School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2024/research/school-smartphone-ban-better-sleep/

by jonatron • 2 years ago

1014 651 2 years ago

york.ac.uk

MeetingsBrowser• 2 years ago

I feel like smartphones should be banned but

On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban,

20 minutes seems like kind of a small impact.

jonatron2• 2 years ago

To finish that sentence:

, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.

An hour seems like kind of a big impact.

loloquwowndueo• 2 years ago

“ sleep. On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night. ”

An hour of extra rest does seem significant. Also averages without standard deviations are yucky.

meow_mix• 2 years ago

4% is a pretty big lift imo

And who knows how good it is for the quality of that sleep

hammock3• 2 years ago

Indeed, four times greater than the absolute risk reduction of sever illness or death provided by the Covid vaccine (Nb: among adults), which was also mandated in many places

And the connection between sleep quality and early death is very well documented

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

20 mins is actually pretty big. The difference between chronically sleeping 20 minutes less than you need, and always getting the rest you need really does add up quite significantly, especially when it comes to learning and the ability to pay attention.

tecoholic• 2 years ago

Next para says

50 minutes earlier during the phone ban weeks compared to the week before the phone ban

That’s a big improvement. Combined with them falling asleep faster, that seems like an hour of extra sleep at least.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

If it’s the daily average then it’s a considerable impact

verteu• 2 years ago

I found a couple interesting papers/preprints on smartphone bans:

- https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906

- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240

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?)

slow_typist• 2 years ago

Just drop them a line and ask whether they plan to publish their research in a more formal way.

In my experience scientists respond pretty well.

https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/lh/#pu...

irjustin• 2 years ago

Yea this is pretty annoying how hard it is to discover the sample size and methodology.

Is this even published/peer reviewed or did it just go to TV?

I'm extremely skeptical of accepting results/conclusions at face is this whole thing is around a show?

eru• 2 years ago

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?

m00x2• 2 years ago

It would be almost impossible to enforce.

School smartphone ban has an obvious way to be enforced since it gives teachers the ability to do what they've wanted to do all along.

standardUser• 2 years ago

In US schools most students are forced to exercise about 30 minutes per day during gym class. I had this from at least 6th-10th grade, though maybe only a handful of days per week had any serious exercise, usually running or playing sports like soccer or basketball.

doug_durham6• 2 years ago

Not in any schools I attended or have had children in. You got gym maybe 1 to 2 times a week. In elementary school you were expected to run around during recess. In middle school and high school we had a proper gym class 3 days a week.

ramon156• 2 years ago

Something something "my body my choice"

The mere thought of someone advising them would be literal hell.

drekipus• 2 years ago

Yes absolutely

card_zero10• 2 years ago

I would make use of the increase in my strength and stamina to be very vigorously angry about being forced to exercise.

yapyap2• 2 years ago

It would, but when you reach a certain age these institutions dont have power over you anymore to such an extent and when reintroduced to being as controlled as people were when they were back in school but in their adult lives at their older age they tend to freak out.

Yes 30 minutes of exercise a day and other ”law” like one preventing people from overeating to where they wouldn’t be able to walk anymore would be wildly positive but seeing as it’d impose on the freedom to be unhealthy it would not work.

LinuxBender• 2 years ago

It's been a thing in Japan off and on for a few decades at least resulting in fewer sick days. [1] I could see commercial gym's being upset if this were implemented. In the US and EU it would probably have to be voluntary at first with really good incentives to get people into it and would probably have to remain voluntary for one or two generations.

I think a harder challenge would be to get rid of all the bad foods and snacks. Facebook might be a good place to test removing bad foods given how many people live there and never leave. I can not even begin to imagine the incentives that would be required for people to adopt it.

[1] https://www.trtworld.com/life/japanese-companies-introduce-e...

nerdponx• 2 years ago

In the US and EU it would probably have to be voluntary at first with really good incentives to get people into it and would probably have to remain voluntary for one or two generations.

Health insurance companies already offer gym reimbursements. But that doesn't matter if you have a bad diet and bad sleep and spend too much time working or commuting, and don't feel well enough to benefit from a gym membership.

Heck, there's literally a free gym in the office building where I work, but few people use it because they are busy working during the work day.

card_zero10• 2 years ago

You're fucking serious?

I already get worn out physically by the thing I do for a living. I negotiated delicately to keep the amount of it I do to a minimum so that I can also do the things I regard as real life, which take place in bed with my laptop. If the government forces a mandatory half-hour of exercise on me I will get militant. I'm not gonna be frogboiled into accepting it, either.

One-size-fits-all solutions suck donkey balls.

Do they really have compulsory exercise in Japan? You say "off and on" ... so, I'm guessing, currently off?

Oh, from the link, it's mandated by the company you work for. That would select for office workers, and possibly fits Japan best considering the culture of being always in the office (asleep).

hammock3• 2 years ago

In my family, absolutely.

In my workplace, they pay you $$ for submitting step counter data, etc.

In my church, the run club that encourages this has been great.

At my country club, the “challenges” they release every month similarly have been great and the vast majority of the community participates in them competitively.

Do you mean federal policy (for some odd reason)?

mcmoor• 2 years ago

Funnily there are some Japanese and Chinese companies forcing employees to do aerobic in the morning

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

I think the Japanese ones are more about team building and stretching before physical labour jobs, and less about cardiovascular health.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Typical hn comment. Spin a good effect as no different than coming from another cause and then argue how it should not be made into a rule. False equivalence.

dabbledash• 2 years ago

No. Because it's inappropriate to treat adults like children.

Ponet1945• 2 years ago

why?

andrepd• 2 years ago

"Adult" being the crucial word here. I also can't tell adults to eat veggies but I can my kids :)

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

Say what you like about Noam Chomsky, but I recall him once saying that it is OK to cover children as their parent, presumably to build good habits. Thinking back about my childhood, I am sure that my parents did similar, to much benefit to me as an adult!

bdangubic18• 2 years ago

once you are adult you can claim “oh my freedom” and all that stuff… kids have no such luxury, it is on parents/teachers/community/policy/… to get them as best we can to adulthood and hence these two are not comparable. should we let kids snort coke during recess might be though (we don’t)

lmm• 2 years ago

Banning something that you ban for adults as well is defensible. Insisting kids follow a standard of "healthy" that you won't apply to yourself smacks of hypocrisy and bullying.

caseyy7• 2 years ago

Deliberately introducing it as a cultural change would probably significantly increase life satisfaction (through prolonging healthspan and lifespan both) and have positive effects on the economy. Cultures that value exercise (mainly Asian examples come to mind) benefit from all these things.

inerte• 2 years ago

This is a false equivalency. We already take away many things from adults.

aorloff2• 2 years ago

I have a feeling certain religions are onto something in this area.

yapyap2• 2 years ago

not surprised honestly, a ban on smartphones in the workplace is also in place in most retail establishments due to productivity reasons

talldayo• 2 years ago

If you work in retail, smartphones are not the bottleneck of your productivity.

hooverd• 2 years ago

no, it's just bosses being petty tryants

m00x2• 2 years ago

I feel like giving teachers and schools more freedoms to implement these things would be a great overall effect.

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.

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.

toomuchtodo6• 2 years ago

An important component is solving parent entitlement as well. They are stakeholders, not customers.

(~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)

hammock3• 2 years ago

An important component is solving parent entitlement as well. They are stakeholders, not customers.

Only in public schools. At private schools, they are customers, and paradoxically the concomitant “entitlement” is not a bug, but a feature

gus_massa2• 2 years ago

What happens if both parents work?

Sajarin• 2 years ago

Blaming the “system” is easy but is it the whole picture?

How much of it is due to culture? Teachers in western countries are not as respected as teachers in other parts of the world. A few teachers abuse their authority and that results in outrage and lawsuits from parents, rightfully so.

I can imagine in many schools in the US, if a cellphone ban were to be implemented, there would be a large outcry from parents on how restrictive or overreaching that policy would be. Even if the net positives (as shown in the article) are proven to outweigh the pragmatic concerns (i.e I might need to be in communication with my child) why take the risk?

Not to be supporter of “the man” but it seems unfair to point the finger at a system that takes steps to preserve itself without also acknowledging the hostile environment in which it operates.

