I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.
Because phones have become the command center for our lives.
Your FreeStyle Libre pings your phone when you have low blood sugar. When your watch detects a serious fall or a heart abnormality your phone calls emergency services. You use your phone to let the dog walker in, check the camera to see if you turned off the garden hose or left it running, use it to find your lost wallet/keys/bag, etc.
Childhood is where you teach positive behaviors and responsibility. Just chucking phones out the window to avoid the problem teaches nothing.
> Childhood is where you teach positive behaviors and responsibility. Just chucking phones out the window to avoid the problem teaches nothing.
I think that's the strongest argument against this. The ideal case would be a room full of kids who are taught to have the discipline to not touch their phones when inappropriate. However, I think the real issue is that teachers aren't able to effectively police this... probably partially due to class sizes, and our society's cultural lack of respect for rule-following and self-discipline.
> Childhood is where you teach positive behaviors and responsibility. Just chucking phones out the window to avoid the problem teaches nothing.
We specifically engineer acculturation processes to incrementally add responsibility for a reason.
Nobody gives a 2 year old a loaded pistol and then tells them they can't have candy.
IMHO, a smartphone with unregulated addictive apps is too much responsibility for grade-level children during school hours. (Hell, it's too much responsibility for many adults I know)
Tech focuses too much on scale and frictionless experiences. That's noise in an educational environment where children are more-or-less mandated to be in. Get rid of smartphones in school. School offices still have voice phones if students and parents need to communicate.
> Your FreeStyle Libre pings your phone when you have low blood sugar.
Surely this could just be an exemption? If you have a medical device (not just low blood sugar devices) that uses a phone then you can keep your phone.
> When your watch detects a serious fall or a heart abnormality your phone calls emergency services.
I'm curious how far your phone can be away from your watch for this to still work?
Regardless, most kids aren't far away from others so a serious fall probably isn't a big risk since the kids nearby can get a teacher or some other adult.
> You use your phone to let the dog walker in, check the camera to see if you turned off the garden hose or left it running
Are these things that kids need to do?
> use it to find your lost wallet/keys/bag, etc
Seems like a kid could go to the office and the school can provide the phone to them for a while.
Also, kids were able to get by without using a phone to find their wallets for centuries. It might do a kid some good to walk around the school and get exercise.
Indeed. There are plenty of things that I will teach my kids are not worth the downsides.
As for your medical examples - those devices work fine without a smartphone. Certifying a medical device that includes the user's smartphone as a key part of the therapy is very challenging, and avoided if possible.
I guess I just don't share the sentiment that giving every child in a classroom unfettered access to content designed to distract them while a teacher is trying to teach the class is a good thing. I'm having difficulty understanding why you'd need to be convinced that it isn't.
I have two teenagers and it doesn't sound like it's a huge problem. And attempts to stifle phone usage (yondr pouches) are just creating friction. Maybe having a phone out is very obvious but kids have been doodling, daydreaming, talking and passing paper notes forever. If the downside of phones was so overwhelmingly obvious we wouldn't have such a dearth of measurable evidence.
This was my experience. My guess some combination of teachers losing control and being under pressure from helicopter parents led to either policy change or their looking the other way.
On Sept 11, 2001, I remember parents freaking out and pulling kids out of school. After that, parents were giving kids phones earlier for safety reasons.
Phones with SMS and voice call functionality only, for safety purposes.
Good!
I'm hard pressed to enunciate an argument for why having social media during a school day, at school, is beneficial to early childhood development.
>> “I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” [New York governor, Kathy Hochul] said.
>> “These addictive algorithms have been used against young people since 2011,” Hochul said. “If [social media companies] were going to self-police and manage this themselves, what has stopped them thus far? Clearly as a government, we need to step in.”
That's not exactly accurate. Schools were heavily encouraged to apply the policy from the start of the school year, and most of them did so. The policy was an official requirement from the start of this school term, at which point it had already been school policy at the vast majority of schools.
Our children are getting destroyed by the attention economy. I tried to setup a mobile game the other day and I immediately deleted it because every single popup was a psychologist-optimized addiction machine designed to suck every bit of dopamine from undeveloped children.
This is the #1 issue plaguing children in my opinion and it will only get worse without regulation.
I'm not sure how much this will help, given how many parents I see allowing their children to be glued to screens outside of school, from incredibly early ages.
Good, I don't see any good reason for kids to have smartphones in school. If someone needs to get a hold of the kid, the old fashioned way of just calling the school still works just fine.
