National has ordered schools to stop students from using mobile phones in classrooms, but parents, teachers, and academics are divided on the merits of the policy. Alex Spence talks to an American researcher who says it is a necessary step but not the only one needed to resolve a startling decline in our young people’s mental health.
Since the new academic year started, schools have been trying to implement one of National’s main election promises: Removing phones from classrooms.
From next term, the Government wants schools to introduce stricter restrictions aimed at boosting academic performance and students’ mental well-being. There isn’t universal support for this view and Ministry of Education officials say the scientific evidence is “marginal”.
To better understand the case for restricting devices, the Herald spoke to Zach Rausch, a research scientist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and co-author of After Babel, a popular Substack newsletter about the impact of technology on young people.
Rausch is collaborating with Dr Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and author who has been one of the most vigorous advocates in the United States of the position that smartphones and social media have been the major driver of an epidemic of mental health problems among adolescents in high-income countries.
Over Zoom, we discussed the evidence that led Rausch and Haidt to conclude that hard restrictions on smartphones are a necessary step to resolving the mental health crisis, why social media use also needs to be curbed, and the overlooked importance of childhood play in promoting wellbeing. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Zach, what’s so bad about young people having phones at school?
Just to put this into context: Beginning in the early 2010s, we started to see a collapse in youth mental health. It started here in the US. As Jon [Haidt] and I started working on this, we started to see that this was happening in many countries around the world. It was hitting adolescent girls the most.
The range of possible explanations for what was driving these changes in adolescent mental health was pointing more and more towards a transformation of childhood between the years of 2010 and 2015 that was largely driven by smartphones and social media overloading the lives of young people.
That’s the context that I’m coming from. So why are phones problematic in school? The first is the displacement of time that is caused by phones. In the US, there has been a sudden drop in the percentage of adolescents getting more than seven hours of sleep per night. We have a rising problem of sleep-deprived kids – and sleep-deprived kids are going to struggle with memory, learning, going to school. So first just getting to school and having the energy to thrive there. And then once they’re in school, phones are incredibly distracting.
All throughout the day, kids are using their phones. It’s a distraction machine. We’re really not setting kids up for success, to think deeply and critically, especially when these platforms that are on these devices — social media platforms, as an example — send push notifications constantly throughout the day, pulling attention away from kids. A recent survey found that just about 20 per cent of teens reported getting about 500 notifications a day. If you’re constantly being pulled away, it’s going to be harder to learn, harder to focus, you’re going to socialise less. And if you’re sleep-deprived, all of this is really problematic for learning outcomes.
I just want to drill down into that. Which problem are we trying to solve? You’re talking about learning outcomes, and the New Zealand Government has also talked mostly about learning performance as its motivation for introducing stricter limits. But you started the conversation talking about kids’ mental health.
So our research started with a focus on what is happening to young people’s mental health, and we’ve found that there is this international collapse. And in the process, we found an international decline in test scores [at the same time].
Programme for International Student Assessment scores in science, reading, mathematics were generally improving up until right around 2012. And then those scores started to go down. And this is happening in multiple countries around the world. And we also see this in the US National Report Card [an annual government assessment of educational progress] that we have similar scores declining right around the same time.
So that’s the connection here: It’s that something really changed among young people between the years of 2010 and 2015. And the best explanation that we have right now is that it is the mass movement onto smartphones and social media platforms that have really pulled kids away from the real world and into an online virtual world that is incredibly distracting, and in many cases addictive. And has all sorts of unexpected impacts. One of those impacts we believe, is this impact on attention, impact on focus, and [which] ultimately, impacts on how students are doing in schools.
What’s the best evidence for banning phones as an intervention? In the New Zealand Government’s regulatory impact assessment of their proposed policy, officials who looked at this seemed lukewarm about the evidence for the effectiveness of such a change.
