There is an ongoing discussion in Finland with legislation being worked out, to limit the usage of smartphones during school times. While I am not a fan of governments intervening in decisions that parents should be making, in this regard, most parents aren't making decisions that are in the best interest of their children, or for other children in the classes that their kids attend.
The school environment has become quite a strange place, with many kids struggling to interact with others, unable to make up games together, with many feeling quite isolated. And this is for relatively young children, who should be at their most playful. As the kids get a little older, but getting younger every year, they are filled with increasing amounts of anxiety and self-worth issues, as social media rots their esteem away, and isolates them from reality.
Banning phones in schools doesn't stop much in regard to the mental affects of social media, but what it does do is create a space where the phone is not on the mind all the time, and out of reach of fingers in endless scroll withdrawals. This space will be quite a challenge for many of the children to deal with at first, but it could be that they start to relish the time away from the screens, and start to value human interaction again.
In Finland at least, there has been an increase in the last couple years of parents buying phone watches for their children instead of smartphones, but it is still a small minority. The thing with the watches is that they don't have an internet connection, no games, no whatsapp - so they are far less convenient for the parents. Remember, no young child really needs a phone, and none of them need to have constant access to the internet and games that take their attention away from everything else they could be doing, or need to be doing.
The screens are like a drug addiction, when present in the system, they are mindlessly consumed, but when taken away, the symptoms of withdrawal kick in. People start fidgeting, getting irritable, and can't concentrate. But, addictions can be beaten, if the behaviors change and the environment isn't filled with temptation.
Out of sight, out of mind.
The environment we surround ourselves with is hugely influential over our behaviors, and we already have many kids who don't have decent diets, don't have solid rolemodels, don't have clear rules, and often have unstable homes. There environment is already working against them, but then we also give them a way to escape reality, to avoid dealing with others, to fill their experience with content that doesn't take them forward in their lives, but holds them back.
Of course, this is "just" my opinion on it through what I have observed over the years, so a lot of people will justify their decisions to limit screens or not on whatever suits them, which is fine. But, they also seem to shirk the responsibility for the behavior of their children either. While happy to complain about teachers, they all act as if their children behave impeccably, and if they do play up, it is someone else's fault. Often blaming social media.
The irony.
Life as a kid used to be pretty inconvenient, as it was necessary to plan ahead, talk to people directly or on the phone when they happened to be home, wait for programs to watch at a certain time, make up games to pass the time, get to know people, sit at a bus stop with nothing to do - and the list goes on. Yet, I don't remember having withdrawals from not having something, which might have been because there wasn't always something to have. Waiting for a favorite TV program that is now on demand, but there was very little on TV that was worth a kid watching anyway.
Now, there is always another post to scroll to, or an autoplay to watch.
Kids don't know how to go without having something to do, so perhaps it might be a good lesson at school to learn how to manage oneself, when the drug of choice is not available. Maybe for some kids it will be so unbearable that they will become even more lost, but I don't think that is really going to be the case if this happens. From early reports in some trials at least, many of the teens where positive on the experience of missing out on all the streams for a few hours a day.
At least, I think they should be trialing some versions of in-school screen limitation, to see how it affects groups and the results they are getting at school academically and socially. At any rate, I think there is more to gain from trying this, than staying on the track most are upon, where children are expected to limit their own consumption of what is designed from the ground up to attract them, engage them, entrap them.
Time to take the receiver off the hook.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]