We actually wanted to use the Seek app to show kids how to identify plants from pictures and what they could learn about plants. We wanted to emphasize:
* native vs introduced vs endangered
* threatened or endangered
* medicinal, culinary, or crafting uses
Unfortunately we could not because of school policy preventing kids from using smart phones in class, BUT they were happy to follow the teacher around and point at plants to ID. It significantly increased classroom participation cause it’s interactive learning. Information that used to be incredibly out of reach is now readily in front of them.
Overall, I think it’s good to extremely limit use of smartphones in schools, but I think there’s some amazing stuff we can do now like bird ID with Merlin and kids should know how to do it.
Medical devices, e.g. (some) insulin pumps like the Tandem Mobi, are managed via smartphone apps only. It's an unfortunate fact of life that life supporting technology can increasingly only be interfaced via smartphones.
From my perspective, that's an unfortunate but ultimately good reason for some kids to have smartphones.
> It's an unfortunate fact of life that life supporting technology can increasingly only be interfaced via smartphones.
Things like "insulin pump control" had separate, non-phone devices for a long time. Consumers flocked to the ones on the phone even when they sucked and had 1/10 the features.
I'm no defender of medical companies, but the blame for your complaint falls squarely on the consumers, themselves.
I think this strikes me as a revealed preference story. Would you rather carry around an additional device, remember to charge it, etc. else be locked out of lifesaving care? I see the appeal of reducing the number of devices you have to carry around.
I also think for many smaller medical device manufacturers it can be advantageous to build on an existing platform like android/iphone. You're already solving one challenging hardware problem, why add another when you can take advantage of a mature development ecosystem that consumers 1) seem to have a preference for and 2) have already paid for, thus lowering the cost of treatment delivery.
my kid's phone is used for managing and monitoring t1d, and they will always have their smart phone at hand i don't care what law people think they are putting in place
Valid, yes. But the law could still require that the medical monitoring device have other functions disabled or (depending on what the legislators consider easy enough) not in use while in class except for the t1d monitor + SMS + voice, right? And they could still apply discipline if the student's phone has other functions enabled or (depending on the legislative wording) in use while in class?
The law could also use indirect leverage to gradually separate students' medical monitoring from the smartphone over the medium to long term. For example, they could begin a multi-year transition period after which NY-regulated health insurance plans would have to cover a non-smartphone version of these monitoring devices with at least equivalent functionality to any smartphone version they cover, at no greater out-of-pocket cost to the patient, unless no comparable non-smartphone product is on the market from any manufacturer. Then they could eventually require the non-smartphone version in class once it exists, with a fully insurance-paid (no cost-sharing) transition available at that time to children who use the existing smartphone monitoring system.
To avoid a gap in insurance coverage, NY could continue to mandate that some version of these devices be covered, so nobody would go without affordable medical monitoring. But as soon as one company decides to make a non-smartphone version, their competitors would have to do the same or else lose market share in NY, so they all would. (Why would that first company take the leap? They'd get a lot of insurance-paid device purchases for the transition for children's existing devices.) And then teachers would have an ADA-compliant way to remove the distractions of smartphones in class even for kids with medical monitoring needs, without causing harm to anyone.
> The law could also use indirect leverage to gradually separate students' medical monitoring from the smartphone. For example, they could begin a multi-year transition period after which NY-regulated health insurance plans could only cover these types of smartphone-linked medical monitoring devices if they also cover a version with equivalent functionality in a non-smartphone version (at no greater out-of-pocket cost to the patient) unless no comparable non-smartphone product is on the market from any manufacturer. Then they could eventually require the non-smartphone version in class once it exists, with a fully insurance-paid (no cost-sharing) transition available to existing users of the smartphone monitoring system.
I think there are a few issues here.
T1D is already incredibly intrusive in the daily lives of children. Continuous glucose monitors (device 1, on body with bluetooth connection to a smartphone, device 2) track one's blood sugar every 5 minutes or so and gives the child, the parent, and the school nurse the information they need to jointly replace the functionality of the child's pancreas. This might be dosing with insulin through a pump (device 3, sometimes managed via smartphone) to lower blood glucose or cover carbohydrate consumption. Or it might be eating to raise blood glucose.
If the student's blood glucose gets either too high or too low (which can happen in a matter of minutes) the consequences can be fatal or lead to lifelong complications like nerve damage in the extremities or eyes. High stakes stuff.
If I understand correctly, your proposal would introduce a fourth device to separately monitor blood glucose and, I assume, manage the process of uploading this data and sharing it with all parties. This fourth device would mean a few things:
- Yet another piece of expensive, and durable medical equipment you are required to pay for, that insurance rarely fully covers.
- The child would have to tote around now four devices daily to manage a chronic condition.
- Another device to manage and maintain (batteries need to be charged, etc).
- Paying for another 5g plan to ensure that the monitoring device can share information with parents etc.
