Submitted by Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony, Ed.D, Republican member of the Greenwich Board of Education
Earlier this month, Greenwich Public Schools put forth new regulations around student cell phone use, essentially attempting to ban their use by students during the school day. The Board of Education has yet to have a conversation about the regulations. As one member, I do not speak for the board. I look forward to a very public community conversation around these changes this fall.
Also speaking just for me, I can say I am very concerned about the use of cell phones in schools and supportive of measures to curtail them.
This summer school districts from New York City to Los Angeles have enacted total bans on cell phones in schools. Indeed, the CT State Board of Education just released guidance designed to, in Gov. Lamont’s words, “get the cell phones out of classrooms.”
Other states have gone farther.
Gov. Rick Desantis signed legislation last year banning all cell phones in Florida classrooms. Similar laws have passed in Ohio and Indiana, with more being proposed.
This jolt of momentum against teen cell phone use is in large measure due to the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s highly-disturbing recent book, “The Anxious Generation”.
In the book, Haidt makes the compelling argument that the last fifteen years have witnessed a great “rewiring of childhood”. His central thesis is that over-protection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world has led to horrific social-emotional challenges for today’s teens – who Haidt calls the “Anxious Generation”.
Haight shares the concerning national statistics around teen depression and anxiety, which began spiking shortly after the introduction of the iPhone in 2008. Those numbers have grown such that we now find ourselves in a full-blown teen mental health crisis. Case in point, the percentage of girls reporting at least one depressive episode has increased by 145%; it is now one in four teenage girls. Suicide and self harm-rates have similarly shy-rocketed.
What’s the connection between these numbers and teen cell phone use? As part of the “great re-wiring”, kids have shifted from play-based childhoods to phone-based ones. Before smartphones, social media existed but was not omnipresent and always active. Kids needed to sit down at a computer to use it. Yet in a phone-based childhood, kids’ social media presence can be a constant force.
This has led to social and sleep deprivation and attention fragmentation. Today’s youth report spending far fewer hours each week interacting with friends in the real world, sleeping, or doing other non-screen-based activities. In fact, teens nationally report spending 120 less minutes a day interacting in person with their friends than they did in 2003. Social media can be an experience blocker–reducing interest in all non-screen based interactions.
Social media is also intentionally designed to be addictive. The leaked “Facebook Files”–internal documents about the design of Facebook and Instagram — discuss in Orwellian detail how the company designed its products using brain science to hook teens and pre-teens. The semi-regular dopamine hit users get when a like is reciprocated is not happenstance, but the product of deep internal research on tween brain mechanics.
So concerning is the addictive nature of social media in teens that last year the US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, called for a warning label on social media platforms, similar to what we see on cigarette cartons. “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address”.
Lest we think we in town are immune to these national trends, the local statistics are actually worse. In last fall’s Greenwich Together survey of town youth 31% of girls in grades 7-12 self-reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness within the past year. That is six points higher than Haidt’s most recent national numbers. 25% of Greenwich teens reported feeling “frequently” anxious over the past month – the national figure is 18%.
In Greenwich, 46% of 7th and 8th graders and 53% of high school students self-report being on social media two to three hours every school day (read that again: every school day –not days off). 10% report being on more than five hours a day.
As I said at the outset, this is the beginning of a community conversation. It is logical that cell phone rules must look different across elementary, middle, and high school. There are legitimate questions about how some students may use them for academic purposes.
Yet in my own work with teens, the sight of four teenagers sitting together at a table in silence staring at their phones is all too common. This is not how my friends interacted in high school. Something feels wrong. That might be why 83% of teachers nationwide are supportive of school-wide bans.
This is why Haidt urges all schools to go completely phone free. He argues that rules telling students to simply keep them away during class are all but useless:
Writes Haidt, “Students’ phones are loaded with apps designed to catch the attention of young people, pinging them with notifications calling them out of class and into their virtual worlds. That’s what is most disruptive about learning and relationships. Any school whose leaders say they care about fostering belonging, community, or mental health, but that hasn’t gone phone-free, is standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.”
Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony, Ed.D, is a Republican member of the Greenwich Board of Education.