Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”
There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.
Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.
Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.
Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.
I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
generally speaking I don’t think they were ever really allowed, but if you tried to “take them away” the kids would just put it in their pocket and not give it up. and that was it.
the difference now is that we have things like the magnetic pouches so students physically can’t use them. the rule is the same, but now it’s actually enforceable.
100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions. Don't neglect that part of your life and you won't be tempted to scroll, or at the very least you'll be resistant to it. No other way out of this, especially because you're in for a very emotional time in the near future.
But don't fret: becoming a parent forces you to find strength you didn't know you had. Sounds cliche but there's really no other way to describe it.
Before kids I was glued to my phone. Now when we go to the playground I just stare at the sky like a chimpanzee released after years of indoor captivity.
Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example.
Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
Congratulations! Who knows what the world will look like when your kids are in middle school / high school, but I would recommend strongly resisting social media / phones before they are in high school.
This can be tricky if all their friends / school communicates through such mediums as your kids may feel isolated. And yes, many schools promote the use of apps / social media as a shared means of communication for clubs, sports, etc. - which is maddening.
And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
I have three kids, now just turning adult. My wife and I took the point of view that we are modeling a healthy lifestyle for our children. So, we only used technology as tools -- looking up stuff, scheduling, reading PDFs, etc.... AND we made sure they could see what we were doing -- no "hidden" screens or hidden computer time.
After doing this for the last 15+ years, I think it's turned out well. The oldest two seem to have a healthy relationship with their devices (as tools) and are just as happy to put them down and go outside or spend time with other people. The youngest is similar, but still needs to use tech a lot for his studies (by curriculum design). However, he'd also prefer to go outside or watch a movie than be on a device.
They can't go outside any more - third places (aka, places where one can be without consuming something) are sorely lacking, doubly so for youth who are driven away by "mosquito" teen-repellent devices, and you need to be able to get there without being in danger of getting pulped by a SUV so tall the driver literally cannot see a child.
Oh and parents don't want their kids go out alone lest they be charged with neglect by some HOA busybody snitch siccing CPS on them.
They can't be at school after hours because it's closed or because school is an unsafe place for them (e.g. bullying).
They spend too much time in front of computers, their Boomer parents cry about violent games turning their kids into killers or porn turning them gay.
They can't be on their phones because Boomers cry that they're not doing anything else.
Tell me, what are kids supposed to do? It's like an inverse Schrödinger's cat.
Those mosquito things are awful, I'm in my early 30s so I can't really hear 17.4 Khz tones anymore, but my neighbors have this awful animal repellent device in their garden that goes off during the night, it's about 12-15 Khz and is infuriating.
The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc
And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives
Many parents I talk to have this notion that idle-time/free-time for their children is unproductive, a waste of time, and thus bad for their children. And that's why they feel the need to micromanage their kids' time - "If I don't give Timmy productive things to do, he'll just rot away."
There's a number of articles about this topic, but I just don't see parents accepting the message: boredom is good for young people. Heck, boredom is why I got into programming my Commodore-64 back in the day - Midwest winters are long and boring as shit, lots of time stuck inside.
We took away my kid's screens for a week because we caught her lying to us about something.
She was understandably upset and bored for a few days, and then found ways to occupy her time. Not productive ways - but ways that reminded me of what I did as a kid without screens.
Maybe that's why so many of the best demoscene coders are from northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, Finland? Bored kids with nothing to do but faff with their computers?
...who spends half the year in darkness, to boot. It's so bad they even have a national holiday to grieve the departure of the sun and call for its return!
There's also the symptom that almost our entire society is addicted to staring at their phones for at least 4 hours a day. Go literally ANYWHERE and just look at the people around you if you don't think so.
20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
You're ignoring the engineered addiction to the games on phones. Loot boxes, 2 free hours of play with double bonuses, etc.
There is no engineered addiction to reading the New York Times, so people just put it down when something else wants their attention.
Looking at a phone is a problem to the extent that it cuts you off from real interactions in society. It is a problem to the extent that the attention you pay to the phone does not go toward solving real problems.
It can be a problem because it allows kids to escape from uncomfortable situations like struggling to learn something, and the Instagram-perfect view of the world makes their own lives feel inferior.
> Looking at a phone is a problem to the extent that it cuts you off from real interactions in society.
I am confused here. Is reading the New York Times in paper form, on an e-reader, or a mobile phone different? If you are reading on a mobile phone, can you "just put it down when something else wants their attention"? Also, I was a subscriber to NYT for about 15 years, but quit about 10 years ago when the content got more and more click/rage-baity. (This is probably true of most large US newspapers.)
Final comment about paper vs digital newspapers: I much prefer paper because the adverts are print-only (no motion/animation) and there are no auto-play videos. It is much less distracting.
But the New York Times on a phone is not particularly more or less addictive than the same content on a piece of paper. Nor does reading it on a phone cut anyone off from the rest of society any more than focusing on the printed paper or a book or a Walkman.
If the problem is games, social media, or porn, why don't we identify those as social problems and try to fix them? Rather than blaming the device.
Oh! It definitely is, and it was engineered to make it more. The comments make sure of that, then you've got the alerts for Breaking News, the sense of urgency in animated visuals with shiny colors. Of course, the NYT in a phone is far more addicting.
Naming the device where we consume addictive content is just a convenient shorthand.
If we just stuck to the same NY Times articles we would have read in the paper that would be fine. But very few of us have the will power to pick up our device and not wonder into social media apps.
There's a lot of commentary addicts and such. Cable "news" started this, the internet has magnified it even more. "Screens" wouldn't be the problem if we all used them for mental enrichment, but instead they've been taken over by "engagement"-hunters trying as hard as possible to get you to see just one more ad... and then another one... and another one...
I had a long commute in public transport during the mid 2000s, made lots of acquaintances, even dated some girls I met on this bus. Definitely, people were more open to engage in conversation if you started it.
> 20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey.
Some folks did this, others chatted with the 'regulars' that they sat with that had the same schedule as them. There were television series based on this:
Nah, the portion of people on phones vs reading newspapers/magazines/books is much higher. Most people 20 years ago didn't find enough interesting in the average paper or magazine (and didn't read for pleasure much anyway).
So it was a weak background distraction at most. Course, different places had different accepted levels of conversation - London tubes aren't chatty - but there's a difference in brain activity, patterns, anxiety, etc sitting in silence with your thoughts vs having the phone constantly trying to get "engagement" with attention-grabbing provocations.
Similarly, watching TV at home was more "background" than "constant binge." The types of shows reflect this - intentionally repetitive, fairly low stakes, things are back to normal at the end of the episode, because most people weren't so hooked that they watched the same stuff every week at the same time.
"Background phone use" is much more conversation-killing.
There is an absolutely massive difference between reading a map and scrolling tiktok. The level of engagement and entertainment social media provides is off the charts compared to what people used to distract themselves with.
I remember meeting a lot of people by just talking to them in the subway during y daily commute. That happened both in France and Japan. Nowadays with phones it happens a lot less..
You spoke with "a lot" of people in Japan on the subway during your daily commute? I am stunned here. Can you provide more details? (Years / location / line?) I find this very hard to believe. Metro trains in Tokyo and Osaka (and suburbs) are basically silent except very late when people are drunk, talking with their friends.
Kyoto 2005 to 2008. Mostly Kintetsu and subway (mostly between Kyoto and Nara). Later keihan from demachiyanagi to shijo kawaramachi. I am the one who often initiated the conversation (apart from some osaka bachans who did initiate. I'm using that term of endearment not criticism despite their fearful reputation Osaka bachans are great). There were also significantly less tourists back then. Made a few friends with whom I still stay in touch. Also met my first wife like this.
