31 ms·

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

• yapyap 2y ago
  not surprised honestly, a ban on smartphones in the workplace is also in place in most retail establishments due to productivity reasons
  • talldayo 2y ago
    If you work in retail, smartphones are not the bottleneck of your productivity.
  • hooverd 2y ago
    no, it's just bosses being petty tryants
• Ciitizenswerds 2y 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 2y 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?
• MeetingsBrowser 2y 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.
  • meow_mix 2y ago
    4% is a pretty big lift imo And who knows how good it is for the quality of that sleep
    • hammock 2y 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
      • Dylan16807 2y ago
        It doesn't really make sense to compare the raw percentage of two completely different things. Especially when one is a percent change, and the other one is a percent risk. There's a ton of health numbers that work out to 4%. Or 1%. Some of them have massive impacts on your life, and some of them are basically negligible.
  • jonatron 2y 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 2y 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.
  • marginalia_nu 2y 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.
  • 2y ago
• kleiba 2y ago
  [flagged]
• verteu 2y ago
  I found a couple interesting papers/preprints on smartphone bans: - https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240 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 2y 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/#publications-content https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/lh/#pu...
  • irjustin 2y 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 2y 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?
  • ramon156 2y ago
    Something something "my body my choice" The mere thought of someone advising them would be literal hell.
  • dabbledash 2y ago
    No. Because it's inappropriate to treat adults like children.
    • Ponet1945 2y ago
      why?
  • standardUser 2y 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.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • doug_durham 2y 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.
  • m00x 2y 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.
• m00x 2y 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.
  • toomuchtodo 2y 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)
    • hammock 2y 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
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Private school cohort is a minority, and those kids in the aggregate will do well because of their parents’ wealth, income, and time available. Private school teachers typically are compensated appropriately and empowered as well (as opposed to public teachers who are not). Managing expectations, but also realistic expectations. (home/virtual school two kids under 10 in our family, my observations and perspective from interacting with both public and private schools and the parents there, ymmv)
        • airstrike 2y ago
          The student-to-teacher ratio there is also wildly different. For example, it's 4:1 at one school in New York[1] vs. the 15:1 national average (it's 12:1 in New York) [1]: https://www.stbernards.org/about-us/faculty--staff https://www.stbernards.org/about-us/faculty--staff [2]: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-12-education/student-to-teacher-ratio-public/ https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
• cyberax 2y 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 2y ago
    Non of that paper stuff! Stone tablets only.
    • rkagerer 2y ago
      Would abaci be too high tech?
      • caseyy 2y ago
        "You won't always have an abacus in your pocket."
      • bawolff 2y ago
        Abaci would actually probably be good for making mental math come naturally. As a general rule, i am on team - if you need a calculator in math class then you aren't learning math.
        • thfuran 2y ago
          Because if you're studying real math, a calculator wouldn't help?
          • cyberax 2y ago
            Pretty much. You either do every calculation symbolically, or you need a full-blown computer for numeric methods.
          • bawolff 2y ago
            Either that, or you are trying to teach people arithmatic, in which case having them do it by hand is a benefit.
• chollida1 2y 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.
  • myko 2y 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
    • ipaddr 2y ago
      How often is their a school shooting when this would be useful?
      • QuarterReptile 2y ago
        It hasn't happened yet, but if it did, then it still wouldn't be useful.
      • myko 2y ago
        Not one I'm aware of since my oldest has been at the school, but there has been at another in the same city
    • Phelinofist 2y ago
      Honestly this is really sad
  • zozbot234 2y 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.
• tzs 2y 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_man 2y ago
    Doesn’t screw up your dopamine system
  • phire 2y 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 2y 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.
  • toasterlovin 2y 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_man 2y ago
      Teenage dogs need more sleep, too. I think it’s a bit of both.
    • boredatoms 2y ago
      Its having to get up before noon thats the true problem, they just live in a different timezone
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        I always laughed at the supposed benefit from moving high school start times an hour later with the claim that teens need more sleep. They'd need to move it three or four hours later; getting up at 8:00 instead of 7:00 is not a big difference when your body wants you to sleep for another three or four hours.
