This anecdote reminds me of the "rat park" studies on addiction.
From The Psychiatry Times:
"Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles-one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine-the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed...
But [researchers] wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs."
I think this relates the most to the arguments above. I am a college student that moved across the country to start college and anecdotally this lines up with my experience. In high school, I had a rich social life with sports and community and didn't go on social media much at all even though I had it and enjoyed using it for pursuing niche interests or entertainment occasionally. Once I got to college and had to rebuild my social life from scratch, i was sucked into social media a lot more and found it hard to be alone without it. Then, once I built a stronger community again, social media use declined again.
I am very impressed with the teenagers' behavior at the independent school -- it is the type of school that I would have liked to have attended. It shows how important it is to actually check in every once in a while and observe what is happening at street level and not make all sort of theoretical assumptions about cell phone abuse etc.. It also illustrates to me how when you get the top line aspects of the learning environment correct, everything naturally works out from there.
Perhaps foremost amongst such aspects is the entire learning framework of these students. Independent study based upon pursuing personal passions is a very good starting point. Notably almost all of the students when just randomly questioned about how they were using their cell phones were actually engaged in something that they were passionate about and were in fact focused on their learning; even while seemingly just scrolling. Channeling positive energy of young people to what they are passionate about is critically important to create a positive social atmosphere.
However, this positivity completely contrasts with the standardized educational model. In typical bricks and mortar public schools, children will be constantly dragged through educational experiences that they have little or no interest in. For many this can continue to be true through college and even when they are employed. In fact after COVID in some workplaces 100% voted to continue to work remotely as they felt that none of the social interactions they had with co-workers or others was in any way positive for them. Their work place brought them ZERO joy? When public school students are questioned, roughly 70% will reply that they have little if any interest in their schooling. Ironically, when they then do engage with something on their phones that they are passionate about they risk having their phones seized. Confiscating cell phones seems to me to be a hopelessly misguided short term fix. Instead of addressing the lack of engagement in their education, schools are simply choosing to paper over the problem by forcing compliance. Is this strategy effective the minute the school day is over or when the students graduate?
From the positive energy generated by the independent school approach to self-directed learning we then see how these students then can imagine their peers as potential assets in pursuing their own interests. One might even suspect a type of economy could emerge in which students good in math might help out others good in social studies in exchange for reciprocity. These exchanges then could lead to sustainable and mutually beneficial social interactions. One can also observe the casual and non-punitive interactions of the staff member with the students in the quoted blog. In a public school environment such coffee talk type interaction is unheard of.
Such social motivations are all too often absent in public schools. With highly standardized curriculum and deeply unmotivated students there is then a culture of social disengagement that is so pervasive and entrenched that there is no obvious way to reverse the institutional dysfunction. Almost all that is left is to patch up problems (by banning cell phones etc.) while never addressing the deep structural flaws.
This short vignette of the independent learning school reveals a surprising amount about the pathology of our prescribed modern school/work system and the relatively intuitive ways in which the problems could be addressed when innovation is allowed.
Knowing what to look for in a school environment as a prospective student is critically important. One additional observation that I find worthy of note is that when asked all of the students were pursuing a DIFFERENT passion in the independent school. That is notable because in a traditional mass school environment the social hierarchy is established through a highly limited number of subjects many of which typical students have no interest and then the students compete with one another for status. This leaves only one champion at the top of the pyramid. Yet, in the independent school all of the students can achieve their own personal success in orthogonal dimensions. This means that helping your peers in the independent school does not in some way lower your status as it would in the bleakly Darwinian dystopia of a traditional school.
These resonates with what I have seen at my son’s Sudbury school here in Illinois. Adults love talking about kids being “zombies” on their phones, but this isn’t what I see. The children seem to more intuitively engage with tech in healthy ways than adults who weren’t raised with it.