I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.
My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
Yeah. As someone who spends way too much time on their phone... I'm pretty sure that I have access to all kinds of alternatives, and that I have the agency necessary to getting off my phone.
The addictive substance is the network,not the phone. Nobody gets addicted to any phone disconnected from the internet. OTOH, as you experienced it's easy to spend just as much time on the laptop or desktop when that has a persistent internet connection.
First thing I did to beat my addiction was keep my phone in airplane mode at all times, and just rely on wifi. After porting my number to a voip provider, i just canceled my cell phone subscription and then the device was no longer a phone, but a wifi tablet. a boring tool i could easily leave at home most of the time until I never took it with me again.
I often leave my phone in a different room, and that's pretty effective, too.
I've started leaving my phone at home when my wife and I go places together.
It's not a problem without solutions, of course. It just takes an amount of discipline that feels unreasonably burdensome to me (as in "ugh why is this so hard?!").
Computers still have a lot of pre-24/7-internet applications and patterns compared to phones. You can get all the brain-killing stuff on them, but you also have more options for doing interesting stuff.
(Most HN use arguing with strangers is not that. Clearly I'm guilty too.)
Ironically for the "you'll rot your brain" panic of the eighties and nineties, a lot of video games are similarly better. Invest 60 hours into a complicated game and you've worked your brain out MASSIVELY more than 60 hours scrolling or watching tiktok.
Hell, at this point making it through a pre-2000s TV show or movie can be an attention-span challenge. Where's the constant payoff every 30 seconds like with memes??
May I introduce you to Factorio or Satisfactory, for example? :D
But yes, I agree. A regular computer offers more "productive" options than a phone. It's just that in my case, I'm an alt-tab away from going back to brain rot, and I am very good at hitting alt-tab.
I think it is the same as with food, we just have to not get tempted. It probably would take something as radical as getting a dumbphone, DNS blocking additive sites, ditching the toilet-scroller. I'm on a website before I realize it.
One of the reasons 'God' ("as we understood Him") is invoked because you are admitting that you do not have it with-in you to control things (anymore) and that you need 'something' external to help you clamp down on your behaviour.
Literally lock it in a safe for a month and see if after you recalibrate, if you are happier. Not carried a phone in 5 years and one of the best choices I ever made. Nothing you want to do in life requires you owning a phone if you are resourceful.
That's the problem actually. Not a second of "boredom", where there isn't something happening. Downtime is important, and I don't mean popping on the TV and vegetating until it's time to go to bed.
bring a mechanical puzzle, or a book to read, or a lock to pick, or a tiny pocketable laptop that allows you to actually be productive, and leave the brainrot device at home, or get rid of it.
5 years free of doom scrolling and never been happier or more productive in my life.
When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.
Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
>When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.
It's so wild looking back at those times. My friends and I would take the bus to the mall, which took (what felt like) forever. And we'd hang out there, browse stores, etc. for HOURS. Even though none of us had any money to spend. Sometimes we'd get a fountain soda at the food court for $.50. it's amazing we'd spend so much time at stores when we had no money.
Maybe there's some rare incident, maybe they're just annoyed the teens don't spend enough per hour. It doesn't really matter. Teens aren't some special danger, and it's bad when places want to give off the impression of being a nice public place but fail to be one in significant ways.
>Malls, movie theaters, arcades all require a parental escort
I don’t know where you are, but that sounds like a horrible place to raise kids. I’m in a California suburb, and my teenage kids go to the local malls and theaters wi their us all the time - it’s great for their independence and social life.
There lucky if they even exist. Where I grew up the local malls and hangouts that were within <30 minute drive had all died _and_ society had already moved into the “unattended minors are a threat to society” model
I tried walking 2-3 miles to school or to a friends and got picked up by the police and brought home, so I stopped going outside and became a homebody nerd. I’m not really surprised it got worse decades later with better entertainment on machines and even worse busybodies outside
In my household no one has cell phones, so we set expectations of checking in once a day via chat over wifi from laptops, radio, meshtastic, or picking up a public phone... and otherwise learn to be resourceful, self confident, and independent.
I am convinced these skills will benefit a kid more than being good at doom scrolling.
Hardly. I run a b2b tech company in silicon valley, frequently travel the world, and have a fairly active social life.
No essential services ever -require- a phone. Just say it is against your unspecified religion and watch them fall over backwards to create alternatives for you.
It is always hilarious to watch someone at a theme park or restaurant produce a paper map or menu just after saying they no longer exist moments earlier.
If I travel overnight my only tech is a tiny laptop to work on the go, but when it is closed it is off, and not able to notify me.
It’s a tight feedback loop, use of phones is a symptom caused by problems caused by use of phones. To break it you have to stop using the phone. This is far simpler and more broadly applicable than figuring out who has dopamine disregulation and putting them on meds.
My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access.
For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect.
I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
One of the nicest things about the ban (not total ban) at my kids school is no more parent email "Talk to your kids about their phone" type emails.
The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing.
Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting.
Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.
Don't have the link handy, but there was a blog post I saw on HN by a teacher who asked students to spend an hour on their phones in class and record the source of notifications. IIRC texts from parents was one of the top sources of disruption.
Australia has done this for public schools recently. It's been a huge success. Private schools have banned phones for ages.
As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.
> There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.
Nature is healing. Glad to see this. I was in high school when smart phones really became widespread, and was personally still on a flip phone most of the way through. I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection. 24/7 social media seems like a very destructive portal to isolation, and having a reprieve from that, if only a few hours a day, seems like a great thing.
Not just socialization and introspection, and not just among kids!
I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here on HN, but the amount of social woes we are currently experiencing that are indirectly the result of a dramatic increase in social media consumption is a lot higher than I think most people expect.
There are just so many aspects of life that one only really gets nudged into doing at least partially out of boredom, despite ultimately fulfilling so much more. When you can stave off boredom instantly and indefinitely, there are all kinds of experiences that will be substituted.
Hundreds of millions of people are totally oblivious and uncaring of their situation and surroundings, so long as they have access to enough digital distraction. It's the new opiate of the masses.
I would not have learned to play the guitar if I had a smartphone then, or if the internet was any faster than a dial-up. Now I have an outlet to make something beautiful out of my loneliness whenever it strikes.
I suspect this counts as phone addiction, but I'm reading many books on Kindle with the All You Can Eat Kindle subscription. One thing I've become addicted to is the never-ending series of science fiction stories, for example, such as Backyard Starship, No Stress, Space Express, The Worst Ship in the Fleet, Homeworld Lost, and Frontlines (Martin Kloos, worth paying for). Then there are the numerous series by Alma T. C. Boykin. She's able to spin a story out of everyday life, drawing on history and mythology, while adding enough fantasy to hold my interest.
Some of them are good, while others are cheesy. There are also series I will not admit to having started and given up on when I realized how bad they were. You can thank me later when you realize how much of your life I've just wasted.
The rapid decline in writing quality caused by CNN and the death of print journalism and the quality book writers that used to come from that space has destroyed long form writing.
I used to read books voraciously and, while I do still read books, it's a pretty small number compared to what I used to do. I've been trying to pare my bookshelves of books I'm never realistically going to reread or read.
I really don't think I understand what it must be like to have smart phones in high school. I went to school in the "no beepers allowed because only drug dealers have them" era
> I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe
I recently heard the comedian Jimmy Carr make an excellent comment about how we as a society think of boredom as a negative, when it's actually a positive: "Boredom is just unacknowledged serenity."
