Banning phones from classrooms not enough
Parents should take cue and restrict access at home, says Laurence Miall.
About 18 months ago, I found myself on a journalism assignment in a University of Alberta classroom. Many of the aspiring teachers gathered there were millennials and yet even they were in shock about the disruptive presence of smartphones they had witnessed during their field placements in schools. Fast forward to back-to-school season, and the Canadian policy landscape has changed. Alberta, Ontario, B.C. and Quebec have implemented bans or restrictions on smartphones.
As a parent and education writer, I am broadly supportive of the bans. Many researchers favour restrictions on phones. While there are justifiable concerns about enforcement, if those are properly addressed, the bans help remove a major distraction from learning. Yet one critical audience has been mostly missing from the conversation: parents. Those of us raising children should take the classroom phone ban as a cue to restrict access at home.
UNESCO has studied technology and its effect on children in classrooms. A report on the pandemic lockdowns concluded: “Technology-based solutions left a global majority of learners behind” and “education was diminished even when technology was available and worked as intended.” UNESCO has found that countries continue to invest in technology for classrooms with little evidence of positive effect. “Countries tend to describe progress in terms of the technology inputs they have purchased instead of the learning improvement these inputs have achieved,” write the authors of Technology in Education, a report from 2023.
There's even less evidence that technology, especially phones, are of any positive influence outside the classroom. If our children spend their school days phone-free only to be sucked back into screen time during the mornings, nights and weekends, we will be failing them.
As Jonathan Haidt writes in his book, The Anxious Generation, phones and their applications have been detrimental to the experience of growing up. “By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids' eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, (tech) companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale,” he writes.
In October 2023, a group of 30 American states filed lawsuits alleging that more than one million children under the age of 13 were using platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, contrary to the rules of those very same platforms. One way to keep underage children off the apps would be to involve parents in the age verification process. What's more, there is no reason social media and phones shouldn't be restricted right up to the age of majority, as we do for driving, cigarettes and any number of other potentially dangerous activities.
If children are not endlessly poking at their phone screens and uploading selfies to social media, what, then, should they be doing? The answer has been around since time immemorial: playing outdoors and socializing in person.
A 2024 report from Participaction recommends that “outdoor and nature-based play opportunities should be promoted and supported.” This is for a variety of reasons, including the known association between increased physical activity and positive mental health outcomes.
A peer-reviewed study from the National Institutes of Health found “excessive screen usage has detrimental effects on social and emotional growth, including a rise in the likelihood of obesity, sleep disorders, and mental health conditions including depression and anxiety.” They even found language acquisition is impaired.
My wife and I plan on never giving either of our daughters a smartphone. They can have “dumb” phones when they're ready. We will also restrict access to social media until they are at least 16. But no parent can do this alone. We need to join the growing global movement, like parents in Barcelona, who started the group Adolescence Free of Mobile Phones, which has spread across Europe with 10,000 members.
It's time to embrace the growing power of parents to confront and repair the damage the tech tycoons have wrought and bring back childhood.