I feel that Ben Draper's observations are important (together with Peter's comments). If it is true that young people who have the time and space to find their way with their peers make better and more limited use of smart phones that is yet another support for my 20% campaign in England (https://www.humanscaleeducation.com/post/20-time-for-schools-a-modest-proposal-from-derry-hannam#:~:text=The%2020%25%20proposal,and%20questions%20of%20the%20students.) It is suggested in the piece that students tend to use their phones more before their friends arrive at the Macomber Centre - has Ben found this to be the case? My head is buzzing with questions for further research. Thanks from across the pond.
The observations here echo what I've observed in my unschooled 22 year old. She's better at self-regulating social media use than her Boomer grandparents are or her GenX mother is! She's very savvy about the addictive nature of some of the platforms and won't use ones she finds unethical. They are not all created equal!
I do think social media is harmful when it becomes that "last resort" for contact and community, instead of a supplement to connection. I think that's the difference between "neutral" and "harmful."
I think it's also important to note, too, that not all social media works the same. A tight knit online group on a small special interest forum may develop into real-life friends; conversely, open short form posting driven by algorithms may stoke rage or unhealthy appearance comparisons.
It's cheaper to ban social media with legislation so that kids who access it are breaking the law than to improve the environment within schools, make schools more like the one described in this article. Australia is currently considering this. :-(
This post is pretty persuasive. I'm on board with all of its premises, but I still feel for the parents whose kids attend traditional schools for one reason or another. They must feel pretty trapped and scared.
I'm sceptical. I see how addictive these devices are and even adults can't regulate their use, so i'd be surprised if kids could. I consider myself pretty happy with a fulfilled life, and yet, i get sucked in (not social media but information i'm interested in, mostly history and geopolitics) to a point where i spend countless hours daily in mediated reality instead of in real life. So even if you're educating yourself online, it still cuts you off from real life social interactions, which i consider a bad thing.
I think it's a mistake to conflate getting sucked into social media with getting sucked into information you're interested in. If you're a professor of history and geopolitics then getting sucked into that sort of information sounds like a happy and fulfilling use of time. I'm a vaccine scientist and I reflect almost daily on what a privilege it is to be able to indulge my interests in molecular biology, politics, ethics, history, evolution, food, etc. I'm incredibly lucky to be in a situation where getting sucked into that stuff is my actual day job.
Here's a case study: a recent commentary in Science got me interested in a scientist named Paul Berg. Although popular culture has long painted Berg as the man who sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of recombinant DNA technology, I've been excited to learn the forgotten history of how he also tried to sound the alarm about the dangers of letting political stooges and public hysteria dictate which experiments scientists can or cannot do. To the point at hand, here's an excerpt of the autobiography Berg submitted for his 1980 Nobel:
"An inspiring high school 'teacher,' Sophie Wolfe, whose job was to supervise the stockroom that supplied the classes in chemistry, physics and biology, nurtured that ambition. Her love of young people and interest in science led her to start an after school program of science clubs. Rather than answering questions we asked, she encouraged us to seek solutions for ourselves, which most often turned into mini research projects. Sometimes that involved experiments in the small lab she kept but sometimes it meant going to the library to find the answers. The satisfaction derived from solving a problem with an experiment was a very heady experience, almost addicting."
It doesn't make any sense to view intellectual "addiction" as a bad thing. It's among the best things modern humans have the privilege of exploring.
There's an interesting research question here. I'm happily child-free, but observations of my nieces and nephews makes me wonder whether self-directed education may only be vitally important for a minority of children. For the sake of argument, let's say a third of humans are born with minds that flourish under self-direction. I'm familiar with the biographies of quite a few Nobel laureates and my impression is that pretty much all of them emphasize the importance of self-directed learning. I bet there could be ways to apply statistics to the question of whether the type of mind that goes on to do amazing science disproportionately requires self-directed learning in childhood.
To put it in darker terms, my sense is that No Child Left Behind may be guaranteeing that all the Paul Berg minds are getting left behind - because they can't fully thrive under top-down pedagogic dictation.