We see the problem of smartphones and social media as a collective action problem. For any one individual to decide to pull themselves off smartphones and social media, there’s going to be a high social cost, because everybody else is on these devices: other students, their friends, their parents, their entire social lives are on these spaces. And the benefits increase as multiple people come together to choose to do something different. If you have an entire school that for seven hours in that day is not surrounded with smartphones and social media, it changes the entire dynamic of the environment.
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Schools are a great place to test out the kind of network effect of smartphones and social media on the well-being of kids and their ability to focus, because if everybody is not on their devices there’s no incentive, no need to be on them in the first place. And that will help kind of bring students into the present moment.
That’s the broader theoretical framework. We are hoping that wherever this is being done we should see the effects within one to two years. And if on a nationwide scale this does not improve things, then we’ll have to change course.
How far have schools in the US gone in restricting phones in classrooms?
Not very. That is beginning to change now, where more schools are leaning towards implementing more stringent phone bans. There was a recent study which said something like 60 per cent of schools implement some form of a ban, but typically what that included was: You need to keep your phone in your backpack, or you need to keep your phone in your pocket, or you can use it in between class time. [On After Babel, Haidt has argued that those restrictions are ineffective and that schools should insist that phones are locked away during the day.]
You mentioned social media. I’ve noticed that people in this debate sometimes seem to talk about smartphones and social media interchangeably. Which do you think is more pernicious for children and adolescents? Or is it the combination of the two technologies that makes them so potent?
Yeah, so I personally do not think social media on its own is all that harmful. And I don’t think that smartphones on their own are all that harmful. It is specifically the combination of the two, precisely because once the two come together then you have access to this social world 24 hours a day, seven days a week in your pocket. And that is what I believe has really changed in terms of the way that we are interacting with each other.
I sense that there’s been quite a lot of debate here in New Zealand about whether to ban phones in schools but much less discussion about the impact of social media on students.
That’s fascinating. I feel like we somewhat have the opposite experience here in the United States. And yeah, I really think these things need to be thought of together. Because if you go back to 2006, you’re sitting on a desktop computer and you’re on Facebook, there’s only so much – it didn’t have the same constant quality. You couldn’t bring it with you everywhere you go. It couldn’t come with you to the bathroom, to your bedroom, to class. There was a level of distance that we were able to have, and that distance is what has really gone away.
Haidt said in a Substack post that he’d talked to teachers at a particular American school who were adamant that phones need to go. I found it interesting during the debate here that there wasn’t more enthusiasm from teachers and principals for a ban — and some pushed back on the idea.
You know, I think it depends on what the approach is to deal with this. If the expectation is that teachers need to be policing their students the entire time, that is an incredible amount of energy. That’s going to be a losing battle. That’s why phone lockers would be a more effective strategy [than less restrictive policies that give students more control over when they can look at their phones]. If you are constantly having to battle students with this issue — and it’s the same with parents, and again there’s this collective action problem where if my friends are all using it — yeah, it’s going to seem like the cost is too high. I really think that the benefits are going to be seen when this is done in a more collective fashion and when it’s done in a way that doesn’t impose more work for teachers.
I think some people are sceptical because restricting phones is a quick measure that hasn’t been accompanied by a wider, comprehensive strategy for addressing the youth mental health crisis.
I think that is a really fair point. Any initiative to try to improve the wellbeing of young people needs to take into account that there are so many factors that go into this. But I guess the point I would want to make is that the evidence is building that there is a harmful cost to the quantity of time young people are spending on their devices. Parents and teachers and schools are really being put in a trap that is exceptionally difficult for any individual to get out of. Even though it seems like a simple solution, it is a solution.
It’s not the only solution, but it’s a solution that’s doable, that’s cost-effective and can have some quite significant impacts. But we need to see. For the most part, these ideas have not been tried. Smartphones and social media came into our lives just a little over a decade ago.
