Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK.<p>Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time.<p>I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise. We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe.<p>However I do think social media use should be severely restricted, unfiltered video being zapped into young minds is not the way to build a cohesive society. tiktok/reels/youtube should probably be editorialised so that we can avoid the stupid, bullying and dangerous stuff being spread by arseholes.<p>Furthermore I think phone use should be time limited by default. That is, the default is that the phone stops all notifications after 20:00 apart from things like parents.<p>I have two kids, and I despair at other parents who think its fine to allow their 10/11 year olds to start group video calls at >20:30. Or the ones who let their kids bully on the class whatsapp.<p>Part of this is education, most of it is tech companies wanting to make money from kids (including mine.)
> Interestingly, the research didn’t show significant improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialise.<p>Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.
> challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their smartphones completely for 21 days.<p>It was not a ban during school. It was complete phone abstinence. The result was that the kids got an entire additional hour of sleep! Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night.
I bought something called brick which lets me lock some apps with a Bluetooth app. I have to walk to a different room and touch my phone to the little cube magneted to my fridge in order to unlock them. Just this extra friction has halved my screen time. No phone in bed no phone while I’m working and no phone on weekends while I’m bored.<p>Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.
I found a couple interesting papers/preprints on smartphone bans:<p>- <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906" rel="nofollow">https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906</a><p>- <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240" rel="nofollow">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240</a><p>But I wasn't able to find a detailed writeup of this particular experiment (It seems to be more of a TV show than a scientific study?)
I find all of these bans quite interesting because when I was at school we would be figuring out how to circumvent the web filters and would be building apps to hide the games we had open on Miniclip when a teacher walked past.<p>I think I kind of owe my software development career to these early days as that is what inspired me. We didn’t have smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren’t as optimised to be so addictive but we did have Facebook and Bebo.
It seems to me the issue is phone apps that are designed to exploit the limbic system. This is why you don't have slot machines in most localities. The phone itself is just a computer. Using the phone to write, help with homework, or communicate doesn't seem to be the problem. It's the addictive gambling-like apps (TikTok, Instagram, ...) that what generate compulsive and disruptive behavior.
When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addiction)?<p>Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.
My kid's school got a lot of press for a smartphone ban. To be clear you could still have a phone, it was just taken if anyone saw it during school hours. If you got caught 3 times your parents had to come retrieve it ... that last part did wonders.<p>I don't know how the sleep part plays into it, my oldest of course wants his phone with him at all times (he is required to put it away before bedtime).<p>I wonder if the school's ban encouraged parents to set similar restrictions?
There are so many confounding variables here, the study doesn’t have a control group.<p>The study was made with kids from the same grade who “were convinced” to give up their phones, so basically it could be the study hypothesis is right but there’s a high change it could be anything else.
It's not phones or tablets. It's the wrong doing apps / social netwrks / games. Same applies to friends: there are friend circles that bring only bad behaviors. We don't ban friendship because of that.
Ban social network apps. Ban addictive games. Ban notifications and any other FOMO-triggering mechanisms. Don't ban phones.
I didn't see anything about what the mechanism might be. Why would not having a smartphone in school affect sleep time, which I presume occurs at home?<p>As a guess maybe without a smartphone the students pay attention more in class, which leads to them completing homework faster, meaning less having to stay up late for that? I'm guessing UK schools do give homework, because Hogwarts gives homework and I presume JK Rowling modeled Hogwarts after real UK school practice.<p>Or maybe not having a smartphone directly improves mood, and people in a better mood have an easier time getting to sleep?
I feel like giving teachers and schools more freedoms to implement these things would be a great overall effect.<p>We've seen a large reduction of what teachers are able to do in the last few decades because the school districts have continuously pushed bad policies to protect them against liability and extra work. My parents were both in the school system and every year they would get more rules to protect the district by pushing more work onto them.<p>The school system has a lot of similarities to have Boeing has been run recently. The board and admins make all the decisions while the people who deliver the value get the short end of the stick.
Being able to write BASIC programs and play games on a TI83 Graphing Calculator kept me sane through High School. That's not quite the same as a smartphone, as it has no communication features at all.
We did _not_ need a study on this.<p>Schools used to ban mobile devices at the door and at some point gave up, like everything, someone gave up.<p>Private schools in the UK still have this policy and are still churning out better grades and students regardless of whether they charge admission or not.