I guess it is easy to be skeptical. Perhaps, what is missing from your recount is the people around you that would provide the interest to interact. Interesting that when I travelled back to Romania this summer for a month of holiday I saw very few young people on phones in open spaces like outdoor cafes and parks. I saw many gathered to chat with one another. I think cultural conditions have an influence. I personally feel that Romania has smaller cities and lots of green places, people love the outdoors. I also have an interesting conversation recently with one of the educators in my team (I run two outdoor schools in Brunei) . This person nis American married locally. This conversation brook place on our teacher.s day celebration when my husband and I invited all educators out for hightea. He,is a casual staff and joins us in one of the schools once a week. He mentioned in us rarely people join work events. Perhaps that was his experience. He would add that people don't talk about their life with others in work and that they don't know about one another to the extent that we kind of did. I remember me saying.. I think some people (from his context) would feel very lonely.
I can’t stand the straw man here either. These children are demonstrating regulation. No one is advocating for children to use tech to the point of dysregulation. I’m objecting to your view which I see as demonstrating ableism (anti-tech) and childism (bias for adults).
You said you’re skeptical children can regulate their own use because adults can’t. I said apply the same logic to something else with addictive qualities. The reality is there is a huge bias against tech and your response is exemplifying that perspective
Sorry i'm not as optimistic as you. I recognize my own problems with this, which makes me sceptical. So you're also against parents limiting their children's cellphone usage?
I've thought about this a lot too. Resisting temptation is the broader theme here. What does it truly take to resist temptation? Part of it is getting genuine needs met in healthy ways, but of course "healthy" is pretty subjective. Another part of it is self-awareness. You aren't very self-aware when you are "sucked in".
Thanks for sharing this article. These are important and helpful perspectives.
A teen that I mentored described her experience on her phone as changing over time that it took her to settle into homeschooling, and heal from her school experience: At first she was "mindlessly scrolling". She gradually realized that she was starting to take in some of what she was seeing. Then she started actually thinking about what she was seeing. Eventually, she began using her phone in a more intentional way, similar to that described by the Macomber Center's teens.
She noted that to an outside observer, all stages of that process looked identical.
She was so grateful that her parents had given her the space to move through those stages...it was an important part of her journey.
Being a Professor of Electrical Engineering, I guess I had early access to the Internet when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s. We didn't have smart phones but would spend hours on internet Relay Chat groups. But I don't think I or others were addicted (maybe a few were). I think the smart phone is simply the tool of the moment. 20 or 30 years later it will be something else (humanoid robots perhaps?). So I think as a tool it can be used and misused. I don't have any experimental data to back this up, but my opinion is like any technology, there will basically be a Bell curve. The majority use it in a fairly good way and are not addicted. Some don't use it at all. And some are actually really addicted and just wasting time. But for the majority it is just the useful tool of our era.
This lines up with what I've experienced with my homeschooled students and my own children. A couple of examples:
My autistic son was on his computer a lot when he was in school, playing video games. We were concerned and tried to get him outside and involved in hobbies. He had a terrible experience in school and eventually dropped out. After that, he almost completely lost interest in video games. He now (age 25) uses his computer to research and learn new things, and has gone back to reading books a lot.
My students are not fully self-directed, but their parents and I aim to follow their lead and interests while covering skills that would benefit them. When the topic of phones or social media comes up, they express relief at not having to cope with social media. Most have iPads for schoolwork (with parental restrictions on apps and sites), and can do video calls with friends and relatives who live far away. They are far too busy with classes they take for enjoyment, anyway.
I completely agree that public school students are using social media because they already feel hopeless, not the other way around. Banning is an authoritarian move that can only make things worse. We need to do what Ben did and talk to the kids. If they were offered a better way to learn and connect, I'm sure they would choose it.
Ahh I like this story, but I see the public school kids, who predominate the American society and it makes me somber. I do ultimately know I can only control what's within my realm. But, one thing I notice, everything that was done on smart phones could've been done on a computer at a set time later. And you guys could've been involved in conversation?