Parents have greater zeal in suing the school than they have in attending open board meetings.

threeseed2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't group all Western countries together.

The US has always been unique in having a very libertarian, freedom at all costs culture.

For example in Australia we have recently banned children from using social networks and this was supported by about 80% of the population.

eimrine4• 2 years ago

Teachers in western countries are not as respected as teachers in other parts of the world.

It can not be true for most of Asian countries with a really rich history of beating bad students.

bawolff7• 2 years ago

We're talking about banning cell phones all day (not just during school hours).

I don't think teachers should control what kids do outside of school. Teachers aren't parents (or jailers).

blitzar3• 2 years ago

giving teachers and schools more freedoms

Sounds like socialism (/s)

cyberax5• 2 years ago

We need to remove technology out of the school entirely (outside of computer science classes).

No iPads instead of books, only manual note-taking, regular blackboards/whiteboards instead of projectors, no calculators, and so on.

Wool2662• 2 years ago

Non of that paper stuff! Stone tablets only.

rkagerer• 2 years ago

Would abaci be too high tech?

cyberax5• 2 years ago

No. Paper and handwriting is great.

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

100% agree for elementary school, probably up until high school even.

chollida1• 2 years ago

In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any issue at all this year.

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.

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.

myko2• 2 years ago

yep, my kids HS has a cloth rack hanging on the door to place phones in so the kids can grab them when a shooting is happening but doesn't have them during class

ipaddr2• 2 years ago

How often is their a school shooting when this would be useful?

Phelinofist• 2 years ago

Honestly this is really sad

zozbot234• 2 years ago

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.

If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard though.

Cpoll• 2 years ago

You can't send messages with an old-fashioned pager. (There are two-way pagers, but I don't think those were ever common).

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

According to my daughter, the Ontario ban had little effect on her high school. Before the ban, some teachers allowed phones, some didn't. After the ban, some teachers allow phones and some don't. Many teachers use internet resources in their classroom, and phones are how the students access those. There are Chromebooks available, but not enough for everybody, and they are in rough shape.

And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.

bdangubic18• 2 years ago

this sounds possibly like a whole lot of things but “ban” is not one of them - maybe something like Ontario “you can do whatever teacher says” thing

getnormality• 2 years ago

Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to organize their daily activities around that possibility, regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?

ta988• 2 years ago

Yes it is really part of the thought processes of people I have met too. Really strange how the reality can be distorted to make room for guns.

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

When you do active shooter drills during school three or four times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a skewed perspective on the real risk.

Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.

bnj2• 2 years ago

Yes, New York State is considering some form of cell phone restrictions in schools from the State level and there's substantial push back from parents who object that they need their kids to have a cell phone for safety reasons like a school shooting.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

Replace shooting with fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc

IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help translate.

rrr_oh_man6• 2 years ago

Fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes do not happen several times a week in the US, unlike mass shootings.

zdragnar4• 2 years ago

As an American, I'm at a loss trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school.

Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one, phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones.

Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even today.

ubj• 2 years ago

Also as an American, my experience was that the majority of high school students didn't care about the rules on phones. I attended high school when Motorola Razr flip phones were the hot new technology, and kids used them in class all time. People learned how to do T9 texts without looking so they could slip their hand into a backpack or pocket during class. There were even ringtones high pitched enough that adults typically didn't hear them. All of this under the threat of phones being confiscated if caught.

I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them.

bdangubic18• 2 years ago

rare as in 1,200+ in the last 4 years… https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings

that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else

warner257• 2 years ago

trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school

I was a high school senior in 2003-2004, and my dad gave me a phone to use that year, and I think most of my classmates had one too, but I don't actually remember there being any problem or policy about it. I assume that's because phones were just phones at the time, and who were you going to call during class? I don't think I even sent or received a text message until a couple years later.

By 2011, when my wife started teaching in a public high school, it was the wild west with phones. The school policy gave her the authority to take them away during class, but then she was responsible for documenting and safekeeping them, so she didn't bother despite the constant distraction as kids openly looked at them during class.

The capabilities and market penetration grew so fast that I think most schools were just caught off guard, trying in vein to implement rules after the phones were already in every kid's hand.

protocolture3• 2 years ago

My only issue is that its baffling to me that you would deprive kids of a platform that is going to be relatively omnipresent in their lives.

Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.

Aerroon3• 2 years ago

This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the idea that we shouldn't ban things by default.

The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?

Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.

tzs• 2 years ago

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?

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.

Or maybe not having a smartphone directly improves mood, and people in a better mood have an easier time getting to sleep?

rrr_oh_man6• 2 years ago

Doesn’t screw up your dopamine system

phire4• 2 years ago

Because it wasn't a "smartphone ban".

They convinced a group of students to give up their phones completely for 21 days, outside of school too. The reason why they went to bed sooner is somewhat obvious.

It's not something you can replicate as a longer term policy, the students only participated because they knew it was short term and (presumably) they were rewarded for it.

And I suspect the effects only work in the short term. You removed their primary source of distraction and they simply wasn't enough time to develop new distraction habits. When I was a teen, I distracted myself from bed with TV, books and the family desktop computer.

gregwebs• 2 years ago

challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their smartphones completely for 21 days.

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.

toasterlovin2• 2 years ago

I have a longstanding hunch that the whole “teenagers need more sleep” thing is greatly exaggerated and it’s just that teens just stay up too late because they’re extreme stimulation seekers. Phones have made things worse, but we’ve had TVs, etc for a long time.

rrr_oh_man6• 2 years ago

Teenage dogs need more sleep, too. I think it’s a bit of both.

boredatoms• 2 years ago

Its having to get up before noon thats the true problem, they just live in a different timezone

tomrod• 2 years ago

Man, if my body was changing again so much that I was getting stretch marks, growing a few inches a quarter, and (for some) putting on 5s and 10s of pounds of muscle, fat, and bone, I'd imagine my metabolism would need sleep as well.

UniverseHacker3• 2 years ago

It’s well documented that need for sleep continuously declines with age. However what you are saying is likely also true, which combine to make kids really sleep deprived.

Aurornis• 2 years ago

Teenagers do need more sleep. They also naturally tend toward later hours. This phenomenon even extends to similar developmental phases in some other species.

That said, the availability of artificial lighting, then the availability of TV, and now the availability of phones have made the problem exponentially worse by removing the natural boundaries that bracket out daytime hours.

I have friends and family who are teachers. As they tell, there’s an obvious bimodal distribution where some kids are going to bed at reasonable times and others are bragging about staying up to completely unreasonable hours. It’s a badge of honor for some to barely sleep at night.

Like most things it comes down to parental involvement. The gulf between students whose parents care and those who let their children do whatever they want is massive.

bawolff7• 2 years ago

Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night.

Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.

lazyasciiart2• 2 years ago

Or if they just had parents controlling them?

lesuorac• 2 years ago

Or C code wouldn't have any bugs if developers were more careful?

adamtaylor_132• 2 years ago

I think the implication is that there are parental authorities who can enforce this. Doesn't take much willpower when you've got people who will help you against your will!

noduerme• 2 years ago

I too have had this sense of superiority about the negative outcomes of other people's addictive behavior. It's easy to blame people for not having willpower. But (and I say this as a former casino owner, former bartender, and someone who worked on early Facebook games trying to maximize engagement), even intelligent people with better than average self control are no match for the sophistication of systems that have been designed, studied, and iterated upon for the sole purpose of breaking down human self control. Looking at myself not being a degenerate gambler, drinker or social media user, I suspect it's only because I have first hand experience being on the other side of the table in all those cases. When people do congratulate themselves for their own willpower, they tend to have other issues and addictions which they hide from public view, and/or they are recovering.

No one goes without being deceived in their lives. And teenagers with little experience are the easiest to deceive and to hook into addictive behaviors.

_fizz_buzz_• 2 years ago

Those are 8 year olds. So there is at least the option that parents take the phone away at night.

unparagoned• 2 years ago

Funny enough studies link night owls with having less self control

tomjen3• 2 years ago

Thats a bad faith take. You are assuming that putting phones away at night does not mean that the phone is still in the same room.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

Look, I am guilty of this. "Maybe people should eat less instead of popping Ozempic", etc. I have been on both ends of being an absolute rock and an addicted mess, so I can understand both sides.