Though what bothers me is all the high schools mentioned are the top prestigious ones you had to apply to, not zoned. Brooklyn Tech, Gramercy Arts, Bronx Science, I'm surprised no comments from Stuyvesant students.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes.
Ha! When I was in NYC high school in the 90s we were not allowed to have playing cards or dominoes. The staff would confiscate them because it was believed to encourage gambling. Quite amusing that now they are the saving a generation of kids from mindless scrolling.
Among other things, lots of those kids are probably using their phones to gamble way more money than they'll ever lose playing poker with their friends.
Playing poker with friends is at worst zero-sum with limited downside; your friends will probably cut you off when you run out of money and the money stays in your little pool. Betting sports against a faceless profit-maximizing corporation is negative-sum and if it turns into a problem for they're happy to raise your minimum and encourage dumber bets.
Anything could encourage gambling to a person who has a penchant for gambling. Cards and dominoes are no different than anything else that can be bet on, which is pretty much everything.
hello, i’m usually a lurker on this website, but i decided to make an account and comment since this is somewhat relevant to me.
i’m a senior in high school in one of those states with new laws about cell phones and electronics. i’m not particularly in favor of these new laws since i’m affected by them firsthand, but i can understand why they were implemented.
a few of my habits have had to change because of these new rules:
- i now write my to-do lists on sticky notes instead of on my phone.
- i write notes in a small a6 size notebook instead of using a notes app.
- i now carry a book and my ipod nano to lunch.
because of these new rules, i do spend more time on my school-provided ipad, however. the school blocks a lot of the websites i typically visit. there are bypasses though — i can easily find instances of redlib if i want to scroll reddit, use a “cookie free youtube watcher” and paste a youtube link if i want to watch a video, and github isn’t blocked, but github pages are. most llm websites are blocked (claude, deepseek, mistral, gemini), but chatgpt isn’t for some reason.
if i want to look at a blocked website that isn’t one of those above, i can use startpage.com’s anonymous view.
i think the days feel longer now without my phone.
For many people (especially on this site), figuring out how to bypass the blocks is what led to an interest and understanding of technology. At some point you realize that it’s more fun to figure out these puzzles than it is to play silly games that have no real point to them.
It has always been a cat and mouse game. To an extent, some expect the net to not be 100% proof ( though I will admit that the holes you pointed out are a little odd -- buddy is an IT admin at a school so while there is obviously a lot of variation, I would think most are pretty locked down ). Anyway, first rule of bypass is not to mention it:D
I honestly don't know enough to share. And the stuff I do know or could share would only get me in trouble in this context. That said, none of this information is really hidden. But if you only have few months left, I would just try to enjoy it. It is highly unlikely you will get that kind of quiet time after school is over.
Fwiw, the article does actually list viable ways of bypassing some of the restrictions
I'm not really against phones, but I don't understand when they became acceptable to begin with. I keep reading about them being recently banned in my area as well, but I distinctly remember them not being allowed when I was younger. It was the early era of flip phones back then, but they also got after most other electronics as well.
This is becoming more and more common to see these bans in Europe as well. When you combine these changes with current or upcoming social media bans in many countries, and other similar initiatives, it really could be, hopefully, a turning point in civilization’s relationship and understanding of the damages that technology can bring.
Playing cards during breaks, reading a lot, interacting with others, listening to radio a lot, that was the student me when I went no tv, no computer (cause I was already addicted to programming, Internet wasn't yet everywhere) to force myself to socialize more. I hope these kids will have nostalgic memories of that time as well.
Our school started this year: Heard one kid says: "What am I supposed to do in the breaks!!" OMG. But, the kids are playing games, talking to each other. Learning viral skills for the workplace all while relaxing. Winwinwin.
One interesting aspect of technology is that there is little if any structure.
I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
I'm optimistic that there will be balance in the future. If Thomson is right that smartphones weren't really the beginning of detachment from society but instead it started more around the television era, it requires us to think how to handle all modern technology to optimize overall well being.
>I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
He doesn't make any claim as to the addictiveness of poetry, music, or Shakespeare: he pointed out that we use different language to describe childhood compulsions for one activity than we do for another.
My own anecdotal experience on the topic is that I was such a voracious reader as a child that it was a problem in much the same way I see people today complain about kids in screens. I'd hide personal books behind textbooks while I ignored classes, hide under the covers with a flashlight to stay up all night reading, the works.
There's no good description of the actual ban here?
At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
I'm ok with that.
Some of the more universal bans I don't get, we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road.
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
> At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
All of these articles are so confusing to me because they act like banning smartphones in class is something new. Is this actually new? Were there schools where students weren’t getting in trouble for using phones during class?
The closest thing I’ve seen to an actual ban is a rule that phones must be kept in lockers during the entire school day, including between classes and during lunch. I could see this requiring adjustment for kids.
However I’m baffled by the articles that imply smartphones were not banned from use during class. Was this really ever a thing?
But in most schools where there aren't really strong bans, what happens is of course you're not supposed to be texting and playing games during class, but the teachers at worst would ask you to put it down. They daren't actually take the phone for myriad reasons:
• Could start a physical altercation
• Parents are going to harangue the teacher about how they "need it" to stay in touch with their kids "for safety" or some long story about some supposed responsibility the kid needs to be reachable for
• Risk of liability (what if another kid steals it while it's in custody)
• End of the day one way or another it'll just be given back, so why waste your effort and risk all of the above for basically nothing.
I think the newer bans may be more about actual school administration support intended to assure teachers and other staff that there will be effective consequences of continual phone abuse, so that it's not pointless to try to enforce no-phone rules.
My kid's middle school made national news for their ban for several weeks.
Really it wasn't a new thing at all, just enforced appropriately. Teacher sees electronics (of any kind) and it's taken and you pick it up at the office. Multiple violations and parents get to meet with the staff to talk about it (that's the real kicker).
Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement.
> Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement
This is confirming some of my suspicion.
Smartphone ban articles are trending, so journalists feel pressured to write something about it. They all around to schools and learn about their smartphone policy, then write that as a new-ish thing so they can jump on the trend.
The statewide ban is a new thing, but phones were already banned when I went to school decades ago, along with gameboys, MP3 players, and all other electronics except a calculator. If you had it out in class, it would get taken away.
That kids were ever allowed smartphones to begin with is a regression from the status quo we had not long ago.
I think the other user's question is asking a broader question than you're answering. They likely know the statewide ban is new, but the school policy may not be entirely new.
Unlikely that phone usage was unlimited in class with no restrictions before the statewide ban.
I acknowledged that, but I was asking specifically about the article’s implication that phones were allowed in class. Read further down and there’s a comment from someone who said they finished their work and just had to stare at a wall instead of using their phone.
That’s what confuses me: Many of these articles are implying that phones were allowed everywhere previously, whereas my understanding was that the previous status quo was that they were only allowed in between classes, at lunch, or before/after school hours.
It was a thing, yeah. The schools around here didn't care. Kids were all on their phones during class, walking through the halls, during lunch, etc. Teachers gave up telling them to put them away because the students ignored them and teachers have no authority anymore. They can ask nicely and that's the extent of their power (at least in my district).
It was quite the shock when the statewide ban happened. Parents and students alike are still complaining about it.
> we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road
Even if this is all it’s doing, that’s a win.
Most adults haven’t figured out responsible usage. Down the road, their brains will be more developed. And down the road, the average among them won’t need to learn at the rate we need them to now.
If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference.
I feel like experience builds good choices and total bans are like just putting blinders on.