        • 1123581321 2y ago
          Was that based on anything? An hour of sleep is a big benefit. You’ll feel a big difference if you give yourself six instead of five hours of sleep, or seven instead of six. Sleeping too late in the day isn’t as high quality; sleep until 7am still is for most people. Students stay up late, but many aren’t regularly staying up past 12. Plus, we do have to compromise with teachers who’d like to have dinner.
• caseyy 2y 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.
  • johnchristopher 2y 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.
    • bdangubic 2y 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
      • johnchristopher 2y ago
        That's not the point. The focus here is on removing the smartphone out of the system, not removing features from the smartphone.
        • bdangubic 2y ago
          that is actually not the focus. phones in it of themselves are not actually a problem, what we do with them is. you get phone companies to provide under-16 phones which have ability to call, text, use Map and limited browser capacity and not a single soul would complain about kids having phones on them. not a single soul might be a stretch as of course there’ll always be someone but you get my point…
• gerdesj 2y 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,326.62h,97.77t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1srvchdpt_qNsO9xAwB4u5uw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-7.769655411264054%26panoid%3Drvchdpt_qNsO9xAwB4u5uw%26yaw%3D326.62205193594406!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMS4wIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExMjMzSAFQAw%3D%3D 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?
  • aorloff 2y 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.
  • WWLink 2y 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.
• duxup 2y 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?
  • jonhohle 2y 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 2y 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.
      • rob_c 2y ago
        Yeah but most IT graduates working in a UK school on that salary are beyond inept in all honesty which is why do y many kids are able to find ways around the tills they use...
        • sahmeepee 2y ago
          That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment. I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum. Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them. This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£1bn turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software packages than just one secondary school I used to work for. What you realise over time is that the technical tools are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need to use their existing disciplinary protocols when children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• andrei_says_ 2y 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 2y ago
    Link?
    • mmiyer 2y ago
      https://getbrick.app/ https://getbrick.app/
      • smusamashah 2y ago
        Took clicking shop now button to realise it's iPhone only.
  • hawaiianbrah 2y 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_13 2y 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 2y 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
  • 2y ago
• iammrpayments 2y 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.
• protocolture 2y 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.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    They try it every year in the summer. It has significant negative effects on all the parents involved.
    • graemep 2y 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.
      • Tade0 2y ago
        They do, but to an extent. Kids are kids and want to do kid stuff, especially when the alternative is dull, but necessary work like chores. My daughter likes to help and we as parents encourage her to, but for us it just means more work.
• EternalFury 2y ago
  My kids are phone drones. I failed to prevent it. I’ll never forgive myself.
  • walthamstow 2y ago
    It's fixable, it's not a lost cause. Question is, are you and partner phone drones yourselves?
    • EternalFury 2y ago
      Not at all at first. More and more since the pandemic.
  • warner25 2y 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.
    • EternalFury 2y 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.
      • warner25 2y ago
        Interesting. Thinking more now about why I picked 2005, I'm trying to decide if someone with a kid born in 2000 fared any better. I suppose that those kids were already teenagers when smartphones reached 50% market penetration, and giving smartphones to kids became normalized, and the "pivot to video" happened (really turning "social networks" into "social media" in my mind). I'm not sure if that was better or worse for them.
• makeitdouble 2y 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_zero 2y 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/ 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.
    • makeitdouble 2y 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_zero 2y 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 2y 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.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • j45 2y ago
    Cognitive ability may have been growing as it does.. just been allocated elsewhere (scrolling). Sleep is the real superpower.
  • daemonologist 2y ago
    Commonly known as the scientific method.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      In what way?
      • it_citizen 2y ago
        Hypothesize then experiment
• jldugger 2y ago
  Okay, do late school start next!
• exabrial 2y 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
• scott_w 2y 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.
• bobse 2y ago
  [dead]
• s777 2y 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 2y ago
  Let's be honest. Its not only the kids. It is everyone...
