Let’s talk smartphones and social media solutions!
Welcome to our book study on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt! In part 1, I wrote about the harmful effects of smartphones, technology, and social media on today’s adolescence. Today I will be summarizing recommendations that the author outlines in the books for what we can do as parents, teachers, and schools to combat this technology addiction.
What Schools and Teachers Can Do
1. Schools Must Go Phone-Free
Remember that study from part 1 that asked people to perform various cognitive tasks with their phones 1) visible 2) in their backpack or 3) in a different room? This study showed that people performed better when their phone was out of the room compared to when their phone was visible. This study was put to the test when Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado implemented a phone-free policy. This county had one of the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado when this policy took effect. “The school’s academic performance improved, and after a few years it attained Colorado’s highest performance rating.”
I keep thinking about my time in the classroom – how on earth was I supposed to compete with a device that allows my students to text friends, scroll social media, and play games? Thankfully, the schools I worked at had a strict phone-free policy, but I sympathize with teachers who have to fight this battle daily.
(Note: The author stresses the importance that the phone must be put away for the entire school day to be effective. If only classrooms are phone-free, students are encouraged to hide their phone and increase their use during passing periods and lunch.)
Classroom Technology Effects
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization issued a report in 2023 (you can read the entire report here) concluding that digital technologies are having detrimental effects on education around the world. “The report acknowledged benefits of the internet for online education and educating some hard-to-reach populations, but noted that there is surprisingly little evidence that digital technologies enhance learning in a typical classroom.”
In this interview, the author, Jonathan Haidt, shared that he is currently studying educational technology – specifically how much of this technology is gamified. While these games increase engagement due to the little rewards and quick dopamine, this actually comes at a cost! “When you gamify a quarter of the kid’s day… the brain is going to react by downregulating dopamine neurons, so they are less sensitive to dopamine.” Now when students aren’t using the technology, they are now at a dopamine deficit – everything is boring and unpleasant.
While All Access does have tech components (digital activities, student video library, and Google Forms alternative options for quizzes and tests), the paper-based instruction and collaborative activities are the core of our math curriculum. In fact, the technology aspects of our curriculum are entirely supplemental. And as a teacher, I loved gamifying my students’ learning experience to increase engagement – I just did it tech-free. Check out this post to learn more!
2. More Unstructured Play Time
“Our students are happier, kinder, have fewer behavioral problems, have made more friends, feel more in control of their day and their life in general, and in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals to no bullying behaviors and no office referrals.” Wouldn’t you love to be saying this about your students and your school? This is a quote from Kevin Stinehart, a 4th grade teacher at an elementary school in South Carolina. He noticed how students lacked perseverance, resilience and would frequently fight. After attending a conference on free play, he made 3 changes:
- Longer recess
- Opening the school playground before school for 30 minutes to allow students who wanted extra time to play
- Offering a play club – essentially an after-school, free, play club where students are encouraged to play with complete autonomy. Teachers don’t organize games or provide curriculum. The kids just play tech-free.
Kevin says that “unstructured free play addresses – head on – making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community – all while teaching them life’s most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.”
What Parents Can Do Now
While the author has recommendations for younger and older children, I am going to focus on his recommendations for parents’ of middle school students.
1. More (and Better) Experience in the Real World
- Allow your kids out of your sight without having a way to reach you. “This kind of practice will help you feel more prepared to give them more independence and to hold off on giving them a phone because you’ll have seen for yourself that they can do fine without.”
- Encourage walking to school in a group – If your school is too far, consider “drive to five.” You choose a meeting place about 5 minutes away from school for parents to drop off and kids to meet up to walk the rest of the way to school.
- Free play after school – No organized activities, just kids playing with their friends.
- Go camping and/or send your kid to camp with no devices
- Form child-friendly neighborhoods.
2. Less (and Better) Experience on Screens
The average 8-12 year old spends 4-6 hours on recreational screen activities when 2 hours is the recommendation. However, Jonathan Haidt reminds us that it is less about the number of hours on screens and more about what kids are missing out on when they are on screens. Here are his recommendations:
- Learn how to use parental controls and content filters. Tech companies will do everything in their power to entice a child to stay on their app, so use time limits and parental controls.
- Focus more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours. Remember how in part 1, we talked about how smartphones could cause social and sleep deprivation?
- Provide clear structure to the day and the week. Examples include phone-free shared meals or Friday family movie nights.
- Look for signs of addiction or problematic use.
- Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16.
- Talk with your kid about the risks.
The internet is here to stay, and children will eventually be online in some capacity. The goal is to extend childhood and allow for the maximum amount of time for your kid’s brain to develop self-control and less fragmented attention.
For the purpose of today’s blog post, I decided to focus on what teachers and parents can do, but Haidt spends an entire chapter outlining the steps necessary for technology companies and the government to protect children. I highly recommend reading the book to learn more. Have you read the book or listened to the interview? What are your thoughts on The Anxious Generation? What smartphones and social media solutions do you recommend?