My oldest had supervised access to a phone / tablet for a while, when he downloads a game now he takes the game to gauge how much it relies on micro-transactions and so on and passes on it immediately if he thinks it is bad. That only comes form experience, and probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money.
> If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference
Adults today can’t manage. That’s a function of the people and context. Adults tomorrow might. Perhaps because we regulate it. Perhaps because they’re exposed to it more carefully.
> probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money
None of this requires he have a smartphone at school.
When I was in high school (shortly before smartphones became widely available, but when feature phones definitely were), it was explicitly against the rules to use a cell phone in class. I believe that similar small electronic devices like iPods were also banned. The concern was actively using phones or other devices during class, rather than simply having them in your backpack or pocket, and also that if your cell phone ringer went off during class that would be distracting (which is in fact true, that is distracting).
My recollection is that some kids did try to violate the rule by surreptitiously texting during class, and did sometimes get their phones confiscated by a teacher; and also some people had their phones confiscated because they got a call or text and it went off in class, since they forgot to turn it off or silence the ringer (although sometimes kids were just asked to turn off the phone and didn't have it confiscated).
I personally was not particularly inclined towards rulebreaking (or was smart enough to only break rules I was sure I could get away with), and I wasn't the kind of social butterfly in high school who was constantly texting people anyway, so my own phone never got confiscated. Merely having phones (or other electronic devices) on your person during the school day and using them on campus but outside of class times (e.g. during lunch) wasn't against the rules. I specifically remember playing a lot of the Nokia phone snake game on my phone to pass time during lunch or while waiting to get picked up after school - because it was the only game on the phone that was even mildly interesting.
I think if my school had tried to ban having a cell phone on your person at all during the school day, I would've attempted to evade the ban by hiding it more deeply in my backpack or something. And if there were literal bag inspections in order to mitigate this, I would've been genuinely pretty angry about that and tried to think of something else I could do to evade the ban. Being compelled to put your phone in a locked box during the school day, rather than just silence it and not use it during class, seems very draconian to me.
Responsible usage is using them after school to arange getting home if needed. There's no good reason to use a phone during school. Anyone you need to contact during that time is physically present.
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
Later in the article it summarizes how it is enforced.
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
>The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
That article gives little information that's not in the original one, even clicking through to the article linked in that linked article gives scant details.
A personal internet-enabled device is any electronic device not issued by a school or NYCPS program that can connect to the internet, allowing the user to access content online. Examples of these personal devices include:
* Communication Devices, such as cell phones, smartphones, and smartwatches.
* Computing Devices, such as laptops, tablets, and iPads.
* Portable music and entertainment systems, such as MP3 players and game consoles.
They describe the ban in the article. Kids put their phone in pouches at the start of school and get them back at the end of the day. They say they're magnetic, I assume that describes some kind of lock or means to prevent use.
When our kids learned about substance abuse, they talk about teenage brains being in a critical period. If they get addicted to a substance, while their brain is developing, the addiction runs deeper than if they were an adult. It's a much bigger challenge to break free of the addiction.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes. Fellow students reported a surge in Uno.
Somebody should introduce these kids to Meshtastic. The Lily T-Deck series features a built-in keyboard and screen, eliminating the need for a phone. I'm sure someone bright could put a repeater up in a place administrators would never find to cover the entire school.
What we really need is regulation of the tech companies driving the addiction. We've long since discovered that megacorps engineering addiction are more powerful than individuals ability to resist.
I am all for phone bans in schools, but if the alternative is forcing them to use googleshit, and agree to googleshit terms of service, also hard pass.
I would insist any kid of mine be allowed to use open source tools that can be studied and improved, or nothing at all.
I like this, phones have become too severe of a distraction throughout the school day, especially in lessons. I don't mind if students have their phone at lunchtime, or outside of the academic time, but allowing them to have their phones in class has just been ruinous.
Not everyone wants to read an article to even find out the location they are talking about or if this is relevant to them... otherwise what's the point of titles and headlines?
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
Yes I understand it's in the article, but that wasn't my point.
People from all over the world read this site and many won't click on articles they aren't sure are relevant to them... why can't we put even the location of the story in the title? Is that too much to ask?
I don't think the relevant part is where there's a smartphone ban. It's that teens are adjusting to the ban on their phones. That even if they're always on them, they can actually disconnect and adjust to it.
I don't presume to know people's reasons for wanting to read a story or not... I just think we should at least put the applicable location in the title.
It's more that parents are afraid of not being in contact with their child when a school shooting happens. It's not some far flung thing in America unfortunately.
Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”
There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.
Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.
Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
At what point did school districts change?
When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.
Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.
I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
generally speaking I don’t think they were ever really allowed, but if you tried to “take them away” the kids would just put it in their pocket and not give it up. and that was it.
the difference now is that we have things like the magnetic pouches so students physically can’t use them. the rule is the same, but now it’s actually enforceable.
100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
I'm expecting a newborn soon and thinking the same. What did you change?
Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions. Don't neglect that part of your life and you won't be tempted to scroll, or at the very least you'll be resistant to it. No other way out of this, especially because you're in for a very emotional time in the near future.
But don't fret: becoming a parent forces you to find strength you didn't know you had. Sounds cliche but there's really no other way to describe it.
Before kids I was glued to my phone. Now when we go to the playground I just stare at the sky like a chimpanzee released after years of indoor captivity.
Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example.
Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
Another problem is that this tool is constantly trying to distract you. As jwz nearly said,
Every app attempts to expand until it is social media. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
See:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/spotify-is-no-longer-just-...
https://www.wikihow.com/Hide-Channels-on-WhatsApp (tl;dr there is no way)
https://www.thepearlpost.com/1342/tech/pinterest-is-now-a-so...
https://gearandgrit.com/stravas-evolution-the-journey-from-a...
Congratulations! Who knows what the world will look like when your kids are in middle school / high school, but I would recommend strongly resisting social media / phones before they are in high school.
This can be tricky if all their friends / school communicates through such mediums as your kids may feel isolated. And yes, many schools promote the use of apps / social media as a shared means of communication for clubs, sports, etc. - which is maddening.
And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
I have three kids, now just turning adult. My wife and I took the point of view that we are modeling a healthy lifestyle for our children. So, we only used technology as tools -- looking up stuff, scheduling, reading PDFs, etc.... AND we made sure they could see what we were doing -- no "hidden" screens or hidden computer time.
After doing this for the last 15+ years, I think it's turned out well. The oldest two seem to have a healthy relationship with their devices (as tools) and are just as happy to put them down and go outside or spend time with other people. The youngest is similar, but still needs to use tech a lot for his studies (by curriculum design). However, he'd also prefer to go outside or watch a movie than be on a device.
Kids can't do it right, eh?
They can't go outside any more - third places (aka, places where one can be without consuming something) are sorely lacking, doubly so for youth who are driven away by "mosquito" teen-repellent devices, and you need to be able to get there without being in danger of getting pulped by a SUV so tall the driver literally cannot see a child.
Oh and parents don't want their kids go out alone lest they be charged with neglect by some HOA busybody snitch siccing CPS on them.
They can't be at school after hours because it's closed or because school is an unsafe place for them (e.g. bullying).
They spend too much time in front of computers, their Boomer parents cry about violent games turning their kids into killers or porn turning them gay.
They can't be on their phones because Boomers cry that they're not doing anything else.
Tell me, what are kids supposed to do? It's like an inverse Schrödinger's cat.
Those mosquito things are awful, I'm in my early 30s so I can't really hear 17.4 Khz tones anymore, but my neighbors have this awful animal repellent device in their garden that goes off during the night, it's about 12-15 Khz and is infuriating.