Public ones have turned into a nursery ruled by the kids from that X generation of handouts.<p>Just go back to giving a dam and it will fix at least this thing. But I'll get stick and b$ for students being social online these days now I bet...
People under 16 shouldn't have smartphones. They should be taken during class, put on a shoe hanger. They should be put away during dinner and family time. Smartphones and tablets are ruining people during the time they need to learn and grow the most. I can't imagine what this generation will be like, especially mixed with all the greed, exploitation, and neglect coming from the top down by the people established before them.
Tangentially related, I recall being a teenager playing video games until 3am in my bedroom. As I grew up and got my own place, I eventually decided to have no TV in my bedroom and my sleep improved a huge amount ever since. I’m not perfect, I’ll sometimes go into a negative spiral playing chess until late and get more worked up, but once every few weeks/months is a marked improvement on every night!<p>Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.
In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any issue at all this year.<p>My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't have a phone during class hours. When I asked why their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting.<p>Which just goes to show how much your environment affects your thinking. I've never once thought or even considered there could be a school shooting at a school here.
These studies simply aren’t nuanced enough for me. I want to give my 6 year old a phone that can do one thing only: call me, my wife or 911. No browser or any other app. Is that bad? Is the issue when they can communicate with friends? Is it social media? Email? The browser?
In my province, they implemented a smart phone ban in public schools this year. It was wild to see the political push back, where people just made stuff up to oppose it because they were politically opposed to the government in general.
I'd like to see this study done with activity trackers on the children to look at
1) changes in exercise
2) actual sleep time results.<p>Not that I don't believe the results, but I we don't need to do self reported studies anymore, and having someone guess how much sleep they got is notoriously unreliable.<p>Without the phones, did the children play outside more (exercise), and of course, did they do an activity like read in bed rather than scrolling - thereby removing the late hour dopamine hit.
I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago, and I have 50% more motivation, 50% more headspace to focus on things, and 50% better moods most days. The attention economy, especially in social media, is a plague.<p>It wasn't always this way. I did digital detoxes every few years for about two decades. For most of that time, there were always subtle positive impacts of switching off. But nowadays, the positive effects are not subtle <i>at all</i>. They are <i>very</i> significant.<p>I am impressed we let a few companies commodify and commercialize human attention and human connection to this degree. Humanity has been done a great disservice in both areas by them. One day, this period of mass harm will be a chapter in history books, I am now convinced.
I run a youth tech club and honestly, attention to what we do vs. phones is all about whether kids are 1) engaged, 2) not tired. To drive engagement, they must have something to do, while progressing and seeing immediate results. I don't believe that's what normally happens at school.
Our household parented our children - no phones until middle school (US) and encouraged intentional use thereafter. Observed the mood swings were correlated "proportionately" with phone use.
Don’t have kids, can someone explain what do you mean by banning phones in school? Do normally kids keep phones on them during class ? How can anyone study? If i had phone on me during my school days, I would just keep playing games all day.
The interpretation of these studies is a bit confused to me. Most of the proposed detriments are entirely plausible, but that is about as instructive as finding out that air pollution is bad for you during the industrial revolution.<p>What are the effects on the opportunities of a child today, with restricted access to tech for 18 years in a highly developed country? What are the effects on a country with wide spread restrictions? To the best of my knowledge there's very little data on that (for obvious reasons), but that should maybe lead to a little more prudence when it comes to weighing the negative effects of the much simpler to run studies.<p>We use combustion engines, have noise, air and light pollution, move too little, sit on desks and use phones not because we enjoy harming ourselves, but because of the benefits attached. It's great that we run studies to learn more about how we are effected. But reasonable consequences, less clear.
Again, it's a study that went all the way to monitor kids for 3 weeks, with sleep tracking, the school also helping etc. Minors are involved, so It must have been planned, ethically checked, reviewed and adjusted by experts.<p>And yet no control group. No report on what happened after the 3 weeks ( it should all go back to the similar levels once the ban is lifted, right ? Did it ?)<p>Not all studies can be perfect, but it feels almost intentional to go these lengths and omit such critical parts. Was this just some checkbox checking study to back a pre decided policy ?
It's like our society is in denial about this, finding creative ways not to reckon with an addiction. For the record: you'll be better off if you use your phone as little as possible.
