I don’t let my Perth students have phones at school. It’s time others followed

While West Australian Premier Roger Cook has joined other states’ calls for an enforced age limit on social media – a welcomed announcement – there is no doubt society has left it quite late to decide if, in care of our youth, we should regulate social media.

In the not-too-distant future, we will look back at our response to regulation of social media in the same way we now look with astonishment at the historic laxity around the sales and promotion of tobacco and alcohol.

Provis with some of her graduating students.

This is the suggestion made by the University of NSW’s AI Institute chief scientist Professor Toby Walsh. I agree.

Keeping smartphone use in balance can be a challenge for many adults, let alone young people.

In this quest for balance, for a decade All Saints’ College has not allowed students to use their phones during the school day, asking them to leave them in lockers until home time.

Our school-day breaks are for face-to-face communication.

While our students generally respond positively, what I am sure all schools have to regularly deal with is the cascading impact back on campus of some students’ out-of-school-hours social media use.

This includes online bullying and relationships damaged by young people who, typing from their bedrooms – often late at night – lack the maturity to be able to navigate sensitively the many social media platforms they are on, legally or otherwise.

While we regularly remind our students to take their values with them into the digital world, we again know many adults struggle with this, let alone children or teenagers.

Jonathan Haidt, in his latest book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, presents an examination of adolescent mental health and the surge in anxiety, depression and self-harm.

He refers to Gen Z, those born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s, who are experiencing higher levels of stress and anxiety than previous generations.

Haidt’s advice for parents

Give children more time playing – ideally, outdoors in mixed age groups and with no adult supervision.

Encourage children to join stable real-world (as opposed to online) communities.

Resist giving children a smartphone as their first phone – if they must have a phone, give one designed for communication and without internet-based apps.

Avoid giving a smartphone to children until high school – and get the parents of your child’s whole class on board with this one.

Avoid opening social media platform accounts for children until, at the earliest, the beginning of high school.

Before this, Millennials were described as the most anxious generation. So now we have an anxious generation raising an even more anxious generation.

Haidt says an explanation is the decline of play in childhood and the addition of phones and social media.

Many parents have reduced their children’s access to unsupervised outdoor play out of fears for their safety. Then they give them smartphones with social media platforms.

Few parents, Haidt says, know what their children are doing in their new virtual worlds. Many lack the knowledge to protect children online, while simultaneously over-protecting their children in the real world.

Just as we provide phone-free time at All Saints’, I encourage phone-free time at home.

I also advise parents to set rules and expectations before buying a phone if possible.

Hearing stories of phones relentlessly interrupting students’ sleep with the constant pinging of messages, one rule I suggest would be not allowing your child to have a phone in their bedroom overnight.

It is heartening that we are starting the conversation about social media usage – perhaps we are, at last, on the verge of some real action.

Now, three states have shown a willingness to listen and act. In this, our leaders have our full-hearted support.

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