I don't know but you're a little behind the times. Kids these days don't have Boomer parents.
Phones might be as much a symptom as a cause
The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc
And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives
Many parents I talk to have this notion that idle-time/free-time for their children is unproductive, a waste of time, and thus bad for their children. And that's why they feel the need to micromanage their kids' time - "If I don't give Timmy productive things to do, he'll just rot away."
There's a number of articles about this topic, but I just don't see parents accepting the message: boredom is good for young people. Heck, boredom is why I got into programming my Commodore-64 back in the day - Midwest winters are long and boring as shit, lots of time stuck inside.
- https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-t...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-b...
We took away my kid's screens for a week because we caught her lying to us about something.
She was understandably upset and bored for a few days, and then found ways to occupy her time. Not productive ways - but ways that reminded me of what I did as a kid without screens.
Maybe that's why so many of the best demoscene coders are from northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, Finland? Bored kids with nothing to do but faff with their computers?
...who spends half the year in darkness, to boot. It's so bad they even have a national holiday to grieve the departure of the sun and call for its return!
There's also the symptom that almost our entire society is addicted to staring at their phones for at least 4 hours a day. Go literally ANYWHERE and just look at the people around you if you don't think so.
Why is the exact device the problem?
20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
You're ignoring the engineered addiction to the games on phones. Loot boxes, 2 free hours of play with double bonuses, etc.
There is no engineered addiction to reading the New York Times, so people just put it down when something else wants their attention.
Looking at a phone is a problem to the extent that it cuts you off from real interactions in society. It is a problem to the extent that the attention you pay to the phone does not go toward solving real problems.
It can be a problem because it allows kids to escape from uncomfortable situations like struggling to learn something, and the Instagram-perfect view of the world makes their own lives feel inferior.
Final comment about paper vs digital newspapers: I much prefer paper because the adverts are print-only (no motion/animation) and there are no auto-play videos. It is much less distracting.
That would be fine but it’s not how people use phones. It’s far more time spent on addictive social media and games.
But the New York Times on a phone is not particularly more or less addictive than the same content on a piece of paper. Nor does reading it on a phone cut anyone off from the rest of society any more than focusing on the printed paper or a book or a Walkman.
If the problem is games, social media, or porn, why don't we identify those as social problems and try to fix them? Rather than blaming the device.
Oh! It definitely is, and it was engineered to make it more. The comments make sure of that, then you've got the alerts for Breaking News, the sense of urgency in animated visuals with shiny colors. Of course, the NYT in a phone is far more addicting.
Naming the device where we consume addictive content is just a convenient shorthand.
If we just stuck to the same NY Times articles we would have read in the paper that would be fine. But very few of us have the will power to pick up our device and not wonder into social media apps.
I’m confident that people watching porn on suburban trains isn’t the problem.
> There is no engineered addiction to reading the New York Times, so people just put it down when something else wants their attention.
Tell that to all the absolute news addicts out there. News is very clearly addicting, just like loot box games.
News doesn't get created that fast.
There's a lot of commentary addicts and such. Cable "news" started this, the internet has magnified it even more. "Screens" wouldn't be the problem if we all used them for mental enrichment, but instead they've been taken over by "engagement"-hunters trying as hard as possible to get you to see just one more ad... and then another one... and another one...
>News doesn't get created that fast.
They are repeated many times with slightly different wording to create appearance of many news, since they aren't limited by print.
I had a long commute in public transport during the mid 2000s, made lots of acquaintances, even dated some girls I met on this bus. Definitely, people were more open to engage in conversation if you started it.
> 20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey.
Some folks did this, others chatted with the 'regulars' that they sat with that had the same schedule as them. There were television series based on this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_48
Some folks didn't want to chat, and in the Toronto-area commuter rail there are designated zones for that:
* https://www.gotransit.com/en/travelling-on-go/quiet-zone
What you are demonstrating is that already in 2003, people talking to each other during their commute was a fantasy rather than an actual occurrence.
Do you think the airborne drops of Operation Overlord were a fantasy because someone made a television (mini-)series on them (i.e., Band of Brothers)?
Certainly I would not take the television series as proof that they happened with regularity or in the way depicted.
Nah, the portion of people on phones vs reading newspapers/magazines/books is much higher. Most people 20 years ago didn't find enough interesting in the average paper or magazine (and didn't read for pleasure much anyway).
So it was a weak background distraction at most. Course, different places had different accepted levels of conversation - London tubes aren't chatty - but there's a difference in brain activity, patterns, anxiety, etc sitting in silence with your thoughts vs having the phone constantly trying to get "engagement" with attention-grabbing provocations.
Similarly, watching TV at home was more "background" than "constant binge." The types of shows reflect this - intentionally repetitive, fairly low stakes, things are back to normal at the end of the episode, because most people weren't so hooked that they watched the same stuff every week at the same time.
"Background phone use" is much more conversation-killing.
The amount of time spent on phones is FAR greater than the time spent on all those activities you describe combined.
What did you do with the other time? (Serious question)
Today, instead of 3 hours of TV at home, it's 4-6 hours of TV in 10-sec snippets at max volume on devices that are much too big
The secondhand socials are driving me nuts
There is an absolutely massive difference between reading a map and scrolling tiktok. The level of engagement and entertainment social media provides is off the charts compared to what people used to distract themselves with.
I remember meeting a lot of people by just talking to them in the subway during y daily commute. That happened both in France and Japan. Nowadays with phones it happens a lot less..
You spoke with "a lot" of people in Japan on the subway during your daily commute? I am stunned here. Can you provide more details? (Years / location / line?) I find this very hard to believe. Metro trains in Tokyo and Osaka (and suburbs) are basically silent except very late when people are drunk, talking with their friends.
Kyoto 2005 to 2008. Mostly Kintetsu and subway (mostly between Kyoto and Nara). Later keihan from demachiyanagi to shijo kawaramachi. I am the one who often initiated the conversation (apart from some osaka bachans who did initiate. I'm using that term of endearment not criticism despite their fearful reputation Osaka bachans are great). There were also significantly less tourists back then. Made a few friends with whom I still stay in touch. Also met my first wife like this.
I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.
I commuted by public transit for around two decades before the ubiquity of smartphones and never experienced or witnessed this.
> talking to them [...] Japan
Really struggling to imagine people talking on the subway during their morning commute in Japan!! Culture changes.
The counter to phone is dog.
My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
Yeah. As someone who spends way too much time on their phone... I'm pretty sure that I have access to all kinds of alternatives, and that I have the agency necessary to getting off my phone.
I'm pretty sure there's an awful lot more to it.
For sure, and you at least acknowledge it. As do I, I'm ashamed of my screen time reports. I feel weak.
At some point I started spending more time on my computer to reduce my phone screen time.
And the worst part is that that made sense to me for a few days.
Big screen = professional tech person. Small screen = phone addicted loser.
HN tabs open on both.
The addictive substance is the network,not the phone. Nobody gets addicted to any phone disconnected from the internet. OTOH, as you experienced it's easy to spend just as much time on the laptop or desktop when that has a persistent internet connection.
First thing I did to beat my addiction was keep my phone in airplane mode at all times, and just rely on wifi. After porting my number to a voip provider, i just canceled my cell phone subscription and then the device was no longer a phone, but a wifi tablet. a boring tool i could easily leave at home most of the time until I never took it with me again.
I often leave my phone in a different room, and that's pretty effective, too.
I've started leaving my phone at home when my wife and I go places together.
It's not a problem without solutions, of course. It just takes an amount of discipline that feels unreasonably burdensome to me (as in "ugh why is this so hard?!").