That said - one has to go through the initial hurdle of buying junk food, or getting a prescription for a drug instead of taking a hard look at their life style first.

Phones are different. THEY ARE ALWAYS THERE, so resisting falling back into negative habit loops is never-ending, hard work.

I've struggled with this, and I came up with some mind hacks: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...

sahmeepee5• 2 years ago

Not really comparable because these are 12 year old children.

Not only could the phones be put away at night, but universally available parental controls could be used to lock the phones at a specified time each night.

We do this. It is just part of parenting, like deciding the time of bedtime.

trogdor• 2 years ago

If you are saying that just based off of the linked article, I don’t think that is clear.

phire4• 2 years ago

Seems clear enough to me:

"challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their smartphones completely for 21 days."

I'm not sure how you can read "completely" as "only during school time"

andai6• 2 years ago

I did a project once where I put my phone away before bed (switched off and in another room) and kept it off for the first few hours of the day, along with my wifi router.

I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed" to turn them back on.

warner257• 2 years ago

along with my wifi router

I'm all about eliminating phones, but I'm curious to know what you accomplished for several hours without network connectivity in general. Whether I've been working from home or in an office, a network outage basically meant taking the rest of the day off because nothing could actually get done.

safety1st5• 2 years ago

Yeah so the smartphones and socials can be difficult addictions to shake, but this is the flip side of it: when you do put them aside for an extended period of time you often see your productivity absolutely go through the roof.

I started sticking my phone in my bag or in another room during my afternoon work session and my productivity with that time doubled, in terms of actual output - tasks completed, lines of code written etc. and probably better ideas generated.

I started turning it off after dinner as well as running a simple script that blocks FB, Reddit etc. on my desktop - my "productivity" with my evening time also basically doubled, whether it was books read, games played, extra work done, time spent with people who matter, keeping my place cleaner, etc. just more life happening basically.

The more hooked you are, the more massive the benefit of quitting cold turkey. Once you see it a couple times the dynamic inverts and it gets harder to go back.

From personal experience, yeah of course if you rip the phones out of the kids' hands they're going to experience a variety of improvements... that's what happened when I ripped it out of my own hands.

I do find it interesting that this study saw little in cognitive improvements - it was only a 21 day study. I thin they are there but they're a long burn, reading books for instance is a skill that has returned to me but it's been very slow and gradual, I should probably lean even harder into turning off my phone and any short-form socials trash.

grecy• 2 years ago

We have our wifi router on an old school power timer. It turns off at 10pm and back on at 8am.

It’s a great signal I need to go to bed.

slavik81• 2 years ago

On the other hand, I locked my phone in a rental car and it took a week for them to mail it back to me. I was surprised, but I found that it made very little difference. I did not feel like I had any more time than usual.

The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.

wraptile• 2 years ago

n of 8 is essentially meaningless tho

shawabawa3• 2 years ago

It's not n of 8. The article doesn't mention cohort size (year 8 is what 7th grade is called in the UK)

Found another source that said n was 26

jweir2• 2 years ago

Our eldest child has a phone. But it has to be kept downstairs at night - no tech in the bedroom before bed.

Hasn’t been a fight or a problem at all.

jstummbillig3• 2 years ago

How old are they and since what age do they have the phone? What constitutes as before bed and at what age do you think you'll lift the no tech restriction entirely?

caseyy7• 2 years ago

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.

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 at all. They are very significant.

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.

johnchristopher3• 2 years ago

What did you replace it with (if you did edit: scratch that, I brain froze and was thinking of "did you replace it with a regular phone") ? Most accounts I read of people ditching their smartphones mentioned they started carrying an ultra light laptop or small candy bar computer (for instance). Basically increasing inconvenience to reduce usage.

bdangubic18• 2 years ago

you can accomplish a whole lot of the same keeping the phone and deleting all social media apps and accounts (what I did). I still use my phone as a map and camera and many other things … my screentime went from 7+ hours to hardly ever over 40 minutes daily

rrr_oh_man6• 2 years ago

how do you deal with otp, mfa, mandatory id scans, face scans, compulsory apps, etc.?

aniviacat• 2 years ago

Otp and other types of mfa can be done on PC, too.

Mandatory apps (that I am aware of) should also be runnable on your PC using an Android emulation layer.

Mandatory ID and face scans can be done via webcam.

What I am more curious about is how they deal with navigation when traveling. A phone seems like a must-have whenever you are using public transport (e.g. a plane).

caseyy7• 2 years ago

I have a phone I set up specifically to disallow content consumption. It has a permanently on Downtime mode (iOS) with only a handful of apps whitelisted – mainly the ones you mentioned. The notifications are disabled, too. I don't have the parental controls passcode, I asked someone else to set it and hold on to it; so it's a lot of effort to bypass the content blocks.

I needed this to ween off social media, scrolling, mindless content consumption, otherwise it was just too convenient and easy to access all that to make the change.

Generally, this phone isn't a problem with regard to social media use or browsing. So it gets used only as a tool, and left in a drawer most of the time. My main phone is a dumbphone but with this second phone, I've not lost access to banking, work apps, etc.

UniverseHacker3• 2 years ago

I really want to do this but there are so many things I need to do that now require a phone- key apps to access doors, concert tickets, etc. are no longer offering a non smartphone alternative.

caseyy7• 2 years ago

Well, I think it was mainly the social media, notifications, and content consumption – not so much the smartphone itself. Dumping the smartphone was simply a "cold turkey" solution.

mattlondon4• 2 years ago

I don't think a smartphone itself is the issue, but the apps that are on it.

Keep the phone, ditch social media apps/sites.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

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.

This horror of a link is what Google Maps shows with Street View:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9469423,-2.6380275,3a,75y,...

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.

That road is the A37 which I was told a while back conveys at least 30,000 odd vehicles per day.

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!

Never mind phones, why not keep an eye on the real world and stop pretending that wearing bins will stop a car killing you?

aorloff2• 2 years ago

I live far enough away from you that I think your English needs tuning up, and I couldn’t agree more.

In my college town the scooters around campus, ridden both on the roadway and on the sidewalk, add another element of risk to the “headphones are not helmets” crowd.

WWLink2• 2 years ago

I mean, ok? What's the big deal? So you have to drive slowly and carefully and wait for people who are walking and might not be paying the best of attention?

I can see how that may be annoying but how many seconds/minutes does it add to your commute such that you would be so bothered about it?

Edit: And to clarify, I believe your post is incredibly tame and politely written. I've seen people get super furious over the slightest inconvenience - both in person and on the internet. Like they feel 1000% entitled to drive 5+mph over the speed limit and any interruption in that results in them laying on the horn and yelling obscenities.

mattlondon4• 2 years ago

An A road is typically a high-speed high-throughput road. Stopping to wait for someone to slowly cross can be dangerous. So you are stationary there and then some comes around the bend at 60mph not expecting a stopped car and wham.

Not saying cars should have priority, but there you go

GeoAtreides• 2 years ago

He has to drive slowly, because he knows the road layout, the other drivers though... i think that was OP's point

duxup2• 2 years ago

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.

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).

I wonder if the school's ban encouraged parents to set similar restrictions?

jonhohle3• 2 years ago

Our school has similar restriction, but then shoved Chromebooks in front of every kid and they use chat instead of text, watch videos, and play games all through class instead. When I’ve tried to find alternatives for my more distractible kids, the school acts like we’re putting them out.

What is the point of a cell phone ban when it’s just replaced with a more capable device?

dylan604• 2 years ago

If a school doesn’t have an IT policy of blocking YouTube and socials, then they are just inept. If the school is buying instructional material that requires that, then they are inept. If an instructional company is making anything requiring any of that, they are inept.

arrowsmith7• 2 years ago

If my child’s school had them playing games on Chromebooks all class, I would move them to a different school.

duxup2• 2 years ago

At least for my kids their Chromebook traffic is all routed through the school (or the school's filter provider...) and through a web filter. It is updated regularly, presumably by the filter provider.

arrowsmith7• 2 years ago

This was the policy at my school ~20 years ago. “Smartphones” didn’t exist, but mobile phones were ubiquitous and every kid owned one. But they weren’t allowed in the classroom, and if you were found to have one in the classroom (even if it was switched off in your pocket), it would immediately be confiscated and you wouldn’t get it back until at least the next day.

