Santa’s got me thinking: What is it that we most want the kids in our own and our friends’ families to have this year? Recent news reports suggest that it’s not the latest smartphone. It’s something not easily found at the mall or online: peace of mind.
A few weeks ago, we reported that a cyberattack on the Provincetown Schools had caused an 11-day shutdown of the system’s network. During that time, school administrators, teachers, and students had no access to the internet at school. I was struck by one line in William von Herff’s story about the shutdown: School Supt. Gerry Goyette told him that, while the network was down, “it was nice to see kids without laptops and computers.”
I’m not entirely sure what Goyette meant, but I suspect it has to do with what we have learned about the consequences of teenagers looking at screens for an average of nine hours a day. Computers and the internet can be good tools for learning, so they might seem inescapable in schools. But that’s true partly because they’re designed to be inescapable period.
Goyette’s remark reminded me of my old friend Susan Linn, a psychologist who co-founded the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay) 25 years ago. That group used to give awards every Christmas, called the TOADYs, for the worst children’s toys of the year — toys that promoted violence and corporate branding and made bogus claims of educational value. One year the prize in that category went to Disney’s worthless Baby Einstein videos, which the campaign challenged in a legal action that forced Disney to offer refunds to buyers who had fallen for that nonsense.
Linn’s latest article, in the December 2024 issue of the American Prospect, reports a promising development: an upswing in the number of schools that ban or strictly limit students’ use of cell phones. This trend, she writes, promises to “provide vital relief for millions of kids in thrall to potentially destructive digital distractions, designed by Silicon Valley’s smartest engineers to be as addictive as possible.”
Linn attributes the movement partly to Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation and its persuasive evidence linking digital media use by adolescents to loneliness, depression, and suicide. This week’s news of “vicious school brawls fueled by student cell phones” made Haidt’s thesis sound naïve.
According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of U.S. high school teachers say cell phones are a major problem in their classrooms. Linn’s Prospect article documents research findings that banning phones in school significantly improves learning. And there’s evidence it’s a relief to students, too.
I looked up the policies posted by Nauset Regional Schools and was encouraged to see that at the high school, students are not allowed to use cell phones except at lunch. At the middle school, phones must be kept in lockers during school hours. This inspires a New Year’s wish: I hope our reporters can learn more about how that’s working and what it’s like for students and teachers. Talking face to face, screen-free, might be the most beautiful gift there is right now.
