All Phones Should be Banned from All Schools

I am breaking my behavioral advice column format for the first time since I started writing it in 2014.

The normal format of answering questions about how adults can teach kids to be better people will return next week.

I have never broken format because, in my lifetime, there has never been a topic in education that was so important to the lives of kids.

This one is different.

I’m breaking format to plead with all readers to do whatever they can to call for and support a total ban of students having phones in schools. For the purposes of this column, “phones” means all phones, smart and dumb, and watches and devices that can make calls, text, or connect to the internet. By “in schools,” I mean no phones past the front door of the school where phones can be collected. Any devices that have medical necessities (i.e. glucose monitoring) obviously need to be allowed, but must have all non-medical internet functions disabled.

I have been working in schools for nearly a quarter of a century. I’ve spent many thousands of days in schools teaching first, third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students, and working as a school administrator. For the last decade, I’ve worked full-time as a behavioral consultant and led a team of people who travel throughout North America doing what the column does: we teach educators and family leaders how to reinforce positive behaviors, make negative behaviors non-functional, reduce negative behavior counts by 85 to 100% in classrooms and common areas, and create more functional, calm, pleasant environments in schools and in homes. We demonstrate how to do this in classrooms, lunchrooms, hallways, playgrounds, and bus lots. We spend our days in schools with kids.

I won’t concentrate on the simple fact that since teens started using smart phones, their rates of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed, and that there is a clear and causal link between smart phone usage and these disorders. Since I’m not a psychologist, I’ll leave that to the experts, including Jonathan Haidt, who explained this in his 2024 book, " The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

Since I do work in schools, and have done so for many, many thousands of days, I’m going to concentrate on what I am an expert on: reasons to ban phones, evidenced by what I have seen first-hand. Simply put, kids are addicted to their smart phones. This includes having their brains hijacked by social media companies whose mission is to get kids addicted to paying attention to their platforms and then selling this attention to advertisers.

It’s not just that the social media companies are stealing our kids’ attention, taking it away from their studies, and selling it to the highest bidder. What’s even more sinister is the means by which this attention is captured and held. The algorithms know that shared content that makes kids angry, jealous, and resentful will keep their attention more effectively than more benign content, so the algorithm chooses to push out the meaner, more incendiary comments and posts, often notifying kids with an attention-catching buzz in their pockets while they are sitting in class.

What this means in real schools is that a middle school math teacher has no chance of competing with social media for the attention of a student when Facebook or Snapchat or TikTok effectively owns that kid’s attention before they ever walk into the school building that day.

It’s a particularly unfair fight when, let’s say, a high school sophomore girl is called something horrible on Snapchat during second period, 200 of her classmates see the post during third period (because Snapchat knows to push out this hateful content), and then some poor teacher is supposed to teach these kids Algebra during fourth period. Not only will there be no learning happening in fourth period, but it will also disrupt the rest of the school day, complete with lunch drama and perhaps a fistfight at dismissal. Social media is stealing kids’ attention, and it’s also making them angrier and meaner.

Not only have I seen these dynamics firsthand, I have also seen phones cause the utter zombification of entire school populations when they are allowed: students in class, or moving from class to class, or in lunchrooms mindlessly scrolling instead of learning, interacting with others, or just having a childhood.

I am calling for every appropriate municipality, state, province, school board, and country to completely ban all phones in all schools. My team and I have already seen school-wide bans effectively put in place by schools all over the country. It’s not hard.

What is exponentially harder is trying to raise and teach a generation of kids whose brains and personalities have been destroyed by their phones.

We just need to have the will to do what’s right for our kids, and the time is now.