Computers still have a lot of pre-24/7-internet applications and patterns compared to phones. You can get all the brain-killing stuff on them, but you also have more options for doing interesting stuff.
(Most HN use arguing with strangers is not that. Clearly I'm guilty too.)
Ironically for the "you'll rot your brain" panic of the eighties and nineties, a lot of video games are similarly better. Invest 60 hours into a complicated game and you've worked your brain out MASSIVELY more than 60 hours scrolling or watching tiktok.
Hell, at this point making it through a pre-2000s TV show or movie can be an attention-span challenge. Where's the constant payoff every 30 seconds like with memes??
May I introduce you to Factorio or Satisfactory, for example? :D
But yes, I agree. A regular computer offers more "productive" options than a phone. It's just that in my case, I'm an alt-tab away from going back to brain rot, and I am very good at hitting alt-tab.
I think it is the same as with food, we just have to not get tempted. It probably would take something as radical as getting a dumbphone, DNS blocking additive sites, ditching the toilet-scroller. I'm on a website before I realize it.
> As do I, I'm ashamed of my screen time reports. I feel weak.
While not everyone agrees with all the precepts/concepts, may be worth noting the first step:
> 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program
One of the reasons 'God' ("as we understood Him") is invoked because you are admitting that you do not have it with-in you to control things (anymore) and that you need 'something' external to help you clamp down on your behaviour.
Literally lock it in a safe for a month and see if after you recalibrate, if you are happier. Not carried a phone in 5 years and one of the best choices I ever made. Nothing you want to do in life requires you owning a phone if you are resourceful.
Yesterday I had a meeting with a friend and wound up having to wait 20 minutes for him. Instead of being bored out of my mind, I doom scrolled.
That's the problem actually. Not a second of "boredom", where there isn't something happening. Downtime is important, and I don't mean popping on the TV and vegetating until it's time to go to bed.
That's abominable, sir. We need you to take care of your brain :)
bring a mechanical puzzle, or a book to read, or a lock to pick, or a tiny pocketable laptop that allows you to actually be productive, and leave the brainrot device at home, or get rid of it.
5 years free of doom scrolling and never been happier or more productive in my life.
> but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
What fun things ban minors? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t see that around here.
When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.
Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
>When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.
It's so wild looking back at those times. My friends and I would take the bus to the mall, which took (what felt like) forever. And we'd hang out there, browse stores, etc. for HOURS. Even though none of us had any money to spend. Sometimes we'd get a fountain soda at the food court for $.50. it's amazing we'd spend so much time at stores when we had no money.
Usually that's the result of an incident with premeditated mayhem from an unsupervised gathering.
Maybe there's some rare incident, maybe they're just annoyed the teens don't spend enough per hour. It doesn't really matter. Teens aren't some special danger, and it's bad when places want to give off the impression of being a nice public place but fail to be one in significant ways.
It doesn’t matter to a non stakeholder like you. For the business owners, it clearly matters.
What they think has very little relevance to the problem of teens having nowhere to go.
And in general the US has been really lacking in third places.
Sure. But the end result is still teenagers losing a place to go.
The late 80's and early 90's was peak mayhem but kids still hung out unsupervised at the mall.
Malls, movie theaters, arcades all require a parental escort. Not to mention the general problem society has with free-range kids.
So I am empathetic when the kids want Minecraft to be that space since society doesn't give it to them.
>Malls, movie theaters, arcades all require a parental escort
I don’t know where you are, but that sounds like a horrible place to raise kids. I’m in a California suburb, and my teenage kids go to the local malls and theaters wi their us all the time - it’s great for their independence and social life.
There lucky if they even exist. Where I grew up the local malls and hangouts that were within <30 minute drive had all died _and_ society had already moved into the “unattended minors are a threat to society” model
I tried walking 2-3 miles to school or to a friends and got picked up by the police and brought home, so I stopped going outside and became a homebody nerd. I’m not really surprised it got worse decades later with better entertainment on machines and even worse busybodies outside
In my household no one has cell phones, so we set expectations of checking in once a day via chat over wifi from laptops, radio, meshtastic, or picking up a public phone... and otherwise learn to be resourceful, self confident, and independent.
I am convinced these skills will benefit a kid more than being good at doom scrolling.
Hardly. I run a b2b tech company in silicon valley, frequently travel the world, and have a fairly active social life.
No essential services ever -require- a phone. Just say it is against your unspecified religion and watch them fall over backwards to create alternatives for you.
It is always hilarious to watch someone at a theme park or restaurant produce a paper map or menu just after saying they no longer exist moments earlier.
If I travel overnight my only tech is a tiny laptop to work on the go, but when it is closed it is off, and not able to notify me.
It’s a tight feedback loop, use of phones is a symptom caused by problems caused by use of phones. To break it you have to stop using the phone. This is far simpler and more broadly applicable than figuring out who has dopamine disregulation and putting them on meds.
My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access.
For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect.
I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
One of the nicest things about the ban (not total ban) at my kids school is no more parent email "Talk to your kids about their phone" type emails.
The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing.
Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting.
Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.
It's pretty funny how full circle this is. This was exactly how it was when I was in middle school in flip-phone days (and it happened to me once!).
Don't have the link handy, but there was a blog post I saw on HN by a teacher who asked students to spend an hour on their phones in class and record the source of notifications. IIRC texts from parents was one of the top sources of disruption.
I am so curious. I don't want to start a gender war, but is it text messages from mom or dad? I cannot believe the majority come from dad.
Australia has done this for public schools recently. It's been a huge success. Private schools have banned phones for ages.
As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.
Funny to see a school administrator talking positively about a loud lunch room. We used to constantly get reprimanded for being too loud.
First you teach them to talk and walk, and then you tell them to shut up and sit down.
- old 90s joke
We did too, but not as a rule and not always, just as a preference of whatever petty tyrant was standing in the lunch room that day
> There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.
Solution: put a bunch of terminals in the school allowing the kids to send emails to their parents.
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.
I don't think you can expect schools to stand up to hordes of smartphone-addicted parents demanding no action on this.
State-level regulation provides IMO very necessary cover.
Jesus! those folks need to leave their kids alone! they are at school!
Hey! Parent! Leave them kids alone. All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
Nature is healing. Glad to see this. I was in high school when smart phones really became widespread, and was personally still on a flip phone most of the way through. I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection. 24/7 social media seems like a very destructive portal to isolation, and having a reprieve from that, if only a few hours a day, seems like a great thing.
Not just socialization and introspection, and not just among kids!
I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here on HN, but the amount of social woes we are currently experiencing that are indirectly the result of a dramatic increase in social media consumption is a lot higher than I think most people expect.
There are just so many aspects of life that one only really gets nudged into doing at least partially out of boredom, despite ultimately fulfilling so much more. When you can stave off boredom instantly and indefinitely, there are all kinds of experiences that will be substituted.
Hundreds of millions of people are totally oblivious and uncaring of their situation and surroundings, so long as they have access to enough digital distraction. It's the new opiate of the masses.
I would not have learned to play the guitar if I had a smartphone then, or if the internet was any faster than a dial-up. Now I have an outlet to make something beautiful out of my loneliness whenever it strikes.
Internet ruined me for anything long-form. I'm old enough to remember the Before Times, but a lot of people aren't.
I suspect this counts as phone addiction, but I'm reading many books on Kindle with the All You Can Eat Kindle subscription. One thing I've become addicted to is the never-ending series of science fiction stories, for example, such as Backyard Starship, No Stress, Space Express, The Worst Ship in the Fleet, Homeworld Lost, and Frontlines (Martin Kloos, worth paying for). Then there are the numerous series by Alma T. C. Boykin. She's able to spin a story out of everyday life, drawing on history and mythology, while adding enough fantasy to hold my interest.