It's such a small sample size and personal experience that could skew what is going on for the majority. I plan on homeschooling, but I do believe smartphones and social media have had an overall net negative on society.
I have no social media at this time and would love to get a dumb phone. The allure of the screen and its constant dopamine hits are just too great for most. The model this school uses, should be wider spread since it seems to be helping and not everyone can home school.
My 13 year old daughter is an interesting case. She generally dislikes the internet, as she sees that it takes other people away from her. She’s very social and often wants to be with others. She doesn’t like me using Substack. She has almost no interest in texting with her friends. She doesn’t have a smart phone and doesn’t seem interested in having one. She has access to a Mac with internet and Messenger, but rarely uses it. Most often she wants to be playing with other people in person.
Recently she met a girl in our new neighborhood that sits in her room for very long periods using TikTok. She was shocked to learn that this girl had such little interest in talking and playing in person.
My daughter attended Montessori Academy in Campbell, CA for preschool, then a private school (Old Orchard School in Campbell, CA) for K1, K2 and 1st, then Challenger School in Silicon Valley and Idaho for another 1st and through 6th. She skipped 7th grade, and is now at Thales Academy for 8th grade. She has never attended public school, nor anything very self-directed, except Montessori. The common theme in all of her schools might be “no cell phones allowed” combined with interesting and engaging class environments. Though not self-directed environments, still very engaging.
Thales is less engaging than her previous schools, but I would guess the learning environment is better than most traditional public schools.
I think most traditional public schools probably have a very different smart phone culture than the private schools my daughter has attended as there have been almost no phones at her schools. I don’t claim to understand what the public school phone culture is, but I can imagine what it’s like based on my 12 years in public schools. I wouldn’t like it. Can we say that too many kids at public schools are not engaged in learning? If they’re not engaged in learning, then the next best thing is to be engaged in the social aspects of school. I would say there are many problems in traditional public schools and it’s not clear whether phones are a cause or whether they offer respite, or what’s going on with them. If the school is doing a poor job engaging children to begin with then I’m not sure whether taking away the phones improves their situation.
For students not engaged in learning at school, and not engaged in the social aspects of school, are they better off engaging online or in person in their community? I think it really depends on their family situation. They have access to all kinds of horrible things online. Seems like it could be very bad for some of these kids to be unsupervised online, but what to do about?
You can only control yourself and your immediate family to answer your last question. You've clearly taken the lead and it has born fruit. I know when I was in public school, phone usage was banned and I had a pleasant time there, learning and socializing. Small school only 400~ students in rural southern USA. Times probably have changed.
We plan to homeschool, but my children are only toddlers. I, often notice people say I'm too strict with my toddler only allowed 1ish hours of tv a day. He gets addicted to things very quickly. So for him, no iPads or smartphones until never. And I plan on getting rid of them for myself, so he sees I'm not a hypocrite. I've slowly been going low tech and no social media because I can't regulate well. But, without the options of smart phones and social media, I regulate pretty well.
Back when I was a regular subway commuter I came to a similar realization that (being old enough to remember) 'back in the day' all of us commuters read a newspaper or a book or a magazine during our commutes - and often these were awkward to handle in the crush. As the technology improved, it became possible to do all of these things on your phone and it was much easier to handle in the crowd - of course there were those who also put in ear buds (first with wires and later without) and listen to their music, the news, a podcast of interest. The point was that I had to modify my expectations and actually look to see what was going on after checking my assumptions 'at the door'
This anecdote reminds me of the "rat park" studies on addiction.
From The Psychiatry Times:
"Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles-one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine-the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed...
But [researchers] wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs."
I think this relates the most to the arguments above. I am a college student that moved across the country to start college and anecdotally this lines up with my experience. In high school, I had a rich social life with sports and community and didn't go on social media much at all even though I had it and enjoyed using it for pursuing niche interests or entertainment occasionally. Once I got to college and had to rebuild my social life from scratch, i was sucked into social media a lot more and found it hard to be alone without it. Then, once I built a stronger community again, social media use declined again.
Yes! Bored and lonely rats are dope fiends. There is no reason to belive people are any different. More in this same vein https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731630-500-the-love-drug-that-could-draw-people-away-from-any-addiction/
I am very impressed with the teenagers' behavior at the independent school -- it is the type of school that I would have liked to have attended. It shows how important it is to actually check in every once in a while and observe what is happening at street level and not make all sort of theoretical assumptions about cell phone abuse etc.. It also illustrates to me how when you get the top line aspects of the learning environment correct, everything naturally works out from there.
Perhaps foremost amongst such aspects is the entire learning framework of these students. Independent study based upon pursuing personal passions is a very good starting point. Notably almost all of the students when just randomly questioned about how they were using their cell phones were actually engaged in something that they were passionate about and were in fact focused on their learning; even while seemingly just scrolling. Channeling positive energy of young people to what they are passionate about is critically important to create a positive social atmosphere.
However, this positivity completely contrasts with the standardized educational model. In typical bricks and mortar public schools, children will be constantly dragged through educational experiences that they have little or no interest in. For many this can continue to be true through college and even when they are employed. In fact after COVID in some workplaces 100% voted to continue to work remotely as they felt that none of the social interactions they had with co-workers or others was in any way positive for them. Their work place brought them ZERO joy? When public school students are questioned, roughly 70% will reply that they have little if any interest in their schooling. Ironically, when they then do engage with something on their phones that they are passionate about they risk having their phones seized. Confiscating cell phones seems to me to be a hopelessly misguided short term fix. Instead of addressing the lack of engagement in their education, schools are simply choosing to paper over the problem by forcing compliance. Is this strategy effective the minute the school day is over or when the students graduate?
From the positive energy generated by the independent school approach to self-directed learning we then see how these students then can imagine their peers as potential assets in pursuing their own interests. One might even suspect a type of economy could emerge in which students good in math might help out others good in social studies in exchange for reciprocity. These exchanges then could lead to sustainable and mutually beneficial social interactions. One can also observe the casual and non-punitive interactions of the staff member with the students in the quoted blog. In a public school environment such coffee talk type interaction is unheard of.
Such social motivations are all too often absent in public schools. With highly standardized curriculum and deeply unmotivated students there is then a culture of social disengagement that is so pervasive and entrenched that there is no obvious way to reverse the institutional dysfunction. Almost all that is left is to patch up problems (by banning cell phones etc.) while never addressing the deep structural flaws.
This short vignette of the independent learning school reveals a surprising amount about the pathology of our prescribed modern school/work system and the relatively intuitive ways in which the problems could be addressed when innovation is allowed.
Knowing what to look for in a school environment as a prospective student is critically important. One additional observation that I find worthy of note is that when asked all of the students were pursuing a DIFFERENT passion in the independent school. That is notable because in a traditional mass school environment the social hierarchy is established through a highly limited number of subjects many of which typical students have no interest and then the students compete with one another for status. This leaves only one champion at the top of the pyramid. Yet, in the independent school all of the students can achieve their own personal success in orthogonal dimensions. This means that helping your peers in the independent school does not in some way lower your status as it would in the bleakly Darwinian dystopia of a traditional school.
These resonates with what I have seen at my son’s Sudbury school here in Illinois. Adults love talking about kids being “zombies” on their phones, but this isn’t what I see. The children seem to more intuitively engage with tech in healthy ways than adults who weren’t raised with it.
I feel that Ben Draper's observations are important (together with Peter's comments). If it is true that young people who have the time and space to find their way with their peers make better and more limited use of smart phones that is yet another support for my 20% campaign in England (https://www.humanscaleeducation.com/post/20-time-for-schools-a-modest-proposal-from-derry-hannam#:~:text=The%2020%25%20proposal,and%20questions%20of%20the%20students.) It is suggested in the piece that students tend to use their phones more before their friends arrive at the Macomber Centre - has Ben found this to be the case? My head is buzzing with questions for further research. Thanks from across the pond.