Despite some of the cons to these systems being integrated into your smartphone, there are considerable advantages to using the networked compute you always have in your pocket. Not to mention that these devices suffer from painfully slow development and approval cycles. Durable medical goods often have to go through federal approval and even small changes to firmware can take years.
Also, just some quick figures. The school age population in NY state as of 2021 was 2,622,879. About 1/400 children ages 0-18 have type 1. So around 6.5k students. This is neither the extreme edge case that others have described (and just one of many chronic diseases that are managed via smartphones) nor is it likely a large enough segment to change product development at these large health tech companies.
I don't think the solution is to try to engineer incentives and overhaul the entire health insurance coverage of durable medical goods. Nor do I think the solution is to require children with T1D to carry around and pay for yet another expensive device.
I think we just need to be careful in the design of legislation like this, as you suggest, especially when it comes to ubiquitous devices that have been integrated into so many facets of people's lives. There is no such thing as a 'trivial exception' to a state law (responding to a commenter further down).
Then maybe the easier solution is for the states to work with Apple and Google to make a “classroom mode” that disables everything except SMS, voice calls, and medical apps, and the presence of which can somehow easily be detected by the teacher in a privacy-preserving way (e.g. checking only the aggregate number of nearby classroom mode phones broadcasting that status over Bluetooth LE).
In the world where that is common, smartphones can still be banned in the classroom except for people with a medical accommodation, and those people would need to set their phones to classroom mode. The teacher would then have an app to alert them if the number of classroom mode broadcasts deviates from what is expected.
If that number of broadcasts is too low, that’s cause for investigation either because someone with an accommodation is using nonmedical apps in class or because someone’s medical monitoring is impaired due to a depleted phone battery. The former case would lead to discipline for using nonmedical apps in class outside the scope of their medical accommodation; the latter case would lead to whatever medical assistance is appropriate.
There would of course be plenty of other considerations to balance anti-abuse measures, convenience, and privacy. But the basic idea would work.
What is your plan as a parent for when the kid loses the smartphone by accident? Or if it runs out of battery?Whatever that plan is, why can’t that be the procedure while in school?
Making one’s child’s health utterly dependent on a smartphone sounds like... not a well thought out idea. What did people use to manage t1d prior to smartphones? Does that no longer work?
Before Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), diabetics would need to draw blood from a finger prick and use that with a glucometer to measure blood glucose levels or pee on a test strip.
These ways are still widely used but they still require a secondary device (a glucometer, or test strips) and also lead to much less frequent readings. This means that high and low blood sugars were more difficult to detect and correct.
Because you get far fewer readings (unless you're pricking your fingers every 5 minutes) there are very real health consequences. Having a high blood sugar for too long (oops, that apple had more carbohydrates in it than expected) can lead to nerve damage and blindness in the long term and potentially fatal diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) in the immediate term. There are similar negative outcomes for low blood glucose levels.
Before CGMs people managed T1D but the short and long term health outcomes were/are much worse and the risk of death due to undiagnosed hyper/hypoglycemia was also much higher. Of course, we still carry glucometers and urine test strips (very inaccurate + coarse measurement) everywhere we go and the school has these as well.
They ripped out home economics, Wood, metal and auto shop. They ripped out the computer labs (hey, many of you HAD vocational training and didn't know it). Gym, Art, Music... all persist.
Schools in the US have become some sort of retrograde distopian bubble of a time that never existed.
Now you're going to remove the one check that kids had vs this system? Cause we haven't seen videos of teachers being awful, stupid or misinformed, we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot?
If you think that cell phones harm kids, or social media harms kids, this bill does fuck all to change that. IT does remove the one context where an internet connection and camera might be useful to how the kids deal with the world going forward.
Fund schools year round, with smaller classes, better teacher pay and 8 hour fucking days with meals provided to kids. These are the things that will change outcomes, not cell phones bans.
If schools had the resources and personell necessary to engage the students then there would be no need to ban mobiles because the students would be more interested in the work at hand. Banning them will not magically make the lessons more engaging or more relevant.
1) That their freerange land has been wiped out and replaced with narrow strips of moving vehicles. Kids have ~no alternatives to being cooped up in adult-filled buildings.
2) False stranger danger alarms have wiped out peer time and 20k years of adultfree self-sufficiency training.
3) Wiping out multi-generational households and walkable communities. Kids used to have many parenting adults but have two. Or one. Or none.
4) Besides needing the wisdom of 100, parents now need to parent 24/7, every day of every week of every year. It's massively more time than the last x0000 years.
Maybe what is ruining kids are adults who've eliminated kids' natural growth builders and now are hell bent on sabotaging their last peer connector.
