Are We Blaming Phones for Our Bullshit?
What if the inanimate objects aren't the problem?
A new study about the effects of phone bans in schools is out, and if you’re thinking “I’d like to have the study summarized by a comedian who browsed some articles about the study after a few beers,” you’re in luck. The study said that bans have a minimal impact on student behavior and test scores. That doesn’t mean that the bans are a bad idea — the solution isn’t to un-ban phones and have teachers try to teach sine and cosine to a classroom full of students browsing Pornhub. But phone bans aren’t a magic bullet; there remains no easy solution to our nation’s Dull Child Epidemic.
Becoming a parent has made me familiar with the discourse around phones (and screens, generally). In some circles, saying “I let my child have a phone” is like saying “I let my child have a machete,” or “My child runs an adorable li’l meth lab in his room.” My boy is three, the big decisions around phones are well in the future, but it’s practically received wisdom among my peers that the culprit for everything from anxiety to depression to restless leg syndrome has been found, and it’s smartphones.
But I wonder if the story is not so simple. As much as I take the points of those who worry a lot about phones — and I’ll address some of those points in a minute — I’m becoming something of a skeptic. Already, by the standards of the ultra-blue place where I live, I’m practically the “let the kid have a BB gun” dad. I agree that kids are subject to some bad, new pressures, and that phones are part of the story, but I think we often often misunderstand and misrepresent phones’ role in that story.