The observations here echo what I've observed in my unschooled 22 year old. She's better at self-regulating social media use than her Boomer grandparents are or her GenX mother is! She's very savvy about the addictive nature of some of the platforms and won't use ones she finds unethical. They are not all created equal!
I do think social media is harmful when it becomes that "last resort" for contact and community, instead of a supplement to connection. I think that's the difference between "neutral" and "harmful."
I think it's also important to note, too, that not all social media works the same. A tight knit online group on a small special interest forum may develop into real-life friends; conversely, open short form posting driven by algorithms may stoke rage or unhealthy appearance comparisons.
It's cheaper to ban social media with legislation so that kids who access it are breaking the law than to improve the environment within schools, make schools more like the one described in this article. Australia is currently considering this. :-(
This post is pretty persuasive. I'm on board with all of its premises, but I still feel for the parents whose kids attend traditional schools for one reason or another. They must feel pretty trapped and scared.
Yes, and parents must start prioritizing their children’s humanity over their own fears. Enough is enough
I'm sceptical. I see how addictive these devices are and even adults can't regulate their use, so i'd be surprised if kids could. I consider myself pretty happy with a fulfilled life, and yet, i get sucked in (not social media but information i'm interested in, mostly history and geopolitics) to a point where i spend countless hours daily in mediated reality instead of in real life. So even if you're educating yourself online, it still cuts you off from real life social interactions, which i consider a bad thing.
I think it's a mistake to conflate getting sucked into social media with getting sucked into information you're interested in. If you're a professor of history and geopolitics then getting sucked into that sort of information sounds like a happy and fulfilling use of time. I'm a vaccine scientist and I reflect almost daily on what a privilege it is to be able to indulge my interests in molecular biology, politics, ethics, history, evolution, food, etc. I'm incredibly lucky to be in a situation where getting sucked into that stuff is my actual day job.
Here's a case study: a recent commentary in Science got me interested in a scientist named Paul Berg. Although popular culture has long painted Berg as the man who sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of recombinant DNA technology, I've been excited to learn the forgotten history of how he also tried to sound the alarm about the dangers of letting political stooges and public hysteria dictate which experiments scientists can or cannot do. To the point at hand, here's an excerpt of the autobiography Berg submitted for his 1980 Nobel:
"An inspiring high school 'teacher,' Sophie Wolfe, whose job was to supervise the stockroom that supplied the classes in chemistry, physics and biology, nurtured that ambition. Her love of young people and interest in science led her to start an after school program of science clubs. Rather than answering questions we asked, she encouraged us to seek solutions for ourselves, which most often turned into mini research projects. Sometimes that involved experiments in the small lab she kept but sometimes it meant going to the library to find the answers. The satisfaction derived from solving a problem with an experiment was a very heady experience, almost addicting."
It doesn't make any sense to view intellectual "addiction" as a bad thing. It's among the best things modern humans have the privilege of exploring.
There's an interesting research question here. I'm happily child-free, but observations of my nieces and nephews makes me wonder whether self-directed education may only be vitally important for a minority of children. For the sake of argument, let's say a third of humans are born with minds that flourish under self-direction. I'm familiar with the biographies of quite a few Nobel laureates and my impression is that pretty much all of them emphasize the importance of self-directed learning. I bet there could be ways to apply statistics to the question of whether the type of mind that goes on to do amazing science disproportionately requires self-directed learning in childhood.
To put it in darker terms, my sense is that No Child Left Behind may be guaranteeing that all the Paul Berg minds are getting left behind - because they can't fully thrive under top-down pedagogic dictation.