• jstummbillig 2y 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 2y ago
  Interesting study, I wonder if it could be easily replicated!
• h4ch1 2y 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 2y 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.
  • jstummbillig 2y 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.
    • h4ch1 2y ago
• Hobadee 2y ago
  My wife is a teacher. She could have told you this for free - no study needed.
• Arch-TK 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    I wish I could do this. Do you even use a flip phone or anything? Or simply no cell phone?
  • basisword 2y 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_durham 2y 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_c 2y 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...
• supersrdjan 2y 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 2y 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.
    • Tade0 2y 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.
      • ANewFormation 2y ago
        It's also the mother of creativity. Endless relatively high quality entertainment is one of those things that sounds amazing at a distance but has probably just been an overall significant negative on society.
  • throwaway6734 2y ago
    try out a cat s22
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • zuppy 2y 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.
• agile-gift0262 2y 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 2y ago
    so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?
  • d4rti 2y ago
    Banning phones is the practical policy. Schools could not police the myriad of apps and websites.
  • ChrisLTD 2y ago
    To what end? Why do school kids need a smartphone?
    • pmg101 2y 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.)
      • mlinhares 2y ago
        That’s why we need blanket bans where no one has a smartphone at school.
        • ChrisLTD 2y ago
          Bingo.
    • sebgan 2y ago
• washadjeffmad 2y 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.
  • thrw42A8N 2y 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 2y ago
      do they drive revenue from ads too?
      • thrw42A8N 2y ago
        What ads? The ads I blocked with PiHole?
        • frde_me 2y ago
          You just went to where 99% of parents don't even know how to get to. Do you think it should be expected of parents to figure out how to use whatever "PiHole" is to protect their kids? I admire your personal dedication to making it as hard as possible to be exploited, but we really can't expect non-tech people to go to the same lengths. And at one point, we might have to admit that parents who spend 99% of their time struggling to even get by and do the basics for their kids need schools and other resources to help out by doing things such as banning phones.
          • thrw42A8N 2y ago
            My point is - it's under my control, if I didn't know how to do this I'd either accept the ads, pay, or not allow phone usage. There are options. I don't need the government to do that for me, I can decide myself. Here in Europe, phone is necessary for daily life - even as a kid. And it makes it so much easier, better - and interesting, if you teach your kids that. My kids use their phone like a Star Trek tricorder, using various apps and tools to learn about the world around them. Something I wished was possible when I was a kid but it was a pure scifi - now it's here and I'm not going to take that away from them just because some bureaucrat thinks parents can't control their kids enough.
• mordae 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Filed under "Kids these days"
• ben_hn 2y 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 2y ago
    This is the same argument people make for not banning guns, and it's a bad argument there too.
    • ben_hn 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      Banning phones has no downsides. You're in the office to work, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.
• nightowl_games 2y 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.
• KaiserPro 2y 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.)
  • quotemstr 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • rmbyrro 2y ago
      some types of content are indisputably disturbing for kids, like violence, war footage, sexualized content (esp. a sexualized female image targeting male kids & teens), etc
      • cma 2y ago
        So outlaw Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit? Will dating before 21 without a religious chaperone be OK?
        • rmbyrro 2y ago
          you can be agnostic while not objectifying the female image to a point of forming a generation of young man that are addicted to porn and can't talk and connect to a real women
• tqi 2y 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 2y 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.
  • dbbk 2y ago
    Flash games in Excel files was the way
  • tclancy 2y 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).
  • rmbyrro 2y 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 2y 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.
    • IggleSniggle 2y ago
• skirge 2y ago
  Steve Jobs way (works if rich enough to live without smartphone)
• interludead 2y ago
  It's a controlled environment, so there's probably a honeymoon effect.
• doug_durham 2y 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.
  • logifail 2y 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 2y ago
      [citation needed], unless you're talking about the merely physical aspect of writing
  • red_admiral 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  • jonatron 2y ago
    The kids were wearing smart watches for the study. Source: The TV show, Episode 1, about 9 minutes in.