If you want to fight teen “phone addiction,” the answer is freedom, not bans.

Allowing adolescents to be adolescents — to be developing humans — is the way to solve your concerns about personal mobile devices and social media.

hundreds of kids in a high school cafeteria between classes, one phone in use

OK, no one gets “addicted” to phones or social media. That’s such a misuse of language that anyone who chooses that word might need a remedial Language Arts class.

That, however, is not my point in this post. The point is that allowing adolescents to be adolescents — to be developing humans — is the way to solve your concerns about personal mobile devices and social media.

“Teenagers have always been attracted to public spaces where they can hang out with friends, find new friends, and talk endlessly with peers about matters that concern them, away from parents and other authority figures. This has always been true, across cultures and across time. It seems to be an essential part of growing up.

“In recent decades, however, teens, as well as younger children, have been increasingly deprived of opportunities to get together in physical space away from direct adult surveillance and interference. Increasingly, their time is taken up with adult-directed activities and their freedom to join peers away from adults outside the home is restricted by fearful parents and, increasingly, by security guards at places such as shopping malls where teens gathered in decades past. (I described forces that have led to such changes in Letter D4.)” — *Dr. Peter Gray*

I spent the last few days in a high school I have known for over 30 years. It is a very good school working hard to be a great school in a diverse community with many challenges. But the challenges Governor Whitmer do not include students having phones. The challenges are funding, state commitments to education, and a lack of state trust in both kids and educators.

This school does not currently ban phones — in fact, kids can use their phones to order drinks from the school’s barista bar in the morning. (their orders are delivered to the classroom)

I watched kids in many classes. There were phones everywhere, but rarely were they in use, beyond an occasional 30-second check. In one class, a “catch-up” math class, every student had a phone in front of them, many had food with them (the school serves breakfast multiple times a day), but both eating and phone use were entirely appropriate. Kids glanced at their phones, took a bite of food, and went right back to their calculators or work on paper. “It looks exactly like morning in any adult workplace,” one observing teacher commented. “Isn’t that what we want to teach them?”

T9 texting, usually done hidden beneath the desk.

Now, all those looking at schools know that phone bans are as ridiculous as any of the U.S.’s endless attempts to ban human behavior. The bans have been a huge boon to people selling burner phones. They’ve beefed up the trading of old phones. And they have chased phones back into student laps where problematic behaviors become invisible to supervision. You might want to remember that early in this century, every high school kid could text without looking on a T9 keyboard. They could do it, and they did it all day long.

“Most kids either brought a spare phone or they said they didn’t have a phone,” she explained. “Or they broke the pouches — they cut them open.”

“People had multiple extra phones,” added Quani’e Lanier, a fellow senior. Some students brought old phones in to distribute to their friends — decoy phones, Lanier says, to put in the pouches.

“Both students are less than a semester away from graduation and looking forward to moving on. Lanier says she is off to college to become a nurse. O’Neil has enlisted in the Navy and will start basic training this summer. Both say one of the big problems with the ban is that they feel like adults and should be in charge of their own possessions.” — *NPR*

Here’s what does work. This high school has seven-minute intervals between classes and is organized around a central cafeteria that serves as the circulation space. During those seven minutes, hundreds of students gather in the cafeteria with no obvious supervision. As we watched, we never saw more than two phones in use. What we saw instead were kids talking face-to-face, enjoying each other, and being the kids we want them to be — so they can become the kind of adults we hope they will be.

Every kid had a phone, they were all completely engaged, and not in some incredibly fascinating work.

I’ve long told parents and teachers of younger children, “If you want to get the kids away from screens, give them a mud puddle.” And if you want them to limit phone use, give teenagers freedom from your constant instruction and surveillance.

This high school lets kids choose where to sit, lets them eat when they want, gives them significant control of their schedule, and treats them with respect. It was a good school, but having all faculty conduct *empathy interviews* with at least two students brought a transformation in adult beliefs, turning it into a great school. All of this allows kids to be with each other, talk to each other, and perform the real work of adolescence, the building of successful lives and communities for their future.

Every phone ban, every social media ban, is an abdication of your adult responsibilities and tells kids you neither respect them nor trust them. So be honest. You’re not seizing things from kids for their sake, you’re doing it based on a nostalgic fantasy that every kid was paying attention back when your generations were being labeled “school failures” — from *A Nation at Risk* to the need for No Child Left Behind.

Or maybe you went to school in Scarsdale with Jonathan Haidt.

• Ira Socol