More importantly, I would wager: significantly less bullying, significantly less "have nots" for the kids that don't have the iPhone 42 HD MAX pro edition in solid gold, etc
There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop is something that is constantly getting in the way of my productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.<p>During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance at all (and probably improved it).<p>Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation, and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is depriving them of this sort of information and community). Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of skills and make people instead learn things much more inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e. studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in college).<p>With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to fix everyone's problems.
Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest?<p>Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world.<p>I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.
We need to remove technology out of the school entirely (outside of computer science classes).<p>No iPads instead of books, only manual note-taking, regular blackboards/whiteboards instead of projectors, no calculators, and so on.
Lifetime mobile phone abstinent human here.<p>Sleep and mood (thumbs up)<p>Waiting for everyone else to stop using the cursed devices and start to enjoy real life allowing themselves to be fully immersed in it for the first time(shrug)<p>"Fully immersive" games are sought after but from my point of view people that use mobile phones have never been fully immersed in their physical reality before (its pretty sick bruh, there's beer and boobs) and you might enjoy experiences that can't be monetized or digitized (yes, they exist)<p>If a human experiences an interaction in physical reality and there isn't a VC around to launch a startup to monetize said interaction does it even make a simd?
My company is situated across a main road from a college. There are a couple of permissive rights of way across our land to the road and quite a few students walk that way and also up the road.<p>This horror of a link is what Google Maps shows with Street View:<p><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9469423,-2.6380275,3a,75y,326.62h,97.77t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1srvchdpt_qNsO9xAwB4u5uw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-7.769655411264054%26panoid%3Drvchdpt_qNsO9xAwB4u5uw%26yaw%3D326.62205193594406!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMS4wIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExMjMzSAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9469423,-2.6380275,3a,75y,...</a><p>Our place is the left hand turn off. The college is about 100m further up on the right. Pretend I'm in the red car. I often see kids with headphones on the pavement (sidewalk) cross our turn off without looking around - invariably they are wearing massive bins - head phones and listening to music or podcasts or whatever. Kids also walk down our ramp towards the college too. Again with minimal regard for traffic.<p>That road is the A37 which I was told a while back conveys at least 30,000 odd vehicles per day.<p>I often get to pause whilst waiting for a kiddie to cross. To be fair, our traffic laws now allow for pedestrians to have right of way when crossing a "turn off". However, that is a life limiting thing to depend upon without keeping an eye out!<p>Never mind phones, why not keep an eye on the real world and stop pretending that wearing bins will stop a car killing you?
Seeing almost feral iPad kids has put me off giving my children a portable screen, especially one with unrestricted access to the internet.
The surprising part is I grew up around computers and the internet (got my first email when i was 4) and have always had a desktop PC around, but somehow gravitated towards building websites, small C games, and even though YouTube, Metacafe, Facebook, Miniclip were easily accessible, me and a lot of my peers never got addicted to them.<p>Maybe it's the way games and apps are designed these days and attempt to hijack your attention, nearly all of them utilising a similar UX pattern (infinite scroll videos, stories, for example) and the effects it has on developing children could very well be magnitudes higher than how it affects adults severely stunting their intellectual growth. If adults are developing attention issues due to such patterns, can't imagine what it must do to children.<p>I think I'm just going to give them a dumbphone, like a cheap Nokia and computer access at home, but also something else to think about is bullying that is pervasive based on your status and wealth often displayed as the latest iPhone, Playstations, etc and the chance of them being outcasts for not conforming to such structures.
Do you ever get periods of time where you're just not interested in your phone? Periods of time when you don't even feel the compulsion to unlock your phone and scroll, so there's no real willpower required to abstain from it?<p>That's the state of mind I want to be at. I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.<p>I do get those streaks of no doom scrolling from time to time, perhaps for a few weeks at a time, but, for now, I keep reverting back to my old compulsions. But I will keep working on it :)
Forcing every adult to exercise 30 minutes a day would probably also have positive health outcomes. But would that be a good enough reason to introduce such a policy?
If the results of the study had gone the other way, would anyone have changed their minds about smartphone bans? Or would they have just pointed at the limitations of the study as reason to disregard the findings...
I feel like smartphones should be banned but<p>> On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban,<p>20 minutes seems like kind of a small impact.