Why would any school not have this policy? What possible reason is there to allow phones in the classroom? How is this even a debate?

graemep8• 2 years ago

Confiscation until the next day could cause all sorts of problems. For example my daughter needs a smartphone app for bus tickets. It would be a lot more expensive to buy a single ticket to get home and I suppose (especially with younger kids) its going to be difficult to ensure they have the money to get home - or the phone might be their main means of payment.

People are dependent on smartphones to live day to day, in a way that they were not on simple mobile phones.

andrei_says_5• 2 years ago

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.

Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.

Izikiel43• 2 years ago

Link?

mmiyer• 2 years ago

https://getbrick.app/

hawaiianbrah• 2 years ago

Been seeing ads for a while, finally caved two weeks ago and bought one. I’ve been on vacation since it arrived but I’m honestly quite excited to get home tonight and set it up.

adamtaylor_132• 2 years ago

I've also been receiving ads for this and I gotten tell ya... Getting a testimonial from a HN'er on a random thread is a huge vote of confidence. I've been toying around with the idea of getting one.

ajoseps• 2 years ago

I've also been using this and I think it's a great product. It's exactly as you describe it, just some extra friction makes a huge difference. I've even bought some for friends

babyoil• 2 years ago

All the replies under this comment sound like shameless advertising

Taek• 2 years ago

I feel like we're getting closer to the moment where all high quality discussion will be locked behind invite only forums. (anyone can read, need an invite to write)

I can't really think of any other solution to the prevalence of bots as it gets easier and cheaper to write human seeming content

andrei_says_5• 2 years ago

As the person who wrote the original reply I agree, and can ensure you that I have no skin in promoting a product - my intention is to promote the outcome.

If someone makes this happen with custom rfid chip I can tape to my fridge I’ll be happy enough.

wyre• 2 years ago

What keeps you from just leaving your phone unlocked? Does the unlock expire after a certain amount of time?

s1artibartfast4• 2 years ago

Nothing but the desire to sleep well

jorisboris2• 2 years ago

My best ideas come in my bed

Ideally I have a kale phone to note them

Because it’s too easy to go to social after I noted down my idea

guerrilla4• 2 years ago

You do know paper exists, right? ;)

RowanH• 2 years ago

Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...) let's a 3rd party app do that..

Neat idea

andrei_says_5• 2 years ago

When disabled, the app icons are greyed out, similar to when screen time restrictions have kicked in.

DrawTR• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, the product demands $50 for what is essentially a < $1.00 3D printed case and a < $1.00 NFC tag. You could probably (not endorsing it!) find the NFC code online and just dump it to a tag of your own.

GreenWatermelon• 2 years ago

I would go limb and suggest that, maybe, developing the app is the expensive part.

gretch4• 2 years ago

If you know how to do all of this, you probably make more than $100 per hour at your day job (maybe a lot more!).

In which case you can jump through all those hoops, or you can just go to work for 30 minutes and then buy it.

andrei_says_5• 2 years ago

I bought it because it did not require a subscription and because it sounded like a smallish business - told me I had to wait a few days for it to be 3D printed.

I love the simplicity of it, the fact that it’s driven by fulfilling a need and not by greed.

Not affiliated in any way. Wish I had given this to myself years ago.

Also wish I had come up with the idea myself.

iammrpayments• 2 years ago

There are so many confounding variables here, the study doesn’t have a control group.

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.

protocolture3• 2 years ago

If the goal of schooling is to improve sleep and mood, they should also include giving up school entirely for 21 days as a control.

blitzar3• 2 years ago

They try it every year in the summer. It has significant negative effects on all the parents involved.

graemep8• 2 years ago

I know that is a joke, but it has enough truth in it to be a sad comment on a society in which parents do not enjoy time with their kids.

EternalFury3• 2 years ago

My kids are phone drones. I failed to prevent it. I’ll never forgive myself.

warner257• 2 years ago

That's heavy. If you're willing to share, I'm curious to hear more. Like when did you have kids, when did they get their hands on phones, how did it progress?

My own kids are still too young for this to be an issue, and I'm encouraged to see more and more collective action to delay or restrict smartphones and social media, so I feel like we have a chance. I've said before that people who had kids 5-10 years before me (say, 2005-2010) seem to have suffered the worst of it, totally caught off guard by the smartphone and social media boom.

EternalFury3• 2 years ago

Your estimate is dead on. My first was born in 2005 and my second in 2009. Social media and the early sexualization it brought were a problem for sure. But pretty much every interaction with these devices is messing with dopamine regulation.

blitzar3• 2 years ago

You have two options; a) pivot to a new product or b) just ditch them and start over fresh.

walthamstow2• 2 years ago

It's fixable, it's not a lost cause. Question is, are you and partner phone drones yourselves?

EternalFury3• 2 years ago

Not at all at first. More and more since the pandemic.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

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.

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 ?)

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 ?

card_zero10• 2 years ago

There was a control group, according to the site of Stanway school. However the whole thing is very much a TV show, featuring a Big Brother presenter, the bassist from Busted, and a TV doctor who hopes it "kick-starts a national conversation about which aspects of technology use can HELP our children and which aspects are in fact HARMING them." No preconceived ideas there at all, right? But I can't find a paper, with details of the experiment, such as how participants were selected and how they were motivated.

https://stanway.essex.sch.uk/swiped-the-people/

The thought occurs that the participants were being goodie-goodies, pandering to adult concerns, and saying the right things such as "yes I feel much less anxious, also I want to pick litter, save some endangered snails, eat vegetables and be virtuous in every way because all the things adults say are so right, look how responsible I am, praise me".

I guess a better test might be an involuntary one, like a solar storm that knocks the phone network out.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

I couldn't find any mention of it, either on the Stanway site nor the York University which was the posted article.

Also the page on your link feels incredibly short, is there something that's not properly loading for me ? (at the same time I have a "2 minutes" reading time estimate on the header, so it can't be that long ?)

That's all I get:

SWIPED: The School That Banned Smartphones is a landmark two-part documentary series, produced by BOLDPRINT Studios, which tackles the timely issue of the impact of smartphones on children’s behaviour.

Through a groundbreaking social experiment that challenges a group of teenagers to give up their smartphones for 21 days, SWIPED is exploring the impact of technology on mental health, social skills, and academic performance.

In a world increasingly dominated by screens, SWIPED dives into the heart of a bold experiment at The Stanway School. Led by celebrity couple Matt and Emma Willis, a group of Year 8 students are forced to confront the reality of life without their constant companions: smartphones.

For three weeks, these young participants willingly surrendered their devices, stepping into a digital detox. As they navigated this unfamiliar territory, cameras captured their evolving experiences, revealing surprising insights into the profound influence of technology on their lives.

Guided by experts from the University of York, the documentary delves into the science behind smartphone addiction, examining how these devices impact sleep patterns, attention spans, and social interactions. Through a series of tests and challenges, the students’ mental and emotional states are meticulously monitored, shedding light on the potential benefits of a technology-free existence. SWIPED is more than just a documentary; it’s an invitation to rethink our relationship with technology and prioritise our mental, emotional, and social well-being.

card_zero10• 2 years ago

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.

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.

techNoob123• 2 years ago

yes they had a hypothesis. that’s how science works.

You left out the other benefits the study found. those benefits seem to be quite significant. In fact, I will go as far as to say that sleep has been well associated with student performance.

You remark comes off as disingenuous and not ready for serious review.

j45• 2 years ago

Cognitive ability may have been growing as it does.. just been allocated elsewhere (scrolling).

Sleep is the real superpower.

daemonologist• 2 years ago

Commonly known as the scientific method.

card_zero10• 2 years ago

In what way?

jader2014• 2 years ago

I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos.

I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction.

Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

Liquix• 2 years ago

left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.

rrr_oh_man6• 2 years ago

I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

Not sure.

I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

You should read what Socrates has to say about book addicts.

We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.

Aerroon3• 2 years ago

Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why.

Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?

maccard• 2 years ago

I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly

Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.

It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/

djtango• 2 years ago

I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again

jrtageh2• 2 years ago

I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.

carlmr• 2 years ago

Apart from whether the days are enough or not to wean off a long-standing addiction. Maybe a 3% boost in working memory has compounding effects over time as well.

You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in working memory long enough. You can't think about complex things if you don't have the working memory capacity.

If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.

Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.

Tenoke3• 2 years ago

If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.

Or you might accumulate way less knowledge because you don't have a phone to get information from and are getting say 300% less information overall despite retaining 3% more of what you get.

riedel• 2 years ago

This typically good science. You have hypothesis and test it, rather than doing an intervention and reporting every random thing that happened.

Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on cognitive development in the long run.

IshKebab4• 2 years ago

Yes but their conclusion is "well our hypothesis is probably still right, we just didn't look hard enough" rather than "maybe it doesn't have a significant effect".

hgomersall• 2 years ago

Why should the null hypothesis be preferred?

flexie• 2 years ago

By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.

As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.

alkonaut• 2 years ago

Someone realized it's not a good idea to hand a bunch of teens cameras, give them unlimited possibility to bully eachother anonymously and then force them to share a space for 8 hours every day, including changing clothes and showering for gym class. In hindsight it seems obvious.

mattbee• 2 years ago

I think that's the norm in UK secondaries too. My 11yo is allowed to take his phone to school for but policy is it stays switched off, in the locker, until the end of the school day.

kwakubiney• 2 years ago

So essentially almost every form of research?

lugu• 2 years ago

What is wrong with that? Isn't it how science works: you make an hypothesis and test it.

Xelbair• 2 years ago

but you conform to the experimental results.

you can suggest further experimentation to prove another point, but this is different from assuming a priori that effect WILL happen. The issue is not in the idea itself, but how it is phrased.

bilbo0s4• 2 years ago

I think so many people, even most here on HN, have forgotten how the scientific method works.

jpace121• 2 years ago

That’s a very uncharitable interpretation of what they wrote, and goes outside of how what they wrote is supposed to be interpreted.

The researchers are not claiming that cognitive ability changes would definitely take longer than 21 days to appear, they’re suggesting that that is the next thing to test.

drawkward4• 2 years ago

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.

You are alleging this without evidence, and have no credibility to base your claims on.

exabrial• 2 years ago

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

jldugger• 2 years ago

Okay, do late school start next!

scott_w2• 2 years ago

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!

Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.

s777• 2 years ago

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.

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).

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).

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.

dainiusse• 2 years ago

Let's be honest. Its not only the kids. It is everyone...

jstummbillig3• 2 years ago

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.

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.

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.

paraschopra• 2 years ago

Interesting study, I wonder if it could be easily replicated!

h4ch14• 2 years ago

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.

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.

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.

vanderZwan• 2 years ago

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)

I'm pretty sure that that's exactly the problem: modern phones and tablets are interactive TVs first and foremost that happen to have the capability to work like computers if you put in a lot of work.

Even if all you did was play games in the pre-smartphone era, those games were not optimized for addiction and microtransactions.

jstummbillig3• 2 years ago

I vividly remember conflicts with my parents over sitting in my room in front of a computer. Potential benefits are never obvious, and certainly not to everyone. "Small C games" seem innocuous in hindsight (specially through the hn lense), but could easily have been center of debate and concern of well meaning parents back then.

h4ch14• 2 years ago

You're absolutely right, thankfully my father was in the tech field back then and could very easily discern if I was wasting my time or actually learning/doing something. Even then I was scolded quite a number of times to go do my homework ^_^

Creating a framework of communicating and channeling children's energy into a path that aids learning in today's attention/dopamine hungry world is something I'm still struggling with.

eptcyka• 2 years ago

I tried writing C games when I was 12 and never got anywhere. I personally feel like I've cultivated quite the overgrowth of dopamine receptors now due to the access of the internet I had as a kid. Curiously, my parents tried to limit access for a long while, and for a long while, the desktop PC only had games and no internet. I do not think giving my child free access to the internet via a desktop would have a similar outcome to yours - not without replicating a whole lot of other environmental factors.

h4ch14• 2 years ago

Yeah, raising children in a world such as ours doesn't seem bereft of a number of variables that can skew the results of their upbringing.

Sometimes I wish there was a standardised framework for raising children but they're too unique and individual for something like that to work.

graemep8• 2 years ago

Maybe it's the way games and apps are designed these days and attempt to hijack your attention

Very much this. I think a social media ban would have most of the benefits of a mobile phone ban.

While you mention FB, you do not say when, and I do not think it was always as addictive.

The other problem with phones is that thy are very much consumption devices. You are not going to build websites, let along games, on one.

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.

The real solution there is to find a different environment for them. Unless its a really toxic environment, its not a big issue. Do you really want your kids to grow up with having to conform to status and wealth displays?

People also tend to overestimate this. lots of people said my kids would be ostracised because we did not have a TV. it was not a problem.

h4ch14• 2 years ago

While you mention FB, you do not say when, and I do not think it was always as addictive.

You're correct, I haven't logged into my account since 2018, but I am talking about the period from 2007-2013, now I am assuming since Meta has Facebook & Instagram & Whatsapp the UX would be more or less the same across platforms like stories/reels or some form of infinite looped community engagement.

Unless its a really toxic environment, its not a big issue.

I think bullying exists everywhere, it ranges from being explicit, like everybody knows what is going on to very implicit bullying which involves people being iced out from social circles slowly but surely, but I agree with your point, I'll do my best to equip my children with tools to navigate such scenarios, since they exist in adulthood as well. Also these experiences are imo essential for character development ie; being sure about who you are and where you come from without being swept up in the beliefs of your peer group.

Tade03• 2 years ago

My neighbours have a way out of this for their 8yo, even though their intention was to just stay in touch as he plays outside unsupervised: smartwatch.

Functions perfectly well as a phone with some additional utilities, but doesn't draw the sort of attention an equivalent phone would if that's what you're going for.

Hobadee• 2 years ago

My wife is a teacher. She could have told you this for free - no study needed.

Arch-TK• 2 years ago

I hope that by the time I have a kid at school age, that phone bans will be a common thing in schools in the UK.

imaginationra• 2 years ago

Lifetime mobile phone abstinent human here.

Sleep and mood (thumbs up)

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)

"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)

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?

andkenneth• 2 years ago

I wish I could do this. Do you even use a flip phone or anything? Or simply no cell phone?

basisword2• 2 years ago

How do you accomplish this (in detail if you don't mind - I'm very curious)? How do you keep in contact with others? Does your job not require a phone for e.g. 2FA? I'm increasingly coming up against obstacles to no-phone life now. For example, certain venues only distribute concert tickets via a phone app and their 'workaround' if you don't have one is 'ask a friend'. Have there been situations you've come across (e.g. some sort of emergency) which have made you reconsider having no phone?

doug_durham6• 2 years ago

Good for you, but you are implicitly engaging in the naturalist fallacy. Phones are objects. Social media and gambling-like games that exploit the limbic system. If you want to regulate those that would be a good start.

rob_c7• 2 years ago

We did _not_ need a study on this.

Schools used to ban mobile devices at the door and at some point gave up, like everything, someone gave up.

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.

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...

supersrdjan4• 2 years ago

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?

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.

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 :)

k8sToGo• 2 years ago

I have those periods when I'm busy with other things. If not busy, then the phone is a way to stay busy.

Don't think we can truly idle and sit there and do nothing.

If you do not want to unlock and scroll, find something that keeps you busy and is more entertaining than whatever you have on the phone.

Tade03• 2 years ago

Don't think we can truly idle and sit there and do nothing.

Of course we can. It's quite enjoyable in the right circumstances.

throwaway6734• 2 years ago

try out a cat s22

zuppy• 2 years ago

I was in the same place and I found a solution that works for me and it almost made me totally quit Instagram (the thing that was taking my time). Set the notifications to be shown on lock screen only for critical apps (phone, sms, etc) and configure the others to just show badge counters. Now, at this point you have red bubbles everywhere, for this issue (on iOS, but I'm sure it's a solution for Android too) you apply a shade for all the app icons. It's a feature that came with iOS 18. Even if this seems small, the fact that you don't see them all in red, makes a huge difference. Now, I only look when I want to look.

doble-io2• 2 years ago

I really hope you get what you want the way you describe, but for everyone else reading this: don't dismiss hacks like unplugging your router.

