Childhood has been rewired in the age of smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence in ways that are linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
How can schools and society combat these troubling developments?
That was the central question in an Education Week Seat at the Table live online discussion this week that featured Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, a New York Times bestseller; Adam Swinyard, the superintendent of the Spokane, Wash., school district, which has put in place an ambitious strategy to get kids off their cellphones and more involved in extracurricular activities; and Catherine Price, a health and science journalist.
“The whole point of childhood is brain development, [which] comes out of millions of input/output cycles that come out of the child interacting with their environment,” said Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “All that got disrupted when the iPhone became common.”
A growing number of educators, policymakers, and parents are supporting student cellphone restrictions or bans in schools. Some advocates have even asked the federal government to report on the impact of cellphones in schools or to impose a national policy that would restrict the presence of the devices altogether.
At least 38 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict cellphone use in schools, according to an Education Week tracker. Most states require a bell-to-bell restriction, while others are enforcing it only during instructional time.
Swinyard’s school district, along with scores of districts nationwide, banned cellphones in middle and elementary schools at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year. High schoolers must keep their phones away during class but are permitted to use them at lunch and at passing times.
The district, however, went well beyond typical restrictions in changing the balance between students’ tech- and non-tech-based experiences.
It created or expanded scores of clubs, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities so students could redirect the time and attention they once devoted to doomscrolling to activities in real life.
“It’s not enough just to take these devices away,” Swinyard said. “We have to be practical, in that kids are going to want something instead [to fill the void].”
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt recommends four foundational reforms to address these challenges:
- Do not allow kids to have smartphones before high school.
- Prohibit children younger than 16 from using social media.
- Establish phone-free schools.
- Create more opportunities for children to engage in unsupervised play and childhood independence.
One simple strategy Haidt recommended during the webinar to help get kids off their cellphones is to have a school playground open for 30 to 45 minutes before class starts and after school from about 3 to 5 pm.
Though parents often worry about letting their kids play on neighborhood streets, “they do trust the school playground, so an incredibly powerful, cheap thing to do is open the school playground” and have an adult nearby for supervision, he said.
Courtesy Jonathan Haidt
Schools and society should have been more skeptical about smartphones and social media
Haidt added during the online discussion that the nation has taken a largely optimistic attitude about technology for decades—from the creation of the internet to the emergence of smartphones and sophisticated ed-tech products, and, most recently, the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
He argues that schools and society should have applied much more caution.
“I simply call it techno-skepticism,” Haidt said during the online discussion. “We must not trust these tech companies … unless they can prove that this [product] actually helps—and not in the lab [but] in actual schools.”
That belief inspired Haidt and Price to co-author The Amazing Generation, a book that aims to show kids how tech products can be damaging to them.
Rather than spending so much time on smartphones, the book recommends to the kids that they put down those devices and engage in face-to-face experiences that don’t feature technology.
“We realize that [talking about the negatives of technology] is not how you get the buy-in from the kids,” Price said during the webinar. “You have to make the case, which is a true case, that real life’s actually more fun.”
Swinyard said during the webinar that many students in his district are now coming to that conclusion. That’s due largely to the district’s expansion of extracurricular activities, he said.
The schools superintendent said the community’s support for these efforts is also helping his students establish healthier habits related to the use of technology.
“There has to be community learning,” Swinyard emphasized during the webinar. “It’s everybody’s responsibility—parents, educators, librarians, doctors, social workers, police—everybody that interacts with a kid.”
