An Analog Childhood isn’t Virtuous, but it is Beneficial.

Nov 2 2024

I don’t like my phone. I love it. It makes me more productive, keeps me connected to work, friends, and family, and gives me dopamine hits throughout the day. I rely on my phone for directions, research, banking, documenting funny and meaningful moments, shopping, making dinner reservations, getting groceries, answering emails or Teams messages in the brief moments between meetings, tracking my health and fitness, calling a Lyft, and offloading information that’s important but my brain can’t handle in the moment (i.e. my phone is an invaluable external hard drive). I don’t want to imagine my daily life without my phone.

My phone also distracts and drives me (and some people in my life) nuts. My phone’s enticing vibrations and alerts cut through my deepest concentration like a freshly sharpened knife through room temperature butter. The soft touch of my smart watch (a comforting cordless extension of my phone) distracts me from colleagues and loved ones, impedes conversation, and interrupts the most inopportune moments. And yet I can’t (won’t) switch to an analogue watch or replace my smart phone with a dumb one. I feel like Dr. Michelle Drouin, Professor of Psychology at Purdue University-Fort Wayne and Senior Research Scientist at the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation:

My phone is probably the most demanding entity in my world. . . I carefully wipe its screen to remove smudges (social grooming). I carry it with me everywhere I go in either my purse, hand or pocket (skin-to-screen bonding). I get nervous if I cannot find it (separation anxiety). We are bonded, and I am smitten.

Once we get a smart phone it’s hard to let it go. Maybe we should learn from people like Stacy Torres, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC San Francisco. Stacy is in her 40s and has never owned a smart phone.

As a proud Gen X-er I love my analog childhood. I bask in its superiority to the phone-based childhood of today. But it’s a smug love, an indulgent form of generational snobbery. I did not choose to avoid addictive technology in favor of a rich, relational, and immersive childhood full of parentless time outside with friends and siblings. I did not choose a learning environment where the only reliable distractions were my classmates’ behavior, the margins of my notebooks (anyone else a doodler?), and whatever happens to be visible through the classroom windows.

There is no virtue in an analog childhood. But there are benefits. The question for us today is: How can we maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides of technology, especially that ubiquitous, addictive, distracting, and disruptive piece of tech knows as the smart phone? There are many things we can do and should consider, but one way forward is increasingly popular: cell phone bans. According to KFF, as of October 3, 2024 “Eight states have passed state-wide policies that ban or restrict cellphone use in schools.” I’m not a fan of the phrase “cell phone ban” but, alas, “a policy that curtails unnecessarily addictive distractions in social and learning environments” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Russell Shaw, Head of School at Georgetown Day School in Washington D.C., put it this way in The Atlantic in August:

Although causation is debated, as a school head for 14 years, I know what I have seen: Unfettered phone usage at school hurts our kids. It makes them less connected, less attentive, less resilient, and less happy. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written for this magazine, smartphone-based life “alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.” It is time to remove phones from schools.

The truth is that cell phone bans are not about banning cell phones, but about protecting and enhancing the limited time students spend at school. Time at school, at least at Providence High School, should be designed to support the learning, growth, and holistic development of our students. One could argue that cell phones do, and I have made that argument in the past. But I want to make sure that argument still holds water.

I don’t think it does. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of high school teachers say students being distracted by their cellphones in the classroom is a major problem. Our own teachers agree. Addiction to smartphones is so clear that the National Library of Medicine (a part of the National Institutes of Health) officially acknowledged the diagnosis of NOMOPHOBIA in 2019.

“The term NOMOPHOBIA or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity.”

It’s important to know that we are looking into how cell phones are being used at Providence, how they impact our learning environment, and how we can best enhance the time your kids spend on campus. We are learning from what other schools have done and listening to our own community’s hopes and concerns.

Here’s what our parents and guardians told us last year: