cawacko
Well-known member
This is an opinion piece but I find it pretty convincing. Basically it's arguing we know how bad social media etc. is for our kids. And while school shootings are scary, they are statistically extremely rare and even if one were to occur the idea of trying to reach out to your kid during one does nothing to help. Basically it's an illusion of safety and control for parents.
I don't think anyone here is a member of Gen Z. We all somehow survived growing up and going to school without a cell phone. I think kids can survive the school day without spending their time on Tic Tok and other social media sites. I do understand the need to coordinate pick up rides and so forth after school/practice and having a cell phone adds a level of convenience. But on the whole, so much more negative comes from them than good. I see no issue with keeping them out of schools.
Anyone think otherwise?
Fear of school shootings is keeping cell phones in school. Our kids will pay the price
Despite an abundance of evidence that phone addiction is wreaking havoc on every aspect of our children’s lives — and news that attorneys general from 41 states and the District of Columbia are suing Meta for its contribution to this crisis — many parents are still opposed to outright cell phone bans in schools.
Why? In the event of a school shooting, these parents say they want to be able to reach their child. While it’s understandable that parents (including me) live in terror that a school shooting could happen at their child’s school, that reasoning is misguided and comes with a substantial cost to our kids’ well-being.
Despite how horrific they are, school shootings — like abductions or terrorist attacks — are extraordinarily rare. Kids are more likely to get hit by lightning. Moreover, if there was an active shooter in their school, using a cell phone would be less safe for our kids. It would distract them at the very moment they need to be most alert, safety experts say, and could actually call attention to their location when they need to stay hidden.
Wanting our children to have phones in schools is really about placating our own anxiety as parents. We’re so scared out of our minds of a potential school shooting that we’re trading our children’s mental, social-emotional and intellectual well-being for our ability to “reach” them in case of a hypothetical event.
As a growing body of research shows, and as the U.S. Surgeon General has warned, smartphones (and social media) pose actual, proven harms — like depression, suicidality and eating disorders — not potential ones.
The numbers of children struggling with cyberbullying, anxiety and loneliness — correlated to social media use — are so staggering that in 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association issued a joint declaration of a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health — and the emergency is ongoing. The number of students battling eating disorders, depression, anxiety, loneliness and self-harm has skyrocketed since 2012, the year that youth smartphone use exploded.
It’s no surprise we’re hyper-focused on school shootings: unregulated, attention-optimizing algorithms used by social media — and even, regrettably, by professional newsrooms — amplify whatever is most extreme, and distort our perception of likely (versus unlikely) threats. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the media literacy tools to understand that, nor recognize when it’s best to look away from our screens and focus on what’s right in front of us.
As parents, we can no longer afford to indulge our anxiety at the expense of our children’s health. Schools that are dedicated to establishing the foundational social, emotional and intellectual well-being of young people need to be screen-free spaces that revolve around learning and face-to-face peer interaction — not places where kids can (and do) watch TikTok, play video games and boost their Snapstreaks. If kids can’t catch a break from our oversaturated media environment at school, where can they?
A number of countries around the world have already made the move to protect their kids. China, England, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal have all instituted bans on cell phones in schools. Japan has had a ban in place since 2009.
Some schools in the U.S. instituted cell phone bans over the summer, hoping to dial back the harms and learning loss from excessive screen time during the pandemic. A 2019 report from the National Center for Education Statistics indicated that 65.8% of U.S. public schools had some cell phone bans in place. That may sound like a good number, but it’s a significant drop from the 91% that banned phones a decade earlier — and doesn’t reflect the lockdown-fueled boost in smartphone addiction.
Last year, lawmakers passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would mandate big companies provide basic privacy and safety protections in the design of any digital product or service that children in the state are likely to access. But even that legislation has been attacked. A powerful lobby group funded by Big Tech filed an appeal claiming the law was an infringement of free speech rights and last month won a preliminary injunction. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a notice of appeal to overturn the ruling, a move cheered by a broad coalition of children’s advocates.
Being able to text your child during the unlikely event of a school shooting provides only a false sense of control — an illusion of safety. If we’re serious about wanting to keep kids safe, healthy and thriving, we need to keep kids safe from smartphones and unregulated social media.
In 2015, then-New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio reversed a cell phone ban for all 32 districts in the largest public school system in the nation, allowing over a million students to bring their phones into the classroom as per their individual school’s code.
The focus then was on “parental rights,” but who is organizing on our children’s behalf to protect them from the harmful effects and sure addiction to devices?
Clearly, not even their own parents.