Everyone should use external control (aka stimulus control [1]) more shamelessly. Stimulus control is a well-known technique that gets the job done for day-to-day problems like "phone compulsion."

When you ask what willpower is, people think of "magical mental points." Common knowledge suggests that needing external control (like putting away your phone) means you lack willpower, spirit, maturity, or you're-not-going-to-make-it™. Like there are two opposite camps: willpower/rational decision making/system II [2] vs external control. This is unwise and is not supported scientifically.

Let me explain in CS-like terms: If life is a search problem, the action space is insanely enormous. Sitting in my office, I could jump, eat a candy bar, look at my phone, throw my computer, play the cello, sing, or work. The first "pruning" is simply availability - I won't play the cello since I don't have one here.

The same applies to distractions. We live in a digital environment where accessing distractions costs nearly zero. So maintaining cognitive hygiene through stimulus control (switching off your router, putting away your phone) is good.

Sadly, willpower is what common knowledge sets as the good/moral/mature behavior: if you need to put away your phone, you are less valid or whatever culture-specific narrative you're into. Ignore those ideas and keep your mind clean: put your router on fire if that's what you need at first. You will get better.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/stimulus-con... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...

supersrdjan4• 2 years ago

Nono, I specifically mentioned no willpower required. Like in your example of available actions, I also have zero desire to jump out of the window, so don’t have to expend any willpower to resist it. Similarly, on my good days, I don’t feel attracted to my phone. What do you say about that?

Nasrudith• 2 years ago

It is the default for me. A smartphone is a versatile but inferior device in terms of UX.

agile-gift02622• 2 years ago

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)?

Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.

beeflet• 2 years ago

so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?

d4rti• 2 years ago

Banning phones is the practical policy. Schools could not police the myriad of apps and websites.

ChrisLTD4• 2 years ago

To what end? Why do school kids need a smartphone?

pmg101• 2 years ago

"Love and belonging" is the third in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

It's difficult to feel a sense of belonging if all your peers have access to something you don't, even worse if that something is your social space itself.

(Full disclosure: I am rampantly anti smartphone. But I understand kids' need to have it.)

sebgan2• 2 years ago

We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.

eitally• 2 years ago

There are a lot of things schools themselves have done that end up essentially requiring it. Here's a short list from my kids' district:

* Use an LMS called Infinite Canvas. Among other things, the kids have to submit homework online -- which can be done on the web app -- which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook?

* Use Teamsnap for sports team management: scheduling, roster management, messaging, etc.

* Use Instagram for school-official communications, including things like social events, counseling services, college visits, and sports team news.

... There are more, but the point is that phone apps make certain things easy and schools are taking advantage of that fact, even if they're simultaneously banning them during school hours.

Lalabadie• 2 years ago

Sure, the difference is that one solution is immediately accessible to a school, and the other will be lobbied against by billionaires for a decade before meaningful change has a chance to happen.

pixelfarmer• 2 years ago

Yeah, it is down to the apps, not the phone as a device as such. Engagement driven software exists on consoles and PCs / laptops as well, and I'm not even talking about "social media" stuff, but pretty much all live service games and beyond. In return, I've stumbled over people that cannot even imagine why someone would take a smartphone into a far off-grid area, because for them the phone is synonymous with "always on" and all these stupid apps.

Problem is, the regulations regarding all that will take much much longer because the very fact all this engagement driven software is actual poison for the brain hasn't reached the stage where you can just hammer down facts and drown everyone who still thinks this is a good idea. They should show how all that affects overall productivity and all the billions and trillions they throw out of the window, how it pours oil into the fire of more and more people being overly stressed (which is not just work causing this) etc.

jrtageh2• 2 years ago

For increased happiness it is the ban of addictive websites. Likes, dislikes and most importantly, flagging, censoring and cancelling, externalizes your locus of control and makes you think that you live in a dystopian world.

The Internet wasn't this bad when people were on Usenet and no one would censor your thoughts.

For cognitive abilities it is the phone ban itself.

qwjd• 2 years ago

Naturally, this comment is flagged. Naturally, without explanation, as is the practice of dystopian wankers.

docmars• 2 years ago

I think you make a really great point:

Living with the social (organic) consequences of sharing unpopular opinions is much better than being silenced and digitally imprisoned, because the latter takes away one's dignity to think or build community around ideas which disagree with the status quo.

baconmania• 2 years ago

This is an enormously disingenuous take. When Usenet was the only game in town, children were not stumbling into hyperoptimized addictive experiences tailored to every flick of their eyes. You don’t think that thousands of engineers building TikTok or Instagram to hijack your child’s literal capacity for attention and healthy social development “externalizes your locus of control”?

Reducing the algorithmic targeting of children (by taking away phones or otherwise) is no more censorship than telling someone to stop standing in front of you and shouting in your face.

firesteelrain• 2 years ago

It’s the phones. There has to be outright bans or restrictions put on them and the apps. But the schools also are app-enabled these days. My 7th grader has to respond to email from the teacher on assignments.

But back to the apps and social media, when we put restrictions on use and got back to the real focus on family and school, then the healing started. It was instant.

I encourage everyone to have phone timeouts.

Levitating2• 2 years ago

Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with it all the time.

Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your face.

It's extremely addictive and imo harmful. It ruins attention spans, it ruins social development and it causes insecurities.

I am in favor of banning smartphones in schools. I have seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing.

warner257• 2 years ago

Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. Take away either one (or take away the unlimited, always-on network access, like I have a 500 MB per month data plan) and I think we're having a very different conversation.

seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing

I'll make the obligatory point that the situation seems not much better for older people (Millennials, Boomers, etc.) who are also consuming a shocking amount of video on their phones throughout the day, to the point of it being anti-social.

IggleSniggle2• 2 years ago

I mean, snake still has a lot of appeal.

amalcon• 2 years ago

One of these things is in the power of the school district, as long as they can convince local parents that it's a good idea (not easy, but studies help). The other is in the power of... who? Possibly nobody. Possibly the American federal government -- but it's not even clear that they have the power to do this.

Either way, the same "they" does not have agency over both things. It makes sense to consider the thing you can actually do.

tootie3• 2 years ago

Sorry for posting this more than once, but it's not anything:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

The York study was a tiny set of kids and the only change was sleep pattern. There have been numerous studies done on larger groups and they results coalesce around screens not being a problem.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 years ago

All because of the pervasive ad-based business model. Ban ads and things will change. Some says "ad are easy because payments are too costly" but the day we ban ads, payment processors will change their own model to make sure they capture all the market previously owned by ads. And freemium works for platforms that pretend their users can't pay.

bdcravens3• 2 years ago

How do you police what's addictive on purpose vs what's addictive by use? Who polices the difference between addictive additives versus standard driving of engagement? After all, I think sites/apps Youtube or even Hacker News would be guilty depending on how you draw the lines.

agile-gift02622• 2 years ago

For starters, forbid behaviour and engagement surveillance. Without that data it would be impossible to fine tune the apps to be addictive for each individual. Just with that, it'd probably tackle most of the "device addiction". Then if you want to go the extra mile, consider forbidding things like personalised recommendations, infinite scrolling, auto-play-next, loots and even notifications on by default.

rapind2• 2 years ago

Easy. Just make it illegal (with massive fines) to advertise to and track kids. Kill the business model and solve the problem.

It's such an easy sell too. Hey parents, any objections if we prevent companies advertising to your kids? How about stopping them from tracking everything your kids do?

tclancy3• 2 years ago

Think of it more like banning them in movie theaters. It’s not necessarily what one kid is doing, it’s the effect on the whole.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

Both. It's tailored for addiction in a portable device that's never turned off.

NoPicklez• 2 years ago

I agree with the apps are bad argument because they are just so addictive

I think its very challenging to come up with a solution of what part of it makes it addictive and how they can not do that.

Taking that logic we would need to remove almost all video games, social media and even online videos.

They are all marketed to keep people engaging with them.