I guess it is easy to be skeptical. Perhaps, what is missing from your recount is the people around you that would provide the interest to interact. Interesting that when I travelled back to Romania this summer for a month of holiday I saw very few young people on phones in open spaces like outdoor cafes and parks. I saw many gathered to chat with one another. I think cultural conditions have an influence. I personally feel that Romania has smaller cities and lots of green places, people love the outdoors. I also have an interesting conversation recently with one of the educators in my team (I run two outdoor schools in Brunei) . This person nis American married locally. This conversation brook place on our teacher.s day celebration when my husband and I invited all educators out for hightea. He,is a casual staff and joins us in one of the schools once a week. He mentioned in us rarely people join work events. Perhaps that was his experience. He would add that people don't talk about their life with others in work and that they don't know about one another to the extent that we kind of did. I remember me saying.. I think some people (from his context) would feel very lonely.
Ok so now do sugar. It’s addictive, some say as addictive as cocaine. Why do we let kids have sugar knowing adults can’t regulate their use?
I didn't say forbid. Limiting sugar is probably also a wise idea ;)
I can’t stand the straw man here either. These children are demonstrating regulation. No one is advocating for children to use tech to the point of dysregulation. I’m objecting to your view which I see as demonstrating ableism (anti-tech) and childism (bias for adults).
You said you’re skeptical children can regulate their own use because adults can’t. I said apply the same logic to something else with addictive qualities. The reality is there is a huge bias against tech and your response is exemplifying that perspective
Sorry i'm not as optimistic as you. I recognize my own problems with this, which makes me sceptical. So you're also against parents limiting their children's cellphone usage?
I’m against parents controlling their kids. Im for anyone setting limits on themselves as they see necessary for their health and well being.
Starting what age?
I've thought about this a lot too. Resisting temptation is the broader theme here. What does it truly take to resist temptation? Part of it is getting genuine needs met in healthy ways, but of course "healthy" is pretty subjective. Another part of it is self-awareness. You aren't very self-aware when you are "sucked in".
Thanks for sharing this article. These are important and helpful perspectives.
A teen that I mentored described her experience on her phone as changing over time that it took her to settle into homeschooling, and heal from her school experience: At first she was "mindlessly scrolling". She gradually realized that she was starting to take in some of what she was seeing. Then she started actually thinking about what she was seeing. Eventually, she began using her phone in a more intentional way, similar to that described by the Macomber Center's teens.
She noted that to an outside observer, all stages of that process looked identical.
She was so grateful that her parents had given her the space to move through those stages...it was an important part of her journey.
Delusional. You think kids are going to tell you the truth in every instance. Watching a horse or martial arts performance is not academic. Delusional
Being a Professor of Electrical Engineering, I guess I had early access to the Internet when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s. We didn't have smart phones but would spend hours on internet Relay Chat groups. But I don't think I or others were addicted (maybe a few were). I think the smart phone is simply the tool of the moment. 20 or 30 years later it will be something else (humanoid robots perhaps?). So I think as a tool it can be used and misused. I don't have any experimental data to back this up, but my opinion is like any technology, there will basically be a Bell curve. The majority use it in a fairly good way and are not addicted. Some don't use it at all. And some are actually really addicted and just wasting time. But for the majority it is just the useful tool of our era.
This lines up with what I've experienced with my homeschooled students and my own children. A couple of examples:
My autistic son was on his computer a lot when he was in school, playing video games. We were concerned and tried to get him outside and involved in hobbies. He had a terrible experience in school and eventually dropped out. After that, he almost completely lost interest in video games. He now (age 25) uses his computer to research and learn new things, and has gone back to reading books a lot.
My students are not fully self-directed, but their parents and I aim to follow their lead and interests while covering skills that would benefit them. When the topic of phones or social media comes up, they express relief at not having to cope with social media. Most have iPads for schoolwork (with parental restrictions on apps and sites), and can do video calls with friends and relatives who live far away. They are far too busy with classes they take for enjoyment, anyway.
