Editor’s Note: Mary Frances Ruskell is a senior at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in Columbia, South Carolina.
When my friends and I walked into homeroom on the first day of school this year, my teacher told all of us to put our phones in a black plastic box on an old desk by the classroom door.
Handing over our phones during class is an official school policy, and my teachers always make this announcement at the beginning of the school year. But teachers would usually forget about the box by third period on the first day, never to be mentioned again by the second day of school. This year, however, the policy stuck that entire first day — and every day since.
I asked my Latin teacher why the school was suddenly getting so strict on phones. It turns out that over the summer most of the teachers had read social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ehtical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, argues that a phone-based childhood leads to mentally unhealthy kids who are unprepared for life and, in my Latin teacher’s words, it “really freaked us out.” Teachers were serious about taking our phones now.
It’s not just causing trouble at my school. Some 72% of public high school teachers in the United States say that cell phone distraction among their students is a major problem, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center in April. In high schools that already have cell phone policies, 60% of teachers say that the policies are very or somewhat difficult to enforce, the same study reported.
Several states have passed laws attempting to restrict cell phone use in schools, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation requiring school districts to regulate cell phone use. At least seven of the 20 largest school districts in the nation have either banned phones during the school day or plan to do so.
It’s not just the United States attempting to address the issue. Many schools in England have gone phone-free, according to a February news release from the UK’s Department for Education announcing a government crackdown on mobile phone use in schools. In the entirety of Greece, students are now required to keep their cell phones in their bags during lessons.
My teachers and other experts aren’t wrong about the impact of smartphones on teens. Phones make us miserable, and I appreciate that my school is trying to address the problem. Honestly, I’d like to give up my phone, but the way our schools, jobs, teams, activities and social lives are set up makes it impossible. Locking up a phone for a class period is a start, but it barely makes a dent.
I got my first smartphone when I was 13 years old, and I start doomscrolling as an automatic response to boredom or uneasiness. Inevitably I become stressed out that I’ve wasted so much time on mindless scrolling. To ignore my stress, I start doomscrolling again, and I’m trapped in a vicious cycle. It’s hard not to compare my life with the impeccably curated posts of total strangers, and it’s hard not to judge myself. In the past few years, I sometimes spent up to six hours a day on screens.
After three years of having the app, I did finally delete TikTok during my sophomore year of high school. Not because I was spending almost five hours on it some days — that wasn’t reason enough for me to get rid of it. I only deleted it because my friend wouldn’t, and I wanted to prove that I could.
For weeks, I clicked the icon where TikTok used to be and was sent to my calculator. I kept staring at the ceiling, unable to focus but also having no 15-second-video relief to fall back on. After a few weeks, though, I felt a lot better. I spent a lot less time on screens and was more grounded in the real world, picking up hobbies like sewing and painting.
And then I was sucked into Instagram reels a few months later.
I know Instagram isn’t good for me. I find myself thinking about the cute pictures I might take during my day, not what I’m actually doing. And it’s not just cute stuff. I could scroll Instagram reels of gruesome car wrecks forever, which must be terrible for my psyche.
So many adults think there is an easy solution to my problem — get rid of your smartphone! Delete Instagram!
But I can’t. My school’s Instagram page posts important reminders and information that I need to know. The student page posts football game themes, school dance dates and ticket prices, and upcoming events.
As for my social life, it’s expected that I’ll like other people’s posts, a social courtesy like waving hi across a hallway. As a teenage girl, I find that Instagram is in many ways necessary to high school life.
Outside of Instagram, I still need a phone.
There are group chats for my homeroom where we post the snack schedule and plan dress-up themes. (“CalcKILLus” was our calculus class group chat on Snapchat last year, used for deadlines, questions and general complaints.) There are group chats to discuss grades, post information about trips and for friend groups.
The managers at my old job texted the work schedule to employees. I texted coworkers to cover shifts or to tell my boss that I was sick. If I didn’t have a phone, I would have been fired.
My school is trying to address more than phones, too. In the past, administrators allowed students to choose either e-books or physical textbooks. This year, we had no choice. The school ordered physical textbooks for us (with only a few exceptions). A teacher explained that studies show students focus more with books you can hold in your hands, another issue mentioned by Haidt.
While there was some grumbling about the weight of our books, this has been easier to swallow for my classmates and me than the phone ban. But seniors don’t have lockers, so there is nowhere to put the new heavy textbooks. It’s another obstacle, one of the structural barriers in place stopping us from going phoneless. (It’s something schools could change.)
Sometimes I wish I could go entirely phoneless. I have friends who have tried to do it, but no one has succeeded. Our current world is set up in such a way that, at least for teenagers like me, a phone is necessary to function.
In fact, while working on this essay, my editor asked me to look at Haidt’s Instagram profile to do more research on his work. Where did I look? My phone. Not having a phone for my 50-minute classes is a start, but it isn’t a fix to the problem.
How to kick the phone habit
What is the solution to our collective phone problem? I don’t know. I can’t even imagine what a phone-free high school life would look like.
But my mom was my age when there was no social media, so I asked her what she and her friends did back in the 1980s and 1990s when they were in high school. How did they function without a tiny computer in their pockets? How did they know what the themes for costumes during Homecoming Week would be?
She laughed, surprised, and explained that they made posters. There were, apparently, posters all over the school announcing club meetings and bake sales and upcoming school events. She said that clubs would get together after school and make the posters with markers and glitter and whatever else they could find. It sounds like it was really fun.
Maybe going old-school is a way to combat the damage done by phones in schools, like the physical textbooks my school brought back. Maybe physical posters in the hallway announcing events instead of Instagram posts could help.
At least part of the solution may be asking the current adults who grew up phone-free to remember how to do it.
In the meantime, I’ve deleted unnecessary social media apps like TikTok, set an hour-and-a-half daily time limit on Instagram, and removed both Instagram and Snapchat from my home screen. I can still get to them by using the search bar, but it’s a small obstacle that actually helps.
During sophomore year, my average daily screen time was typically six hours a day. Last week it was 55 minutes a day, but without a more society-wide solution, I’m not sure I can get it any lower.
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