Almost everything we create has been developed so that people engage with it, that's why we have marketing companies.

washadjeffmad• 2 years ago

Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest?

Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world.

I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.

thrw42A8N8• 2 years ago

I don't know any single anti-gun-regulation person who manufactures guns. Anyways. I am not app developer blah blah and I'm against this. Don't want your kids to be cash cows? Don't give them a credit card...?

onlyontheapi• 2 years ago

do they drive revenue from ads too?

kelipso2• 2 years ago

Acting like kids are so easily controlled. You just need the passcode if you credit card is in apple wallet, for example.

gmerc• 2 years ago

Attention itself is being milked, it has very little to do with money on the frontline. We a/b test these products, genetically pruning them to maximum addictiveness ("time spent on platform") and peer pressure / virality and we're maximizing people's attention spent. Adults are unable to handle it, kids even less so.

Even if you play Roblox for free, you're a) still critical to the developer (whale economics require many peasants for the whales to feel comfortable spending themselves to higher status), and you're still trading off activities that benefit you long term (reading, learning, actually interacting with the non toxic world)

api3• 2 years ago

I call social media and other addictionware companies the “tobacco companies of the mind.”

The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids.

Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one side) lost their mind.

Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don’t maximize engagement. Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.

We’ve kind of known since the dawn of media that trash maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Right, mainstream news has been doing this same clickbait for half century at least and it is the reason we allow it from social media. We're desensitized to it and actually seek it out. We live to suffer and be enraged, because in our minds democracy depends upon it.

sourcepluck3• 2 years ago

I'll be using "tobacco companies of the mind"!

It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people dance around and explain away the situation.

It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a way out of the situation (barring some major technological or social shift, provoked by who knows what).

joenot443• 2 years ago

I'm an app developer who's spent my career building excellent iOS apps, previously with Google and Snap.

I have every intention of raising my kids as far away from smartphones as possible, ideally until they're at least teenagers. My fiance and I have already discussed keeping the household as de-screened as possible, it's something we consider a lot.

It's interesting you'd suggest that an app developer would have a conflict of interest that other engineers might not. In my experience, engineers who work with mobile apps, especially ones in the social space, are way, _way_ more likely to understand and be wary about the dangers in overexposing kids to a life of feeds. Colloquially, we call this "seeing how the sausage gets made".

ToucanLoucan2• 2 years ago

That's exactly what I was going to say. Every software dev I know who works on apps, social media, etc. all keep their kids from going near the shit. They know, conflict of interest or not. I've not seen anyone behind these products once they hit a mature state where they start psychologically stripmining their audiences who's eager to get any of their family onboarded.

canucker2016• 2 years ago

I'd qualify that phrase as, "seeing how the factory sausage gets made".

Social media at the start may have been neutral to slightly negative, but once creators started optimizing and the various "algorithms" were installed and A/B tested, what came out the end is some pretty nasty stuff mentally. Junk food for the soul.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

IME tech folks are, on average, more in-tune with the "keep kids away from screens" thing than the general population. I think we know enough about it to fear it.

vintagedave• 2 years ago

Like the old joke: A non-programmer will fill their houses with tech: TV, internet-connected fire alarm, security cameras, Alexa...

A programmer keeps an axe on the wall next to the electric kettle.

bdcravens3• 2 years ago

We could also disclose who is a parent and who isn't, to make decisions about which comments to deprioritize.

II2II2• 2 years ago

There are plenty of people who work with children yet may not have children: teachers, child care workers, medical doctors, psychologists, social workers, etc.. In each case, we see children in contexts that parents do not. In some of those professions, we may even see individual children more than their parents do. Perhaps it is best to avoid deprioritizing people simply because they don't meet an arbitrary criteria.

(I've had people scream at me because I am not a parent. When they found out what I do professionally, they were immediately humbled.)

tclancy3• 2 years ago

It would also be nice to attach what ages your kids are, because someone arguing against Big Brother and censorship sounds a lot like someone who doesn’t have to get a kid to bed tonight. Not that opinions can’t be valid, but let’s have our cards on the table.

temporarara2• 2 years ago

Reading a book to young kids worked wonders back then and once they were old enough to run outside without supervision they exhausted themselves quite naturally at the end of the day. You can really do million productive things with kids if they aren't feeling sleepy instead of dooming them to bad sleep with those screens.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Hmm. There are other kinds of apps you know, besides free to play and social drugs.

The only mobile phone app I did is a boring industrial thing that reads some sensors and massages the data however the user directs it. It's so boring I bet no one ever starts it except during work hours.

interludead3• 2 years ago

Yep, there's often a lot of money at play, and it’s easy for the conversation to become less about kids' well-being and more about protecting profits

mordae• 2 years ago

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.

neycoda• 2 years ago

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.

caturopath• 2 years ago

Filed under "Kids these days"

ben_hn3• 2 years ago

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.

dmd• 2 years ago

This is the same argument people make for not banning guns, and it's a bad argument there too.

ben_hn3• 2 years ago

I've never lived in a country where carrying gun is allowed and im not much familiar with the topic, so I won't comment on that. But I lived through the time that there was no phone and then when there were phones with non of these junk apps on them and now. This, I believe, makes it very clear, what the real cause of these problems is.

CoryAlexMartin• 2 years ago

It is certainly a stronger argument in the gun case, since defensive usage significantly outweighs criminal usage and most people don't even shoot anyone. Here we're dealing with a situation where being addicted to your smartphone is the norm, not the exception.

huuhee3• 2 years ago

Banning phones is simpler, and has no downsides. You are at school to learn, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.

Besides, lots of things can be addictive and distracting. Personally I'm addicted to reading news. Had smartphones existed when I was a kid, simply banning social media and games wouldn't have been enough.

dalton01• 2 years ago

Banning phones has no downsides. You're in the office to work, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 2 years ago

OK, but anyone who makes this argument should at least put some effort into thinking about how to define what is a social network, and what is an addictive game. It’s not that you’re wrong, but you need to think about the execution and making sure that the criteria has a strong basis in principle that can be used to justify the decisions on what to ban. Otherwise you’re just suggesting the impossible

ben_hn3• 2 years ago

You're right. Defining the criteria for marking an app as harmful might not be straightforward or easy. But we're talking about the education and life of the children. These difficulties shouldn't a preventing factor. Maybe it's easier to allow services and apps one by one when there is a need only. Whatever that's not, let kids have a phone with internet and everything that comes along.

amluto2• 2 years ago

There were plenty of games around when I was a kid, and I’m not convinced they were materially less addictive. But none of them could fit in my pocket or could send me notifications.

tootie3• 2 years ago

It's nothing. This study is narrow and shows no changes in cognitive capability, only sleep. A huge longitudinal study has shown screen time has minimal effect on cognitive ability or behavior of kids:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

There are far worse things in modern culture that are stressing out kids out.

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Do you suppose that study is the final word on topic? Replication is an important part of the scientific process, as are converging lines of evidence.

create-username2• 2 years ago

It’s only sleep, something that is not related with mental health, adolescents barely need and they already indulge a lot in

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Define phone. See.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 years ago

Just ban advertising. Everything follows from the all out war on attention, and ads are its fuel.

njarboe• 2 years ago

I have a pretty libertarian steak, but I do sometimes think that banning advertising in general might be so beneficial for society that it would be worth taking the free speech hit. Not sure how in the hell you enforce it though. "What is an ad?", for example.

create-username2• 2 years ago

Sure. That’s why I guess that my teenage pupils are actually researching scientific evidence when I catch them bare handed rubbing their laps.

I give them the benefit of the doubt because it’s not the mobile phone in class what’s damaging, but only very few uses of it

linhns• 2 years ago

Sounds a good policy but inherently not enforceable. Will end up similar to privacy as there's simply no way to effectively control the offshoots. You ban social networks, they will masquerade it into self-development products. You ban addictive games, they present an argument of socialising, etc...

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

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.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Part of this is education, most of it is tech companies wanting to make money from kids (including mine.)

interludead3• 2 years ago

I agree, we need to regulate tech more thoughtfully, yet we also need to rebuild a culture that allows kids to connect

novaRom• 2 years ago

stops all notifications after 20:00

Better to stop absolutely all notifications. When I need to know if someone of my friends is asking something I can open a chat app and check. If something is urgent then just a phone call. The amount of distractions is enormous, thus disabling it by law might be more effective solution, otherwise intellectual decline/underdevelopment of the future society is predetermined.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

Whilst I understand your point, I don't think banning notifications is actually a good step.

