For parents, school phone bans connect to many issues

This fall, California became the latest state to adopt a law banning cellphone use in schools. The Golden State joins more than a dozen that have imposed restrictions as alarm grows about the potentially harmful effects of smartphone use on students’ learning and mental health.

Support for these policies spans the political spectrum. But one important constituency sometimes has a hard time adjusting, and that’s parents. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for The Cut, wrote about the challenges of disconnecting. The following is an edited transcript of her conversation with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I think that a lot of parents, over the last, I’m gonna say decade, have really incorporated, integrated tech into their parenting to an extent where it feels like an extension of themselves. And so I think parents, especially of kids that have different issues that they might be struggling with in school or emotionally, I think they see phones as a way of supporting their kids from afar all day.

Meghan McCarty Carino: You are a mom yourself, right?

Jezer-Morton: Yes.

McCarty Carino: What’s been your relationship with this issue?

Jezer-Morton: I mean, on a personal level, I would support phone bans in schools. There is actually one that just went in place — I have a 14-year-old and his high school just this term has launched a ban and he finds it inconvenient because he can’t communicate with his friends during lunch and, like, find out where everyone’s going for lunch. You know, he’s like, I only go to lunch with the same kids now because it’s just the people in my class, which that, to me, I don’t really feel for him. Personally, I don’t communicate with him during the day, unless there’s something urgent, and if I don’t have the option, I’m happy to give it up. But that’s because of, I think, where I live. I live in a city, he takes the public transit to school, I’m not picking him up and dropping him off. And also, I should add this as a factor, I live in Canada, so gun violence is really not part of my experience as a parent sending my kids to school. I don’t think about that, and I think that’s a consideration for a lot of parents.

McCarty Carino: Tell me more about your family’s experience with the phone. You write in the piece about how your son, when he first got the phone, didn’t even really keep it charged, wasn’t really even that interested in using it, and you had kind of mixed feelings about that.

Jezer-Morton: Right. I mean, I was frustrated because I thought, you know, if I’m paying for this device and it is supposed to be useful for me, as far as assuaging anxiety, like after school if he’s not home when he’s supposed to be home, I can be like, where are you? And if it’s not working for that purpose, then it serves no purpose for me. But at the same time, I was, you know, taking heart in the fact that he didn’t seem that attached to it. Whereas some kids, you know, they really want a phone from like, fourth grade or younger. And he didn’t get his first phone until seventh grade. So I think on the one hand, I felt lucky that I didn’t have to navigate phone addiction with my kid, which I think is really, really hard for a lot of parents. And on the other hand, I was like, what’s the point of this? You know, now I’m worried about you, and this phone is supposed to assuage that.

McCarty Carino: There is this kind of tension that you point out of parents kind of wanting their kids to use phones for the good things, like staying connected with their parents, and not use them for the bad things, like distractions and social media and all of the many harms that have been enumerated. You wrote, it’s like giving them a sports car and expecting them to drive it only in a parking lot.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah. I mean, I really think that these devices have way more functionality than anybody needs them to have, certainly at the ages that these kids are starting to use them. And it feels deliberately obtuse for us to really expect them not to use them for all the ways that they can be used, and yet that’s what we desperately hope. I mean, when I read that Eton College in the U.K. — the extremely elite school that many royals have gone to — they have a new policy starting this year where first-years, incoming students, are given, like, a flip phone, a dumb phone, and that’s what they can use to communicate with their families back home, but they will not be allowed to bring any smart devices on campus. And that, to me, just seems very sensible because that’s what these phones should be able to do when in the hands of children: communicate with parents in an emergency. But that’s a school with a massive budget that can buy hundreds, if not thousands, of these devices every year.

McCarty Carino: This sort of clinging to the phone and the ever-present connection with kids, I think it can seem like this is just overbearing helicopter parents being overbearing helicopter parents. But you note there is this reality that schools, specifically, have been the site of way too many acts of violence. I mean, how much do you think that plays into this dynamic?

Jezer-Morton: I think it really does play into the dynamic. You know, there are states that have banned phones that also are not banning assault rifles. And so it’s easier for them to ban phones in schools, and I can imagine being a parent feeling really frustrated about that. That there are certain ways that we can keep our children safe, and other ways that just seem like, oh no, that would be too hard.

McCarty Carino: Yeah, you point out that these kinds of phone bans and a lot of the discourse around the harms of phones for kids often come down to basically putting the onus and the pressure on families. I mean, what do you think would be the ideal way to balance these tensions?

Jezer-Morton: I mean, ideal way [is] we have major gun control reform. And I think we change our entire relationship with surveillance technology, however long it would take us to kind of unlearn the habits that we’ve learned. We’ve learned them very quickly. But I think we do need to think about doing less, as far as tracking our children, as far as normalizing the idea that you always know where everybody is. That to me, it feels as though we’ve consented to the use of this technology at the heart of our families, for many families, without really thinking about how it changes our family dynamics and what kinds of lessons it is showing our children, whether we mean for it or not. Ideas about what safety means or what autonomy means. I really think that young people deserve the privacy of not being reachable sometimes, even as frustrating as it is for me to not be able to reach my son. I don’t track him, for example, I don’t, I don’t have location tracking, and I really feel that that’s his right, and it’s my right. And so I think that we have really gone very quickly into the use of this in family life, and I think we need to really think about that hard.

More on this

The Pew Research Center recently published the results of a survey about school phone bans. It found almost 70% of U.S. adults support a ban on phone use during class for middle and high school students. But most opposed banning phones for the entire day.

In Broward County, Florida, where students have been barred from using phones at all during the school day since the beginning of August, a recent districtwide survey found 1 in 5 parents think the phone ban is having a negative impact on their child, often citing worries about being unable to communicate with family members during an emergency. It’s a concern that has particular resonance in the county where the Parkland high school shooting occurred in 2018.

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