Restrict phones and social media, but let’s not lose sight of the real issue in WA schools

Following the lead of states such as South Australia, our federal government is now looking at bringing in age limits for our young people’s social media access.

Governments around the world such as France and Greece, and many of our own state governments, have proceeded with total bans on phones in schools.

We need to change our thinking around online safety and make it a core consideration in design and development of digital services.Credit: iStockphoto

We learnt recently that Instagram (owned by Meta Platforms) is about to modify Australian teenagers’ accounts for those under 18, with features that include more restrictive settings on what our young people can be exposed to.

All teen accounts will now be set to private as the default position and Meta is also introducing an anti-bullying feature for this age group.

Great. But restrictions and bans are just the first step.

Let’s also be looking further upstream at what this author believes is the real cause of the phone and social media epidemic and the frightening decline in our young people’s mental health and wellbeing – the loss of community.

“With tightened rules regarding social media access, there will be no point in giving children smartphones.”

Always focused on making the “why” of our rules and norms visible and understood, All Saints’ College has, for at least a decade, asked students to leave mobile phones in lockers.

This helps avoid distractions in class while also developing students’ face-to-face communication skills and encouraging physical activity at break times.

While the vast majority of students are happy to comply, a school obviously cannot frisk its students nor pass them through airport-style screening devices to ensure phones aren’t secreted in pockets and then used in private – in toilet blocks and so on.

However, if the “why” is understood and valued by our young people, this will hopefully only ever be a minority of students.

Our own state government introduced a similar ban recently and, while restrictions and bans are helpful, we need to be realistic about the challenges of enforcing this.

But that’s no reason not to do it.

A government-defined uniform approach helps reduce disparity across schools while also sending a powerful message to our youth about what our state values – schools with a strong sense of community, where people are engaged in face-to-face relationships with one another.

Parents, similarly empowered by a clear and unequivocal message from our leaders, including increased age limits on social media, can also unite in their position regarding phones.

With tightened rules regarding social media access, there will be no point in giving children smartphones. Cheaper, basic phones designed only to make phone calls will suffice.

Then, we are all in a much better position to focus on the actual and upstream cause of the reliance on virtual networks among our young people, the loss of community.

For it seems we’ve forgotten what “community” means.

A community provides a set of shared values and norms for its young, a common sense of identity.

It is made up of a network of overlapping relationships that reinforce one another (parents supporting school rules, for instance), it contains role models, respect is shown for authority figures who guide the community, and it models a high degree of inclusiveness to ensure all members feel visible and valued.

The decline of community witnessed over recent decades has, unsurprisingly, resulted in us losing trust in our own neighbourhood and this has subsequently seen the loss of a traditional play-based childhood for our young ones.

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, warns that parents today are over-protecting their children in the “real world”, where so much invaluable learning occurs, while leaving them significantly under-protected in the virtual world taking the place of the once joyful play-based childhood.

We have allowed the rise and rise of the phone-based childhood.

But schools and parents can’t address the decline of community and the ensuing rise of, and reliance on, virtual networks alone.

While schools work hard to ensure they embody the many essential characteristics of community, we obviously exist in a wider ecosystem where many of these characteristics have been lost, sadly causing schools to feel increasingly counter-cultural.

Parents and schools need a unified approach about what is important in our community, and that starts at the top.

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