Ban smartphones in school?

What will be our smartphone policy at Acton Academy Annapolis and why?

Amid a lot of tough decisions about building Acton Academy Annapolis, there were two really easy ones:

1. Get outside more

2. Prohibit smartphones

The first is uncontroversial among most parents. But some might be wondering why we went so draconian on the second.

First, let’s review our electronics policy. Students will not be allowed to have smartphones or smartwatches in our classrooms. Obviously, we leave it to parents to decide how to manage smartphones outside of school. If parents need to urgently reach their child, they’ll have the mobile phones of the adults on campus. In addition, gaming or social media on school computers is also prohibited.

To be clear, we are not anti-tech. We think that the internet is a game-changer that enables both personalized learning and the opportunity to explore any topic of interest. Our unique approach to school depends on the use of technology.

So why the complete ban on smartphones? We were thrilled to see Jonathan Haidt, one of our favorite experts on the impact of phones and social media on children, recently write “The Case for Phone-Free Schools”. Haidt made it easy for us to explain our policy — we’ll be quoting his work heavily (but we encourage you to read his entire piece!).

There are three problems that smartphones create among children:

1. An inability to focus

2. An inability to socialize

3. Mental health issues

Individually these are all serious. Taken collectively, we don’t think it’s hyperbole to consider the dangers of smartphone usage in a similar category as smoking or drugs among earlier generations. Unfortunately, a “Just Say No to Smartphones” campaign has not materialized!

Let’s dive into each of these problems.

An Inability to Focus

Most of us have experienced the addictive pull of our smartphone. However difficult we find this addiction as an adult, our brains are far better equipped to deal with it than children’s are. Haidt summarizes recent studies of the effects of smartphones among children:

For example, consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.

The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changes in the brain’s reward system, including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs. As the neuroscientists Jaan Aru and Dmitri Rozgonjuk put it in a recent review of the literature: “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”

An Inability to Socialize

We’ve all seen the table full of teens at a restaurant where everyone is glued to their phones. Haidt explains that the problem goes deeper than just poor restaurant etiquette:

One way that phones have hurt our relationships is through “phubbing” (a contraction of “phone snubbing”), when a person breaks away from a conversation to look at their screen. Research shows that it interferes with the intimacy and perceived quality of social interactions. People who are more addicted to their phones are, unsurprisingly, the biggest phubbers, which may explain why people who are the heaviest users of phones and/or social media are also the most depressed and lonely. 

Once some students start phubbing others, then the others feel pressure to pull out their own phones, and in a flash, the culture of the entire school has changed. Jean Twenge and I analyzed the international PISA data set (part of an ongoing study on education) and found a global increase in loneliness at school beginning after 2012 (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Percent of students in each of four cultural groupings that scored above a cutoff indicating high levels on the average of 6 items in the PISA study that asked about loneliness and friendship at school. From Twenge, Haidt, Blake, McAllister, Lemon, & Le Roy (2021). Graph reprinted from The New York Times.

Students around the world became less likely to agree with items such as “I feel like I belong at school,” and more likely to agree with items such as “I feel lonely at school.” That's roughly when teens went from mostly using flip phones to mostly using smartphones. It's also when Instagram caught fire with girls and young women globally, following its acquisition by Facebook.

Mental Health Issues

Since 2012 there has been a dramatic increase in self-harm, depression, and anxiety among teens (especially teenage girls). The culprit here is more likely social media rather than smartphones. Haidt and Rausch have covered this in depth (here and here), but this post gives the best summary:

Figure 1 shows the percentage of US teens since 2004 who reported having a major depressive episode in the last year. 

Figure 1. Percent of teens with Major Depression in the last year. NSDUH data, see section 1.1.2 of the Adolescent mood disorders collaborative review doc. 

As you can see, there was no sign of a problem before 2010, and by 2015 a depression epidemic was in full force. Today, more than one in four American girls (ages 12-17) report having a major depressive episode in the last year. And more than one in eight boys said the same. 

Figure 2 provides behavioral (non-self-report) data on the number per 100,000 teens admitted yearly to hospitals because they harmed themselves, primarily by cutting.  

Figure 2. Hospital admissions for self-harm, younger teens (ages 10-14), CDC data. See section 2.1.1 of the Adolescent mood disorders collaborative review doc. 

In one of the most harrowing and unprecedented trends of the 21st century, young teenage girls were hospitalized for self-harm in 2020 at just about three times the rate they were in 2010. We see similar but slightly less steep trends among the 15-19-year-old girls (we also see this same gendered pattern in self-poisoning). 

Here’s one additional graph to show that the sharp rise in mental illness was concentrated in young people—it was not happening across the board to all age groups:

Figure 3. Percent US Anxiety Prevalence. National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).

To summarize, four trends emerged in the data from the USA, which we will call the “basic pattern.” They include:

A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.

B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s.

C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).

D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).

We believe that managing smartphones and social media is one of the toughest challenges facing parents today. How do you limit the negative effects without cutting your child off from their peers? We tried to avoid a smartphone for our oldest son, but his friends all communicated on Snapchat, which was inaccessible from his flip phone. So we finally gave in.

We’d love to see more support for ideas like Wait Until 8th, where groups of parents come together to sign a pledge to wait until 8th grade to give their child a smartphone. Managing smartphones as a group is much easier than going it alone. It’s a topic we plan to discuss with the families at Acton Academy Annapolis.