They need to enroll in the Spritzler Lombardi Institute.
Your Kids Don’t Need Smartphones
States ban them in schools. At home, parents should too.
By Jillian Lederman
Sept. 17, 2024 12:59 pm ET
As the school year begins, K-12 students may need to kiss their phones goodbye. Seven states have passed school-technology restrictions that have been implemented or will be during the year. Other states, cities and districts may do the same.
When I was a kid, I didn’t need the government to facilitate my phonelessness; my parents did it on their own. For years, my siblings and I shared a clunky candy-bar phone that we despondently referred to as a “radio remote control.” It was equipped exclusively to call 911 and home, and as my parents frequently said, “What else could you possibly need it to do?”
My parents preserved for me a childhood from an earlier time. Television was heavily restricted. I was required to learn cursive. Any time I wanted to invite someone over, I picked up my family’s landline and dutifully punched in my friend’s phone number.
Most readers probably find this childhood familiar. But I was born in 2003. I was calling my friends from a landline during a time when many households had started getting rid of landline phones altogether. During the same years that I was using my radio remote control to get picked up from school, nearly all my friends had iPhones.
Technology has only advanced since. Today, 74% of K-8 classrooms and 94% of high-school classrooms use laptops all or most of the time. Children 8 to 12 spend a daily average of 5½ hours on screens. Teens spend eight hours. Excessive screen time among adolescents leads to depression and anxiety, among other consequences.
The ubiquity of technology makes restricting it a daunting task. Asking a student to use a landline will get you a blank stare. Plans are made in group chats. Social gatherings are documented on TikTok. True friendship is demonstrated by commenting on one another’s Instagram posts—and good luck to you if you don’t have an account.
As one parent agonizes in an online post, “I have a 10 year old who is the only one of her core group of friends at school who does not have a phone or social media.” The child’s social life is suffering as a result. Hundreds of commenters commiserate.
School phone restrictions are a good start, but the problem is too embedded to legislate away. It comes down to parents, and whether they are willing to keep their kids away from screens. Should they do so, their children likely won’t be invited to every party, nor be up to speed on every nuance of school drama. I certainly wasn’t.
But that’s OK. Phones aren’t the end-all, be-all of social dynamics. Parents should begin making pacts not to allow smartphones until a certain age, so that their children can build friendships based on real-life interactions rather than online posturing.
Unfortunately, most of the resistance to phone bans comes from parents themselves, who insist that they need to communicate with their children during the day. To them, I say: Give your kids a candy-bar phone. To accommodate societal advancement, perhaps even get one that can text.
After all, what else could they possibly need it to do?
Ms. Lederman is a Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at the Journal.
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