I get why some experts in the field are so adamant that smartphones and social media are the prime drivers of the youth mental health crisis. The timeline fits so neatly, and we also know from our own social media and smartphone use — my iPhone and Twitter have completely melted my own brain — so it’s a really appealing theory. But at the same time, it also seems too simplistic for such a complicated issue.
Right. And I think, again, it’s a fair point to look at this and say, you know, it’s crazy to just put out one causal theory explanation of what is happening. I want it to be clear that we don’t believe that smartphones and social media is the cause of all mental health problems. Of course not. It’s an amplifier that takes advantage of the most vulnerable kids, and it makes things so much worse.
The impacts on teens are not uniform, right? Some people are absolutely fine using smartphones and social media; they have positive experiences; it adds something to their lives. It doesn’t affect everybody in the same way.
Of course not. Yeah, different people experience different things. But what is true when we look across the board – I’ll just read a couple of statistics about the experience of many young people. [He rattles off a series of statistics suggesting that American adolescents are lonelier, less sociable, and sleep a lot less than they used to.] Internalising problems have been surging (depression, anxiety, loneliness, disconnection), while the externalising problems (fighting, antisocial stuff) have actually been improving. The thing we have to look at is, okay, what has changed over the past decade? Well, the vast majority of the time that kids are spending is not in person anymore. They’re spending most of their time online on screens.
If these platforms are improving the wellbeing of young people and kind of fostering connection, on average we should expect at least that the number of kids who feel lonely would stay relatively constant. But we’re just seeing an upswing in all these issues that is all about social relationships. Social relationships are really falling apart among adolescents. And that is such a key aspect of young people’s lives.
And so, from these kinds of changes, plus the international pattern in the collapse of youth mental health, plus quite an extensive body of research showing ties between social media views and poor mental health, especially among girls, the evidence to me points to there being a direct relationship between the two. I don’t think it can explain everything. There’s a variety of other factors. But I think it’s clear that there is an impact on young people.
Does your research suggest anything else that we should be doing to respond?
One core idea is that we have been overprotecting kids in the real world while underprotecting them online. This whole conversation has primarily been about under-protection online, sending kids off into this virtual universe without really recognising or understanding the kind of harms that come. What we also see in the US is that there has been a huge decline in the capacity for kids to play outdoors, unsupervised, often with friends.
From an evolutionary point of view, play is – you know, we have 10 years of childhood. Other mammals don’t have this long period of childhood and we have it because it’s a period of enormous cultural and social learning and emotional learning. There’s this natural inclination to play and we want to play because that helps us learn an enormous number of skills, emotional regulation, social skills, all the things that we need in order to move into adulthood.
And so what this rising overprotection, which has decreased the amount of time allowed to play and be unsupervised, take risks, and so all that, plus this immersive new world — they both acted like experience blockers. They prevented kids from experiencing the kinds of ups and downs and experiences of in-person social interaction that we believe is really necessary and important to learn to deal with struggles as you move into adulthood.
Have you got kids of your own?
I don’t, actually. But doing all this research has made me think a lot about kids.
I won’t ask you for parenting advice, though I’d like to, having a 7-year-old daughter who is getting into these things even though we haven’t encouraged it.
I’ll just channel Jon [Haidt] here because he has two kids. There are foundational norms that we would like to set, and we would hope that would help parents manage the massive new virtual world and the over-protection side. The first is to work within your families — but also especially important to work with other families, come together as a group of four to five families — to delay smartphones until age 14, which would protect young kids from the period where they’re most vulnerable to the harms of smartphones. The second is we do suggest delaying social media — again if this can be done collectively — until age 16. And then trying to provide more unsupervised free play with their friends. Really valuing and supporting and acknowledging the role that play has in helping us become thriving adults.
Alex Spence is an investigative reporter and feature writer who tends to focus on social issues. He joined the Herald in 2020 after 17 years in London where he worked for The Times, Politico, and BuzzFeed News. He can be reached at alex.spence@nzme.co.nz or by text or secure Signal messaging on 0272358834.