans set kids up to “feel that their credibility is constantly in question.” She feels that kids should be trusted to use their phones responsibly during school hours rather than subjected to “authoritarian” bans. Another mom said she was all for a school ban but needed her kids to be reachable during their commute.
Buried underneath these arguments is the question of why parents should have to shoulder the burden of keeping their children safe from the toxic side of phone use at all. Critics of Haidt’s book claim it has a neoliberal stench about it, in how it emphasizes parents’ roles in mitigating the harm of smartphone use in children. How can anyone expect parents to privately undo the wrongs perpetuated by unregulated technology and corporate greed? Why should they clean up a mess they didn’t make?
So who’s responsible? Perhaps in the coming years, governments will to do more to restrict the tech companies’ abilities to access underage markets (and do it for real, not just through the cheerful, useless Band-Aid solutions that Meta rolls out every year or so), but in the meantime, state governments have passed the buck to schools. This also seems unfair, to put even more pressure on teachers, especially given the chronic underfunding of public schools. Many teachers have gone on the record saying they don’t love the prospect of having to police a whole new set of behaviors.
Which raises the question of enforcement: how, and by whom? It’s early days still, but it looks like a school’s budget plays a predictably deterministic role in how effective a smartphone ban ends up being. A student at a Park Slope public high school told me that students at her school have been required to store their phones in magnetic pouches for the past year, but enforcement has been so spotty that no one really minds the ban anymore.
“There are two people in the lobby of the building who are meant to check whether peoples’ phones are in their pouches, and they do, but there are so many people passing through that it’s mostly a trust test on them checking if you actually closed your pouch.”
Has the ban meant that students are on their phones less? The Park Slope student said that it means you have to be more discreet about texting in the hallways, but in terms of access to your phone, the ban hasn’t had a huge impact — especially among students who aren’t as interested in school to begin with.
It’s a different story at schools with huge endowments such as Eton in the U.K., which announced over the summer that incoming first-year students would be issued a flip phone to communicate with their parents and would have to leave their smartphones at home. This sounds like the ideal scenario for parents in particular, many of whom feel unsure about letting their kids out of the house phoneless.
Even if institutions, including tech companies, do their parts, parents will likely need to adjust the way they use technology in their households. Smartphones have changed the way we parent just as they have changed adolescence. If we resent the impact of this technology so much, we need to hold ourselves, and our own biases, to account. These technologies have become embedded into our caregiving routines, and no one is comfortable with the idea of caring less. But we owe it to our children to try to untangle actual caregiving from convenience.
Earlier this month I wrote about Dorm Room Mamas, a Facebook group dedicated to the painstaking decoration of adult children’s college dorm rooms. The Facebook group operates as much as a support group for moms dealing with separation anxiety as it does as a resource for decorating, and while reading deep into the group’s posts it became clear that for many of these women the convenience of location tracking and shopping on Amazon Prime was part of their family cultures. These relatively new technological affordances have completely shaped the way they view their parental roles. What bothers me isn’t the hovering panoptic energy that these services enable in parents. It’s that parents have adopted these habits utterly and seamlessly and now take them for granted as natural rights, rather than product features that they pay for.
It feels unnatural to go backward in our relationship to technology. The forward motion, the adoption of the new, feels Darwinian-ly correct, even when it can be maladaptive and literally contributing to our species’ loss of fitness. So it makes a lot of sense that parents are unsure how exactly they want to enact this urgent correction to our children’s relationships to their smartphones. Reading Haidt’s book was the easy part. Now we have to actually change some of our behavior and risk feeling, even briefly, that by letting our children be unreachable for a few hours every day, maybe we’re taking the wrong kind of risk. For parents, that’s a very scary consideration. Most of us would do almost anything to avoid exposing ourselves to that kind of uncertainty. But this time it might actually be worth it.