Julie Scelfo is executive director of Get Media Savvy, a nonprofit working to establish a healthier media environment for kids and families.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/cellphone-ban-school-shooting-18464820.php
I don't think anyone here is a member of Gen Z. We all somehow survived growing up and going to school without a cell phone. I think kids can survive the school day without spending their time on Tic Tok and other social media sites. I do understand the need to coordinate pick up rides and so forth after school/practice and having a cell phone adds a level of convenience. But on the whole, so much more negative comes from them than good. I see no issue with keeping them out of schools.
Anyone think otherwise?
Fear of school shootings is keeping cell phones in school. Our kids will pay the price
Despite an abundance of evidence that phone addiction is wreaking havoc on every aspect of our children’s lives — and news that attorneys general from 41 states and the District of Columbia are suing Meta for its contribution to this crisis — many parents are still opposed to outright cell phone bans in schools.
Why? In the event of a school shooting, these parents say they want to be able to reach their child. While it’s understandable that parents (including me) live in terror that a school shooting could happen at their child’s school, that reasoning is misguided and comes with a substantial cost to our kids’ well-being.
Despite how horrific they are, school shootings — like abductions or terrorist attacks — are extraordinarily rare. Kids are more likely to get hit by lightning. Moreover, if there was an active shooter in their school, using a cell phone would be less safe for our kids. It would distract them at the very moment they need to be most alert, safety experts say, and could actually call attention to their location when they need to stay hidden.
Wanting our children to have phones in schools is really about placating our own anxiety as parents. We’re so scared out of our minds of a potential school shooting that we’re trading our children’s mental, social-emotional and intellectual well-being for our ability to “reach” them in case of a hypothetical event.
As a growing body of research shows, and as the U.S. Surgeon General has warned, smartphones (and social media) pose actual, proven harms — like depression, suicidality and eating disorders — not potential ones.
The numbers of children struggling with cyberbullying, anxiety and loneliness — correlated to social media use — are so staggering that in 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association issued a joint declaration of a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health — and the emergency is ongoing. The number of students battling eating disorders, depression, anxiety, loneliness and self-harm has skyrocketed since 2012, the year that youth smartphone use exploded.
It’s no surprise we’re hyper-focused on school shootings: unregulated, attention-optimizing algorithms used by social media — and even, regrettably, by professional newsrooms — amplify whatever is most extreme, and distort our perception of likely (versus unlikely) threats. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the media literacy tools to understand that, nor recognize when it’s best to look away from our screens and focus on what’s right in front of us.
As parents, we can no longer afford to indulge our anxiety at the expense of our children’s health. Schools that are dedicated to establishing the foundational social, emotional and intellectual well-being of young people need to be screen-free spaces that revolve around learning and face-to-face peer interaction — not places where kids can (and do) watch TikTok, play video games and boost their Snapstreaks. If kids can’t catch a break from our oversaturated media environment at school, where can they?
A number of countries around the world have already made the move to protect their kids. China, England, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal have all instituted bans on cell phones in schools. Japan has had a ban in place since 2009.
Some schools in the U.S. instituted cell phone bans over the summer, hoping to dial back the harms and learning loss from excessive screen time during the pandemic. A 2019 report from the National Center for Education Statistics indicated that 65.8% of U.S. public schools had some cell phone bans in place. That may sound like a good number, but it’s a significant drop from the 91% that banned phones a decade earlier — and doesn’t reflect the lockdown-fueled boost in smartphone addiction.
Last year, lawmakers passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would mandate big companies provide basic privacy and safety protections in the design of any digital product or service that children in the state are likely to access. But even that legislation has been attacked. A powerful lobby group funded by Big Tech filed an appeal claiming the law was an infringement of free speech rights and last month won a preliminary injunction. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a notice of appeal to overturn the ruling, a move cheered by a broad coalition of children’s advocates.
Being able to text your child during the unlikely event of a school shooting provides only a false sense of control — an illusion of safety. If we’re serious about wanting to keep kids safe, healthy and thriving, we need to keep kids safe from smartphones and unregulated social media.
In 2015, then-New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio reversed a cell phone ban for all 32 districts in the largest public school system in the nation, allowing over a million students to bring their phones into the classroom as per their individual school’s code.
The focus then was on “parental rights,” but who is organizing on our children’s behalf to protect them from the harmful effects and sure addiction to devices?
Clearly, not even their own parents.
Julie Scelfo is executive director of Get Media Savvy, a nonprofit working to establish a healthier media environment for kids and families.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/cellphone-ban-school-shooting-18464820.php
I’m guessing the title was too long and dropped the “e”.
