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

Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”

There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.

Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.

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.

It wasn’t that big of an issue at first. While my kid had a cellphone from middle school onwards, it wasn’t until social media boom that she started spending more and more time glued to the screen. Around Junior (11yr) year.

I definitely think the scrolling scrolling scrolling has done something negative to society.

The social media boom timing pretty much matched the popularity of iPhones. So the problem is really they began to have a full computer/screen in their pocket at all times. The usage trends are always going to change when the new tech enables them, social media and constant messaging wasn’t really enabled on dumb phones that existed previously.

I don't agree, we had about 5 solid years before she was doom scrolling and using social media. The first iphones in the home were the first gen iphones of 2009. Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones. It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015 and by then we were on our iPhone 6's. This is when it started but it didn't become a "problem" until 2018...