A recent Associated Press article describes how public schools are trying to counteract the maleficent influence of smartphones. Simply banning them from the classroom isn't enough, it seems, because kids will become glued to their devices as soon as they get them back after school. Reporter Carolyn Thompson says that in an effort to counter the smartphone plague, a school system in Maine coordinated a week of outdoor activities, including camping and cooking outdoors in May. A Spokane, Washington school ran a program called "Engage IRL" (In Real Life) to give students an alternative to infinite scrolls and chatrooms. And many other schools are trying to encourage extracurricular activities to displace the domination of smartphones in their students' lives.
The schools are right to see a problem. But just banning smartphones in class and adding extracurricular activities here and there isn't going to solve it, according to Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt, a Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, has written The Anxious Generation, a book that everyone with children younger than college age should read.
The advent of social media has caused a nearly universal sea change in the fundamentals of daily life for every child and teenager who has access to a smartphone. There is no need to cite statistics on how much time a young person with a smartphone spends on it. Just a circumspice (look around you) will show that unless some powerful outside force intervenes, kids will use literally every spare minute engaged in keeping up with social-media posts and rumors and all the other stuff that goes on in their personal cyberspace.
Haidt marshals the most impressive set of statistics I've seen in any kind of social-science book in a long time to show that the advent of smartphones has not only been correlated with, but in most cases is the cause of, declines in all sorts of normal healthy stuff that kids used to do without prompting: spending literal face time with other kids, playing outside, and learning how to be an adult by attaching oneself to an adult role model or two, getting a driver license, and finding a job. On the active-harm side, incidences of anxiety, depression, visits to emergency rooms for psychological reasons, use of pornography, and suicide rates have all soared.
I have described elsewhere in this space how the social-media companies have spent billions on perfecting algorithms to keep eyeballs glued to their apps, and because the user is the product, the user can't just passively watch things—he or she has to essentially live online and constantly keep updating the avatar that increasingly represents them to the online world. Besides being a sucky way to live, this mode of existence has now been conclusively shown to be actively harmful to mental health.
Haidt has done for smartphones and kids what Rachel Carson did for DDT and eagles in her famous book Silent Spring, which was a foundational document of the environmental movement. If we can muster even a fraction of the concern and activism that we focused on eagles, and apply it to our children and teenagers, we might be able to get somewhere.
The schools cited in the AP article deserve credit for perceiving a problem and trying to do something about it, but Haidt might not endorse their solution of increasing structured activities, although it might do some good. If I had to summarize what Haidt advises in the closing section of his book, it would be "Less smartphones and more recess."
It turns out that play—just letting kids goof around and come up with fun things to do on their own—isn't just the cherry on top of the educational milkshake. It's a vitally essential activity that forms kids' brains and souls to become capable, functional adults. Especially when kids form groups or teams, they spend time working out problems together and face difficulties and learn how to overcome them, ideally without much adult intervention.
For various reasons I won't go into, the idea of just letting kids be unsupervised kids has fallen into disfavor in some circles. The epitome of this attitude is exemplified in a photo Haidt shows to make his point that adults are trying to restrict free play unnecessarily. It was taken at a playground of an elementary school in Berkeley, California. A sign fully as tall as the chain-link fence it is hung on is titled "Tag Rules" followed by nine rules phrased in a way that would warm any bureaucrat's heart (e. g. "If a player doesn't want to play tag, then other players must respect that.").
Such stifling oversupervision is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Haidt cites studies of experiments in which schools have brought back the old-fashioned unsupervised recess, where the kids are told to basically go outside and play for half an hour. He has helped to found a movement called Let Grow Play Clubs, which helps schools design playgrounds that have fun stuff to play with, not the standard OSHA-approved boring playground equipment, but things like big blocks and old pieces of machinery and so on that you can do stuff with. And keeping adults away from the kids is just as important as providing them with stimulating things to play with.
Haidt even has the temerity to say that if a few kids get minor injuries while playing, guess what? It's okay. Better to scrape your elbow on a playground then grow up never knowing what getting hurt is like. That sounds harsh, but it's just an example of the well-supported data he marshals to show that we are currently letting kids do the psychological equivalent of smoking three packs a day, and we not only need to take away their mental cigarettes, but help restore to them the natural stages of childhood and teenagerhood that lead, or used to lead, most people to become functional, reasonably happy adults.
And that still happens, sometimes. But for millions of kids it's not, and we need to do something about it yesterday.
Sources: The AP article "Schools are competing with cell phones. Here's how they think they could win" appeared on Aug. 24, 2024 at https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-ban-extracurricular-afterschool-4d89f5b7fd7c8f1d5903f8c04f26da54. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published by Penguin Press in 2024.
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