They are a symptom of something else. For group chat, its missing out on socialising, Nobody wants that. How do you allow kids to socialise via mobile phone is that actual question there.

For video based stuff, _what_ are they being exposed to? how tightly does the selection algorithm push the viewer into certain categories? Who is making that media, and why?

Given that UK had the BBC to "inform and entertain", why are we outsourcing the entertain and leaving the "inform" to people sponsored by shady companies and malicious actors?

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise.

Could this have died due to tech?

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

I don't think so, it started much earlier than that. Unless tech includes having a television in the living room.

There was the Great Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 90s, and there were more and more places where you need a car to get anywhere. Urban crime, or at least the perception of it, also did its part. It started much earlier than the smartphone era in the US and the UK, but there's still parts of the Nordics and other places where kids go out to socialise and play in the forests or fields or whatever's around today.

Tech on the one hand has given kids a new way to socialise, even if you can't meet up in person for whatever reason, you can still video call and play minecraft together. The other side of that is all the advertising and tracking and addiction-fuelling. The particular combination of always with you, always notifying you, and turning the addiction-generators up to 11 that you get on a smartphone seems to be a whole other level though.

I wanted to make another point but I've got a ping because someone has posted on discord, sorry brb.

AzzyHN• 2 years ago

Not really, no.

People have been talking about the "death of the third place" for a while, now.

wussboy• 2 years ago

Car-centric cities make allowing kids outside too dangerous.

Foobar8568• 2 years ago

Tech as in TV? See Roald Dhal views on TV and kids.

I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a suburb with forest and playground in walking distance, there were less and less kids outside, or for shorter duration.

TV, cable TV and video games just killed everything.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

It was less tech and more the worry about kidnapping and antisocial behaviour.

As people became "less local" as in, you didn't know the people in your street, it meant that unaccompanied kids could be more of a shit without their parent's finding out.

More old people getting or feeling threatened meant that something must be done. ASBOs were one thing, but also the feat that your kids might be mixed up in that sort of stuff, meant that free-range kids were the preserve of "seen to be failing" families

logifail2• 2 years ago

We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe.

That sounds as though you believe spaces such as these no longer exist?

(Full disclosure: have three kids, don't track their location, don't believe they are "unsafe" going to play outside)

tgv• 2 years ago

because …, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise

Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That’s no reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society and youth.

SaltyBackendGuy• 2 years ago

We can bring that back. I agree with all of your points. I am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have a low understanding of the impact social media is having on them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into messaging apps. I am terrified.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

I was a freerange when I was a kid. from about the age of 6 I was left in the garden/scrubland out the back, to be feral with about 4-12 other kids that lived on houses that backed onto the same scrubland.

My wife is and was horrified by this. She was shuttled to other kids houses, and never allowed to go off on their own until deep into her teens.

Objectively kids are much much safer now, however they are not allowed freedom outside. Most of this is because of safety (where are they, are they being abused, have they been run over, are they in a gang, etc etc)

So _you_ as a parent need to entertain them

Giving your kid "the internet" shuts them up, and means you can do other things. However that comes with a bunch of risks that most parents aren't aware of.

rapind2• 2 years ago

Just need to ban (make it criminal) to advertise to and track kids. Eliminate the incentives and solve nearly all social media problems with kids overnight (along with most garbage mobile games).

tqi• 2 years ago

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...

madjam002• 2 years ago

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.

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.

tclancy3• 2 years ago

Sure, but it’s not like kids are missing out on computer options and not every kid is going to be a developer. Any kid who wants to play with technology today has much more of an opportunity than ever before (in middle and upper class districts in the US in my experience).

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

such bans do work. one or a few will find ways to circumvent, but the vast majority will end up complying.

our minds tend to fantasize a lot about our early days. our memories are flawed and what we remember now are full of gaps filled with fantasies that make us feel good.

InkCanon• 2 years ago

When I have kids (or if I ever run a school somehow), I would give my kids hackable, terminal devices that could connect to the internet with work. Both sides are doing it suboptimally. The anti smart phone crowds are suppressing kids natural desire to look for learning and new experiences outside of taking exams. The smart phone crowds underestimate the power of these multi billion dollar addiction engines. The optimal solution is to work with the children's natural curiosity and provide them a runway to growth.

IggleSniggle2• 2 years ago

I agree, but as someone with kids, the problem is that it has to compete with the entire environment. It's not just screens, although that's the biggest distraction factor.

There's a million more toys of every variety that are dirt cheap and that they will be given as gifts, or their friends will be given as gifts. And there's just such a huge amount of _actually great_ media to consume that's much more available, ie graphic novels and age appropriate books, way more higher quality kids show, etc etc. I'm not complaining, but a terminal environment is going to take a lot of careful planning in order to compete with an embarrassment of riches.

I still think PICO-8 did a pretty good job of capturing this; given their licensing, though, I wish they had released an actual console in addition to the fantasy console. It runs fine on a Pi Zero.

O5vYtytb• 2 years ago

I agree it's interesting. But back then (I'm 34) we only had desktop computers so the distraction time was limited.

I remember being forced to take a typing class my senior year in HS, at which point I was already a very proficient typer. So I figured out how to hexedit the program save files and mark my exercises complete.

I feel that the new era of phones and apps have two major drawbacks:

1. The always on distraction in your pocket and on your wrist.

2. The walled garden hardware and software that makes it nearly impossible to tinker and gain a deeper understanding of the magic behind the screen.

MoreMoore• 2 years ago

I had a T9 dumb phone because that's all that was available. Smartphones didn't exist yet. There was no reason to be on your phone the whole time, at most I might be distracted because I'd be texting a crush during class. I wouldn't be scrolling through social media - it didn't exist yet or what did exist wasn't accessible by phone.

amluto2• 2 years ago

I think some of the difference may be the form factor.

With traditional computers, the computer was in a specific place, and people would use a computer when they were at the computer. Then, when it was time to eat lunch or go to the bathroom or go to the next class, the computer was gone.

On top of this, a real keyboard is much faster for typing, which means that less time is consumed merely transcribing one’s thoughts into text.

biztos• 2 years ago

On the one hand, I think "Bad Thing banned for kids but the smart kids get around the ban" is a pretty good state of affairs.

On the other hand, I fear that the "think of the children" crowd will attach legal jeopardy that will mostly fall on the smart kids, their parents, and indie developers.

awfulneutral• 2 years ago

I think about this a lot because I was the same, I couldn't stop messing around with computers and I owe my career to it. But if I was a kid today I'd probably just get caught up in the easy distractions and not learn to program. It's a very different environment now.

dbbk3• 2 years ago

Flash games in Excel files was the way

skirge• 2 years ago

Steve Jobs way (works if rich enough to live without smartphone)

interludead3• 2 years ago

It's a controlled environment, so there's probably a honeymoon effect.

doug_durham6• 2 years ago

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.

logifail2• 2 years ago

The phone itself is just a computer. Using the phone to write, help with homework, or communicate doesn't seem to be the problem.

If you want children to learn to be able to write, you have to get them to do it themselves. Not with a computer, not with a phone, not with ChatGPT, with a piece of paper and a pen(cil).

They may not like this(!)

strken• 2 years ago

[citation needed], unless you're talking about the merely physical aspect of writing

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

The phone itself is just a computer.

But one with the special feature that's it's around you all the time.

Even a computer in a child's bedroom is not around them when they're at school, going to/from school by whatever means of transport, eating meals outside their room, going to a diner/restaurant/cafe... with family (or friends), and many other activities.

cryptozeus• 2 years ago

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.

Dwedit• 2 years ago

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.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

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.

pedalpete• 2 years ago

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.

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.

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.

jonatron2• 2 years ago

The kids were wearing smart watches for the study. Source: The TV show, Episode 1, about 9 minutes in.

Ciitizenswerds• 2 years ago

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.

e-clinton• 2 years ago

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?

School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

Related Stories