I think the focus on age is perhaps outsized especially in that child protection act described in the article.
Forcing social media companies to collect a bunch of personal info for age verification is bad for privacy and doesn’t solve the problem of companies being legally allowed to build dopamine casinos.
This is wonderful. Make it National. Then collective elderly Us can rest assured the generation that's running the country received a "proper" education closer to what many of us experienced since we were in school before smartphones were everywhere.
So just yesterday I'm reading here about the Google "Kids Watch" and how its benefit it that kids "don't need a phone anymore".
Now I see this and I can't help but think some Google lobbyist authored a bill (this absolutely does happen), handed it to a staffer in New York and now we're getting a bill that says parents have to buy their kid a Google Kids Watch (since you want your kids location but they cant have a "smart phone").
I didn't get why Google would make such a product and why in the world parents would ever trust Google with a kids product.. but seeing this article it all makes sense. I knew it had to be some kind of gambit but I didn't immediately see how. Now I think I do.
"Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’"
Of course the governor of NY is basically wrapping herself in the American flag, putting her hand on a bible and protecting our children ...
Now with this, kiddos are gong to cut their teeth using the Android ecosystem. When it does come time to get them a smart phone, what kind do you think its going to be? Of course the kids watch is going to have some kind of ecosystem the parents will get deeper in with pic storage, calendars, location tracking etc.
First, buy a law that says kids cant have iPhones. Second, produce a watch that placates the parents/politicians thats not a smart phone. Third, sleep walk the kids and family into a new ecosystem. Fourth, in a few years as the kid matures you get to sell them Google Phones in the Google Ecosystem. Fifth, cast yourself as a concerned company with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of America's Children.
I don't know whether I want to go buy Alphabet shares or go outside and yell at the sky about what a corrupt world we live in.
$10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow. Who doesn't want a more fun way to play hide-and-go-seek? Gotta know who your friends are so we can invite them to the game etc.
The bill wont strictly "mandate buying a Google Kids Watch" but it will stipulate a ban on smart phones (iPhones being the dominant device) in schools. The Google Kiddie Crack watch is $200, the Apple Watch can't compete at that price point. Dumb Phones (flip phone) wont offer location tracking the parents can monitor.
What option is a parent to choose I wonder? This product seems suspiciously designed for a very specific set of conditions to emerge.
"This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario."
You call it a "conclusion jump", I call it a Rational Explanation.
You do know that there are other alternatives to smartphones besides a "Google Kids Watch", yes?
Edit:
> If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts...
That's every dumb phone out there, and a far cry from Google cornering some kind of market. Plenty of options available from a variety of vendors and price points.
Maybe go outside, take a walk and get some fresh air for a sec?
Furthermore, if this and similar laws create a new set of requirements for school devices, companies (including Apple!) will create products to meet demand.
It seems like the tail wagging the dog to reason back from a dominant device now being excluded to regulation shouldn't happen.
> The Google Kiddie Crack watch is $200, the Apple Watch can't compete at that price point.
The cheapest Apple Watch is only $250.. they could obviously sell one at a cheaper point via the Education portal if there was sufficient reason to (like a nationwide ban on cell phones).
This has been a campaign for years and other jurisdictions have already passed similar laws. If anything, Google is reacting to the legislative trend, rather than lobbying for it.
This just feels like more social panic pandering from Hochul. I sincerely doubt this will have any appreciable affect on kids well-being. My older kid's high school just leans way in. They use phones in class for tasks. They watch videos, do research, use calculator aops, Google Classroom. The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn.
It also seems reasonable for teachers to say, "my email hours are not from the hours of 8am-4pm, so email me after school - since that's when I'll be answering them anyway."
I honestly think it is unreasonable. I don't think the real-world lesson should be to blindly submit to authority. Obviously you have to be realistic, but kids are already very aware of which teachers are being difficult for no good reason. Most teachers now are requiring assignments be turned in via digital channel because it makes it impossible to question when they were due, when they were turned in or for a paper to be misplaced. It's unequivocally superior to paper assignments. Even for hand-made work, they will take a photo on their phone to upload.
One teacher in particular still requires hand-written papers to be turned in and recently gave my kid a 0 on an assignment because he lost it. She had to go to his class afterschool and find it.
That doesn't jive with your experience as an adult in the real world?
Someone in authority says a thing must be a way.
You're welcome to plead your case, or take them to court, or try any other redress that you want. But in the end, if you need something from them you're beholden to their requirements and favor.
It's not like they're asking a child to submit a paper at the top of Mt Everest.
If it needs to be in dead tree form, on a desk, then you plan a way to make that happen. Or you argue your case about why you shouldn't be subject to those rules.
