This is wild to me. When I was growing up, my mom would make sure I didn't sleep through my alarm as she was walking out the door for work. My dad worked shift work in a factory so I would only randomly see him. Usually after the brief morning 'get up!' I wouldn't see either of my parents again until the street lights came on at night and I rushed home to eat. Once I could drive, I had a job after school until ~10PM, so I would go days without seeing my parents. I grew up in the 80s/90s.

Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.

Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc

And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.

If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives

Their children in school are being distracted and their learning is being hindered.

The parent at work is being distracted and their productivity and focus is being hindered.

It's a lose-lose situation all-round. When I was a kid I managed to get through the school day without looking at my phone (went through during the transition to smartphones, first iPhone).

I can't comprehend where we go from here if people use their phones this much. One of my colleagues probably sacks off 2 hours or so of their working day constantly checking their phone, and it's vibration patterns on the desk distract me working adjacent to them.

The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing.

Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting.

Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.

As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.

It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.

I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.

I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here on HN, but the amount of social woes we are currently experiencing that are indirectly the result of a dramatic increase in social media consumption is a lot higher than I think most people expect.

There are just so many aspects of life that one only really gets nudged into doing at least partially out of boredom, despite ultimately fulfilling so much more. When you can stave off boredom instantly and indefinitely, there are all kinds of experiences that will be substituted.

I recently heard the comedian Jimmy Carr make an excellent comment about how we as a society think of boredom as a negative, when it's actually a positive: "Boredom is just unacknowledged serenity."

This. People these days talk about boredom like it's the worst thing ever.

He doesn't make any claim as to the addictiveness of poetry, music, or Shakespeare: he pointed out that we use different language to describe childhood compulsions for one activity than we do for another.

My own anecdotal experience on the topic is that I was such a voracious reader as a child that it was a problem in much the same way I see people today complain about kids in screens. I'd hide personal books behind textbooks while I ignored classes, hide under the covers with a flashlight to stay up all night reading, the works.

> At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.

All of these articles are so confusing to me because they act like banning smartphones in class is something new. Is this actually new? Were there schools where students weren’t getting in trouble for using phones during class?

The closest thing I’ve seen to an actual ban is a rule that phones must be kept in lockers during the entire school day, including between classes and during lunch. I could see this requiring adjustment for kids.

However I’m baffled by the articles that imply smartphones were not banned from use during class. Was this really ever a thing?

Even if this is all it’s doing, that’s a win.

Most adults haven’t figured out responsible usage. Down the road, their brains will be more developed. And down the road, the average among them won’t need to learn at the rate we need them to now.

My recollection is that some kids did try to violate the rule by surreptitiously texting during class, and did sometimes get their phones confiscated by a teacher; and also some people had their phones confiscated because they got a call or text and it went off in class, since they forgot to turn it off or silence the ringer (although sometimes kids were just asked to turn off the phone and didn't have it confiscated).

I personally was not particularly inclined towards rulebreaking (or was smart enough to only break rules I was sure I could get away with), and I wasn't the kind of social butterfly in high school who was constantly texting people anyway, so my own phone never got confiscated. Merely having phones (or other electronic devices) on your person during the school day and using them on campus but outside of class times (e.g. during lunch) wasn't against the rules. I specifically remember playing a lot of the Nokia phone snake game on my phone to pass time during lunch or while waiting to get picked up after school - because it was the only game on the phone that was even mildly interesting.

I think if my school had tried to ban having a cell phone on your person at all during the school day, I would've attempted to evade the ban by hiding it more deeply in my backpack or something. And if there were literal bag inspections in order to mitigate this, I would've been genuinely pretty angry about that and tried to think of something else I could do to evade the ban. Being compelled to put your phone in a locked box during the school day, rather than just silence it and not use it during class, seems very draconian to me.

The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.

Later in the article it summarizes how it is enforced.

> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.

  From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens are adjusting to the smartphone ban

Come on people, read.

> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.