Some of them are good, while others are cheesy. There are also series I will not admit to having started and given up on when I realized how bad they were. You can thank me later when you realize how much of your life I've just wasted.
The rapid decline in writing quality caused by CNN and the death of print journalism and the quality book writers that used to come from that space has destroyed long form writing.
I used to read books voraciously and, while I do still read books, it's a pretty small number compared to what I used to do. I've been trying to pare my bookshelves of books I'm never realistically going to reread or read.
Funny enough, I've had the opposite experience. Easy access to books and reviews has me reading conservatively 10x as much as I did a decade ago
On the other hand, I would not have learned to play the guitar without the high-speed internet.
I really don't think I understand what it must be like to have smart phones in high school. I went to school in the "no beepers allowed because only drug dealers have them" era
> I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe
I recently heard the comedian Jimmy Carr make an excellent comment about how we as a society think of boredom as a negative, when it's actually a positive: "Boredom is just unacknowledged serenity."
> I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection.
This. People these days talk about boredom like it's the worst thing ever.
Excellent news.
Though what bothers me is all the high schools mentioned are the top prestigious ones you had to apply to, not zoned. Brooklyn Tech, Gramercy Arts, Bronx Science, I'm surprised no comments from Stuyvesant students.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes.
Ha! When I was in NYC high school in the 90s we were not allowed to have playing cards or dominoes. The staff would confiscate them because it was believed to encourage gambling. Quite amusing that now they are the saving a generation of kids from mindless scrolling.
They still could encourage gambling, but someone somewhere judged it's the lesser of two evils.
Among other things, lots of those kids are probably using their phones to gamble way more money than they'll ever lose playing poker with their friends.
Playing poker with friends is at worst zero-sum with limited downside; your friends will probably cut you off when you run out of money and the money stays in your little pool. Betting sports against a faceless profit-maximizing corporation is negative-sum and if it turns into a problem for they're happy to raise your minimum and encourage dumber bets.
Anything could encourage gambling to a person who has a penchant for gambling. Cards and dominoes are no different than anything else that can be bet on, which is pretty much everything.
Yeah indeed, phones have many games of chance also.
hello, i’m usually a lurker on this website, but i decided to make an account and comment since this is somewhat relevant to me.
i’m a senior in high school in one of those states with new laws about cell phones and electronics. i’m not particularly in favor of these new laws since i’m affected by them firsthand, but i can understand why they were implemented.
a few of my habits have had to change because of these new rules: - i now write my to-do lists on sticky notes instead of on my phone. - i write notes in a small a6 size notebook instead of using a notes app. - i now carry a book and my ipod nano to lunch.
because of these new rules, i do spend more time on my school-provided ipad, however. the school blocks a lot of the websites i typically visit. there are bypasses though — i can easily find instances of redlib if i want to scroll reddit, use a “cookie free youtube watcher” and paste a youtube link if i want to watch a video, and github isn’t blocked, but github pages are. most llm websites are blocked (claude, deepseek, mistral, gemini), but chatgpt isn’t for some reason.
if i want to look at a blocked website that isn’t one of those above, i can use startpage.com’s anonymous view.
i think the days feel longer now without my phone.
For many people (especially on this site), figuring out how to bypass the blocks is what led to an interest and understanding of technology. At some point you realize that it’s more fun to figure out these puzzles than it is to play silly games that have no real point to them.
It has always been a cat and mouse game. To an extent, some expect the net to not be 100% proof ( though I will admit that the holes you pointed out are a little odd -- buddy is an IT admin at a school so while there is obviously a lot of variation, I would think most are pretty locked down ). Anyway, first rule of bypass is not to mention it:D
you’re right… maybe i shouldn’t have mentioned them.
oh well, only a few months left anyway.
or maybe you could tell the methods i mentioned to your school it admin friend, just a thought. :3
I honestly don't know enough to share. And the stuff I do know or could share would only get me in trouble in this context. That said, none of this information is really hidden. But if you only have few months left, I would just try to enjoy it. It is highly unlikely you will get that kind of quiet time after school is over.
Fwiw, the article does actually list viable ways of bypassing some of the restrictions
Chatgpt isn’t blocked because the staff is probably using it.
I'm not really against phones, but I don't understand when they became acceptable to begin with. I keep reading about them being recently banned in my area as well, but I distinctly remember them not being allowed when I was younger. It was the early era of flip phones back then, but they also got after most other electronics as well.
This is becoming more and more common to see these bans in Europe as well. When you combine these changes with current or upcoming social media bans in many countries, and other similar initiatives, it really could be, hopefully, a turning point in civilization’s relationship and understanding of the damages that technology can bring.
Playing cards during breaks, reading a lot, interacting with others, listening to radio a lot, that was the student me when I went no tv, no computer (cause I was already addicted to programming, Internet wasn't yet everywhere) to force myself to socialize more. I hope these kids will have nostalgic memories of that time as well.
Maybe we’ll get back to an era where people connected & form friendships and bonds in a non digital way. Like the video below.
https://youtube.com/shorts/CUfwcIVq6H0?feature=shared
Our school started this year: Heard one kid says: "What am I supposed to do in the breaks!!" OMG. But, the kids are playing games, talking to each other. Learning viral skills for the workplace all while relaxing. Winwinwin.
We played chess in school
I went to a smaller school in a large school system, and our chess club was one of our school’s only “competitive” teams.
That, and the annual Avogadro competitions.
One interesting aspect of technology is that there is little if any structure.
I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
I'm optimistic that there will be balance in the future. If Thomson is right that smartphones weren't really the beginning of detachment from society but instead it started more around the television era, it requires us to think how to handle all modern technology to optimize overall well being.
>I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
He doesn't make any claim as to the addictiveness of poetry, music, or Shakespeare: he pointed out that we use different language to describe childhood compulsions for one activity than we do for another.
My own anecdotal experience on the topic is that I was such a voracious reader as a child that it was a problem in much the same way I see people today complain about kids in screens. I'd hide personal books behind textbooks while I ignored classes, hide under the covers with a flashlight to stay up all night reading, the works.
My wife was like this. Her teachers came to her mother with concerns that she was reading too much.
Books are definitely that addictive as well.
There's no good description of the actual ban here?
At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
I'm ok with that.
Some of the more universal bans I don't get, we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road.
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
> At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
All of these articles are so confusing to me because they act like banning smartphones in class is something new. Is this actually new? Were there schools where students weren’t getting in trouble for using phones during class?
The closest thing I’ve seen to an actual ban is a rule that phones must be kept in lockers during the entire school day, including between classes and during lunch. I could see this requiring adjustment for kids.
However I’m baffled by the articles that imply smartphones were not banned from use during class. Was this really ever a thing?
Most schools don't have lockers anymore.
But in most schools where there aren't really strong bans, what happens is of course you're not supposed to be texting and playing games during class, but the teachers at worst would ask you to put it down. They daren't actually take the phone for myriad reasons:
• Could start a physical altercation
• Parents are going to harangue the teacher about how they "need it" to stay in touch with their kids "for safety" or some long story about some supposed responsibility the kid needs to be reachable for
• Risk of liability (what if another kid steals it while it's in custody)
• End of the day one way or another it'll just be given back, so why waste your effort and risk all of the above for basically nothing.
I think the newer bans may be more about actual school administration support intended to assure teachers and other staff that there will be effective consequences of continual phone abuse, so that it's not pointless to try to enforce no-phone rules.