I completely agree that public school students are using social media because they already feel hopeless, not the other way around. Banning is an authoritarian move that can only make things worse. We need to do what Ben did and talk to the kids. If they were offered a better way to learn and connect, I'm sure they would choose it.
Ahh I like this story, but I see the public school kids, who predominate the American society and it makes me somber. I do ultimately know I can only control what's within my realm. But, one thing I notice, everything that was done on smart phones could've been done on a computer at a set time later. And you guys could've been involved in conversation?
It's such a small sample size and personal experience that could skew what is going on for the majority. I plan on homeschooling, but I do believe smartphones and social media have had an overall net negative on society.
I have no social media at this time and would love to get a dumb phone. The allure of the screen and its constant dopamine hits are just too great for most. The model this school uses, should be wider spread since it seems to be helping and not everyone can home school.
My 13 year old daughter is an interesting case. She generally dislikes the internet, as she sees that it takes other people away from her. She’s very social and often wants to be with others. She doesn’t like me using Substack. She has almost no interest in texting with her friends. She doesn’t have a smart phone and doesn’t seem interested in having one. She has access to a Mac with internet and Messenger, but rarely uses it. Most often she wants to be playing with other people in person.
Recently she met a girl in our new neighborhood that sits in her room for very long periods using TikTok. She was shocked to learn that this girl had such little interest in talking and playing in person.
My daughter attended Montessori Academy in Campbell, CA for preschool, then a private school (Old Orchard School in Campbell, CA) for K1, K2 and 1st, then Challenger School in Silicon Valley and Idaho for another 1st and through 6th. She skipped 7th grade, and is now at Thales Academy for 8th grade. She has never attended public school, nor anything very self-directed, except Montessori. The common theme in all of her schools might be “no cell phones allowed” combined with interesting and engaging class environments. Though not self-directed environments, still very engaging.
Thales is less engaging than her previous schools, but I would guess the learning environment is better than most traditional public schools.
I think most traditional public schools probably have a very different smart phone culture than the private schools my daughter has attended as there have been almost no phones at her schools. I don’t claim to understand what the public school phone culture is, but I can imagine what it’s like based on my 12 years in public schools. I wouldn’t like it. Can we say that too many kids at public schools are not engaged in learning? If they’re not engaged in learning, then the next best thing is to be engaged in the social aspects of school. I would say there are many problems in traditional public schools and it’s not clear whether phones are a cause or whether they offer respite, or what’s going on with them. If the school is doing a poor job engaging children to begin with then I’m not sure whether taking away the phones improves their situation.
For students not engaged in learning at school, and not engaged in the social aspects of school, are they better off engaging online or in person in their community? I think it really depends on their family situation. They have access to all kinds of horrible things online. Seems like it could be very bad for some of these kids to be unsupervised online, but what to do about?
You can only control yourself and your immediate family to answer your last question. You've clearly taken the lead and it has born fruit. I know when I was in public school, phone usage was banned and I had a pleasant time there, learning and socializing. Small school only 400~ students in rural southern USA. Times probably have changed.
We plan to homeschool, but my children are only toddlers. I, often notice people say I'm too strict with my toddler only allowed 1ish hours of tv a day. He gets addicted to things very quickly. So for him, no iPads or smartphones until never. And I plan on getting rid of them for myself, so he sees I'm not a hypocrite. I've slowly been going low tech and no social media because I can't regulate well. But, without the options of smart phones and social media, I regulate pretty well.
Glad to hear the story of your daughter.
Back when I was a regular subway commuter I came to a similar realization that (being old enough to remember) 'back in the day' all of us commuters read a newspaper or a book or a magazine during our commutes - and often these were awkward to handle in the crush. As the technology improved, it became possible to do all of these things on your phone and it was much easier to handle in the crowd - of course there were those who also put in ear buds (first with wires and later without) and listen to their music, the news, a podcast of interest. The point was that I had to modify my expectations and actually look to see what was going on after checking my assumptions 'at the door'