Last week, a group of students from Decatur High School narrowly escaped a tragedy. The students were almost hit by a car when they neglected to do one of the most important things their parents probably taught them to do — look both ways before crossing the street.
The reason? They were all looking down at their phones.
An onlooker was so rattled he posted a public safety announcement on social media. Other area residents chimed in. “Put the phones down already,” wrote one commenter. “What is so important that you have to look at your phone 24/7?”
District officials in Decatur are among the growing number of area educators who also have asked that question. This year, many of them instituted cellphone bans during school hours.
The new policies involve some form of keeping phones in lockers or pouches during the school day, with a few students exempted. Other districts have announced policies requiring phones to stay in silent mode and out of sight.
Parents who oppose the bans cite safety concerns as the primary reason children should be allowed to have their phones during school. And they expressed particular concerns about school shootings.
School violence is a threat to children, but it isn’t the greatest threat. On average, seven children are killed annually by guns in schools, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in his much-referenced bestseller, “The Anxious Generation,” all the reasons we should be more concerned about smartphones than school shooters. Parents tend to overemphasize the potential dangers facing our children in the real world (school shootings, abductions) and dramatically underestimate the multitude of threats connected to a life lived in the virtual world — social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction, Haidt wrote.
School phone bans, hands-free laws, digital detox challenges and other protections that address phone usage are indications of the same problem: We’re in the throes of addiction and some of us are in denial.
Children aren’t the only ones lost in their smartphones. Plenty of parents are lost, too, and they may not recognize the harm being done to them or their children. We can’t expect teenagers, the very embodiment of impulsivity, to have more self-control than adults.
I decided to test my own ability to disconnect from my phone without locking it up. My experiment got off to a shaky start Saturday. I had planned to leave my phone in the entryway and turn on the ringer in case anyone called. That felt like an approximation of the pre-smartphone era. But I forgot to turn on the ringer. When I went to turn it on, I saw a few text messages that I couldn’t resist answering.
After a few text exchanges, I put the phone down again and moved on with the day. Later, I went for a walk and picked up the phone to track my steps. I sneaked another peek at the screen and sent a few more text messages.
Before I checked my actual cellphone usage, I would have guessed I used my phone only a handful of times. I actually picked it up 32 times, which was still less than any other day, but I had no idea how I had spent a full 2 hours, 35 minutes of time on the phone.
By Monday, my daily average screen time was 45% lower than the previous week, which felt like a minor victory, but I needed another perspective.
I turned to author Carlos Whittaker, whose forthcoming book, “Re-connected,” details the seven weeks he spent without screens in his life — two weeks at a monastery in California, then two weeks at an Amish farm in Ohio before he returned home for three additional screen-free weeks with his family. This is the extreme that one adult had to undergo to disrupt his attachment to smartphones.
Spending two months away from home or work is a luxury I don’t have, but I do have an advance copy of Whittaker’s book and I searched for lessons that I might apply to my own life.
Whittaker wrote about all the ways our phones have divided our attention and reduced our ability to wonder, enjoy solitude or be present. He suggested we set boundaries on our smartphone usage, experiment with digital detoxes and find tech-free hobbies. Instead of turning to smartphones, we should visit friends, allow ourselves to be a little bored sometimes or turn off navigation apps when we drive and develop our sense of direction.
One lesson seemed especially relevant to all the parents feeling uneasy about smartphone bans in schools.
“Gaining the smartphone has caused us not only to lose trust in something greater than ourselves but also makes us feel like we are in control of our lives. And both things … are problematic,” Whittaker wrote. “You are no more in control of your life today than your great-great-grandparents were in control of their lives one hundred years ago.”
Maybe we’re all just control freaks and smartphones give us the illusion of control in a world that often seems to have spun into chaos.
If we accept our inability to control life with a smartphone, we might be more inclined to stop letting smartphones control us … and our children.
Read more on the Real Life blog (ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/) and find Nedra on Facebook (facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
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