My kid's middle school made national news for their ban for several weeks.
Really it wasn't a new thing at all, just enforced appropriately. Teacher sees electronics (of any kind) and it's taken and you pick it up at the office. Multiple violations and parents get to meet with the staff to talk about it (that's the real kicker).
Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement.
> Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement
This is confirming some of my suspicion.
Smartphone ban articles are trending, so journalists feel pressured to write something about it. They all around to schools and learn about their smartphone policy, then write that as a new-ish thing so they can jump on the trend.
The first sentence of the article:
> New York City students are one week into the statewide phone ban.
Yes, this is a new thing.
The statewide ban is a new thing, but phones were already banned when I went to school decades ago, along with gameboys, MP3 players, and all other electronics except a calculator. If you had it out in class, it would get taken away.
That kids were ever allowed smartphones to begin with is a regression from the status quo we had not long ago.
It sounds to me like the distinction here is that the ban in NY specifies the entire school day, as opposed to just during class.
I think the other user's question is asking a broader question than you're answering. They likely know the statewide ban is new, but the school policy may not be entirely new.
Unlikely that phone usage was unlimited in class with no restrictions before the statewide ban.
I acknowledged that, but I was asking specifically about the article’s implication that phones were allowed in class. Read further down and there’s a comment from someone who said they finished their work and just had to stare at a wall instead of using their phone.
That’s what confuses me: Many of these articles are implying that phones were allowed everywhere previously, whereas my understanding was that the previous status quo was that they were only allowed in between classes, at lunch, or before/after school hours.
It was a thing, yeah. The schools around here didn't care. Kids were all on their phones during class, walking through the halls, during lunch, etc. Teachers gave up telling them to put them away because the students ignored them and teachers have no authority anymore. They can ask nicely and that's the extent of their power (at least in my district).
It was quite the shock when the statewide ban happened. Parents and students alike are still complaining about it.
> we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road
Even if this is all it’s doing, that’s a win.
Most adults haven’t figured out responsible usage. Down the road, their brains will be more developed. And down the road, the average among them won’t need to learn at the rate we need them to now.
I feel like your description conflicts.
If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference.
I feel like experience builds good choices and total bans are like just putting blinders on.
My oldest had supervised access to a phone / tablet for a while, when he downloads a game now he takes the game to gauge how much it relies on micro-transactions and so on and passes on it immediately if he thinks it is bad. That only comes form experience, and probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money.
> If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference
Adults today can’t manage. That’s a function of the people and context. Adults tomorrow might. Perhaps because we regulate it. Perhaps because they’re exposed to it more carefully.
> probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money
None of this requires he have a smartphone at school.
When I was in high school (shortly before smartphones became widely available, but when feature phones definitely were), it was explicitly against the rules to use a cell phone in class. I believe that similar small electronic devices like iPods were also banned. The concern was actively using phones or other devices during class, rather than simply having them in your backpack or pocket, and also that if your cell phone ringer went off during class that would be distracting (which is in fact true, that is distracting).
My recollection is that some kids did try to violate the rule by surreptitiously texting during class, and did sometimes get their phones confiscated by a teacher; and also some people had their phones confiscated because they got a call or text and it went off in class, since they forgot to turn it off or silence the ringer (although sometimes kids were just asked to turn off the phone and didn't have it confiscated).
I personally was not particularly inclined towards rulebreaking (or was smart enough to only break rules I was sure I could get away with), and I wasn't the kind of social butterfly in high school who was constantly texting people anyway, so my own phone never got confiscated. Merely having phones (or other electronic devices) on your person during the school day and using them on campus but outside of class times (e.g. during lunch) wasn't against the rules. I specifically remember playing a lot of the Nokia phone snake game on my phone to pass time during lunch or while waiting to get picked up after school - because it was the only game on the phone that was even mildly interesting.
I think if my school had tried to ban having a cell phone on your person at all during the school day, I would've attempted to evade the ban by hiding it more deeply in my backpack or something. And if there were literal bag inspections in order to mitigate this, I would've been genuinely pretty angry about that and tried to think of something else I could do to evade the ban. Being compelled to put your phone in a locked box during the school day, rather than just silence it and not use it during class, seems very draconian to me.
Responsible usage is using them after school to arange getting home if needed. There's no good reason to use a phone during school. Anyone you need to contact during that time is physically present.
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
Later in the article it summarizes how it is enforced.
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
>The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
That article gives little information that's not in the original one, even clicking through to the article linked in that linked article gives scant details.
Here's the NYC public school district policy:
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/policies/cell-phone-and...
This is what's covered under the ban:
A personal internet-enabled device is any electronic device not issued by a school or NYCPS program that can connect to the internet, allowing the user to access content online. Examples of these personal devices include:
Smart kids then could use retro PDAs like Palm :)
https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/eliminating-distraction...
They describe the ban in the article. Kids put their phone in pouches at the start of school and get them back at the end of the day. They say they're magnetic, I assume that describes some kind of lock or means to prevent use.
Maybe like the magnetic tags they use at stores.
Apparently even suggesting that the post title needs a location in it gets you downvoted.
Unless that location is Israel, in which case it gets dead. (This post has nothing to do with Israel, dear reader who didn't click on it)
When our kids learned about substance abuse, they talk about teenage brains being in a critical period. If they get addicted to a substance, while their brain is developing, the addiction runs deeper than if they were an adult. It's a much bigger challenge to break free of the addiction.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes. Fellow students reported a surge in Uno.
In my day in the US midwest, it was Euchre.
I imagine some would like to play pokemon cards, but the kids are priced out!
Somebody should introduce these kids to Meshtastic. The Lily T-Deck series features a built-in keyboard and screen, eliminating the need for a phone. I'm sure someone bright could put a repeater up in a place administrators would never find to cover the entire school.
Sounds delightful. Now do it for adults.
- an adult phone addict
Adults need to be adults and manage themselves, with or without help. Otherwise they're children.
What we really need is regulation of the tech companies driving the addiction. We've long since discovered that megacorps engineering addiction are more powerful than individuals ability to resist.
iPhone dumbphone https://stopa.io/post/297
I am all for phone bans in schools, but if the alternative is forcing them to use googleshit, and agree to googleshit terms of service, also hard pass.
I would insist any kid of mine be allowed to use open source tools that can be studied and improved, or nothing at all.
I like this, phones have become too severe of a distraction throughout the school day, especially in lessons. I don't mind if students have their phone at lunchtime, or outside of the academic time, but allowing them to have their phones in class has just been ruinous.
Lovely news.
What ban where?
Not everyone wants to read an article to even find out the location they are talking about or if this is relevant to them... otherwise what's the point of titles and headlines?
We can write much better post titles than this.
Original title:
It's in the article.
Come on people, read.
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
To be fair, the title has been editorialized.
From the guidelines: “…please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.”
(I’ve flagged. Happy to unflag once title is fixed.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes I understand it's in the article, but that wasn't my point.
People from all over the world read this site and many won't click on articles they aren't sure are relevant to them... why can't we put even the location of the story in the title? Is that too much to ask?
I don't think the relevant part is where there's a smartphone ban. It's that teens are adjusting to the ban on their phones. That even if they're always on them, they can actually disconnect and adjust to it.
I don't presume to know people's reasons for wanting to read a story or not... I just think we should at least put the applicable location in the title.
A single school shooting is going to reverse this.
Yes, we'll miss getting to listen to recordings of children being murdered while the police fail to go in.
It's more that parents are afraid of not being in contact with their child when a school shooting happens. It's not some far flung thing in America unfortunately.