The first week of school is often a stressful period for students. However, this year students were uniquely stressed, not just about school, but about a new ban on phones during the school day. Yet, even as students are stressed about the phone ban, that stress pales in comparison to the detriments a phone has on students’ mental health. As someone who avoids social media in its entirety, I believe the phone ban will help students manage their time more efficiently, reduce their intake of social media and even allow for a natural, even enjoyable divide between managing texting involved with extracurricular and school activities that permits better time management.
The GDS administration cited Surgeon General Doctor Vivek H. Murthy’s advisory on social media use and youth mental health as the driving force behind its phone ban. Among many problems with social media use, the advisory underscored a deeply concerning rise in mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and self-harm among youth, likely correlated to the increasing use of social media on phones.
Many students in the GDS community have expressed their disdain for the phone ban as an affront to GDS values as an institution on the grounds that phones are not as bad for their mental health as the administration makes it seem; however, the advisory pointed out that social media exposure, which is generally connected to phone use, was directly correlated to a decrease in mental well-being among teenagers.
According to the advisory, social media has exposed roughly two-thirds of adolescents to hate-based content and, perhaps most shocking, is potentially responsible for more than 300,000 new cases of depression in the U.S. college population, with the advisory anticipating greater effects on younger adolescents in a more vulnerable phase of brain development.
I have heard of people being exposed to horrible content, from fatal risk-taking for entertainment purposes to disturbing images shown to them nonconsensually. I see students on their phones constantly: at bus stops, in hallways, even in class. When students are constantly exposed to harmful content, it’s practically guaranteed that their mental health will suffer. I personally avoid contact with social media entirely, and I believe that I am better off for it.
If credible medical information and my experience of better mental health from avoiding social media aren’t enough to justify a phone ban, then certainly one can understand that phone and social media use during the day is simply a massive waste of time. A study cited in the surgeon general’s advisory reports an average daily social media use of 3.5 hours among 8th and 10th graders. Students in these grades waste about 14.6 percent of their days, or about seven weeks per year, on social media. With the extremely rigorous schedules here at GDS, such use of social media—almost always viewed on a phone—takes up time that could be spent on the mountains of schoolwork assigned at this school, fostering in-person relationships with peers, working on extracurricular activities or simply enjoying the presentness of life, however bored one may be.
If social media usage, particularly involving distraction-laden phones, is both unhealthy and extremely unproductive, the phone ban might be similar to telling students not to smoke, as Head of School Russell Shaw said in his Aug. 4 article in The Atlantic. The ban is the school’s civic duty, dare I say the bare minimum action that GDS, as a guardian figure, must take to reduce the damage caused by social media for at least a few hours every day. Especially when considering such a reduction in social media usage is not nearly as restrictive nor as beneficial as the 30-minute daily maximum asked for by the advisory.
I believe we students should enjoy the phone ban as well. With a phone ban, we will need to wait more time before responding to texts from other students involving our responsibilities in clubs, jobs and other social experiences. All students should have to wait until 3:15 to respond to texts, thus implementing a healthy boundary between school work and extracurricular or social activity.
Why should I care about what my Quizbowl co-captains want when I am doing chemistry homework in the Forum? Why should I wonder about the cross-country psych when I am taking a test in Precalculus? With the phone ban, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief, tackle my school life at school and pivot to extracurricular assignments when I return home. If there is going to be a phone ban, we all might as well take advantage of it.
The new policy on phones will help our mental health, save valuable school time, and it is a unique opportunity to enrich ourselves at school and at home. It is high time we seize back control of our lives from technology, and if the administration is willing to help us, I say let them help.