With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone.
At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old. And at younger ages, it’s not the kids asking for the devices, but parents looking to keep tabs on their children out of concern for their safety.
That’s what EdSurge senior reporter Emily Tate Sullivan found when she spent months researching the recent boom in smartwatches for kids, for a feature story that EdSurge co-published with WIRED magazine last week.
“The worst case scenario in the minds of the parents I talked to is just always looming,” she says. “These parents think, ‘If there's a school shooting, if there's a lockdown, I want to be able to communicate with my child in that locked down classroom. If they are abducted, I want to be able to know exactly where they are. Maybe there's still a watch on their wrist and I can track them.’ I mean, these are things that are so improbable, but it doesn't really matter. The fear is pervasive. It's a really powerful force.”
But while parents focus on physical safety as they hand kids smartwatches, they may not be considering the downsides of starting a digital life so early, according to digital media experts. And schools are increasingly seeing the devices as a distraction — sometimes from parents texting their kids during the school day. Yet watches are often not included in school bans on smartphones, and they’re not always mentioned in the conversation about the effects of digital devices on children.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we go behind the story with an interview with Tate Sullivan, including details that she wasn’t able to fit into the final piece. And in the second half of the episode, the author reads the full article, so you can catch this story in podcast form.
COSN (2024 STATE OF EDTECH DISTRICT LEADERSHIP SURVEY)
EdTech Leaders are … challenged by persistent problems such as hurdles to hiring qualified IT talent, issues of student home internet and device access, funding cliffs as pandemic funds expire, and enormous threats of cybersecurity attacks,” according to the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) 2024 State of Edtech District Leadership survey and accompanying report on the survey. “This survey—now in its 11th year—provides an opportunity for EdTech Leaders, who are often siloed within their own district, to benchmark their efforts or simply see what others are doing. It also is valuable to superintendents, school boards, and business officers as they determine priorities and budgets to address these challenges.”
Key Findings:
Artificial Intelligence (AI). EdTech Leaders recognize that AI has potential risks and benefits. The overwhelming majority (97%) see benefits in how AI can positively impact education and over a third (35%) of districts report having a generative AI initiative.
Cybersecurity. Cybersecurity remains the top concern for EdTech Leaders, with 99% of districts taking measures to improve protections. While this is a bleak situation given the challenge, increasingly districts are on a path to implementing many cybersecurity best practices.
Student Well-Being. An overwhelming majority (93%) of districts are using technology solutions designed to address or improve student well-being. Tools for monitoring and reporting bullying and self-harm, as well as tracking student behavior, are common and widely implemented.
Digital Equity. A growing number of districts no longer provide any services to address student home broadband access—31% this year, compared to 19% just two years ago. One clear example is the decline in the number of districts providing hotspots to unconnected students, which from 69% in 2022 to 49% this year.
Interoperability. Most districts are involved in Interoperability initiatives, with the majority partially implemented or in the planning stage. Single Sign-On (SSO) is the most fully implemented interoperability initiative at 43%.
As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.
“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”
When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.
“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”
She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.
She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.
Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.
Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.
Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”
And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.
[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.
— Kris Perry
“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”
Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.
Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.
“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”
Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.
In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.
The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.
Today’s tools make such tracking possible.
“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”
This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.
It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.
— Mitch Prinstein
Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.
“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.
“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”
Technology ‘Training Wheels’
When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.
It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.
“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”
Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.
Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.
Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.
A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.
Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.
— Girard Kelly
“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”
To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.
“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”
Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.
“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”
As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.
“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”
That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.
“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.
Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”
“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.
What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.
Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.
“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.
To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.
‘Better Be Safe Than Sorry’
When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.
“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”
She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.
“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.
The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.
The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.
Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.
Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.
Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”
Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.
Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.
“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”
It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.
Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.
“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”
But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.
Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.
“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.
Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, byanumberofmeasures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)
“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”
It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.
Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.
“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”
Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.
I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.
— Katie Joseph
“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”
Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.
If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.
“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”
Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.
“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.
Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.
One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.
“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”
The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.
‘Opening Pandora’s Box’
Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.
Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.
“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”
Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.
Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.
“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)
The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.
“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.
True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.
Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.
“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.
Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.
They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.
— Katie Joseph
“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”
She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.
Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.
For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.
Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.
He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.
“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”
Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?
Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.
That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.
“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”
Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?
The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”
Angela Fleck says this was the typical scene last year in the sixth grade social studies classes she teaches at Glover Middle School in Spokane, Washington: Nearly every student had a smartphone, and many of them would regularly sneak glances at the devices, which they kept tucked behind a book or just under their desks.
“They're pretty sneaky, so you wouldn't always know that that was the reason,” says Fleck. “But over time, I'd realize no matter how engaging my lesson was, when it was time to turn and do the group activity or the assignment — something that wasn't totally me directing the class — there would be a large number of students that had no idea what we were doing.”
What students were doing with their phones, she says, was most often using Snapchat or other social media or texting with students in other classrooms, which she described as creating drama: “And then it would just spread rapid-fire, whatever the situation was, and it would sometimes result in altercations — meeting up at a certain place, and they'd arrange it all day on the phone.”
This year, though, the vibe has changed. Spokane Public Schools issued a new districtwide policy that bans the use of smartphones or smartwatches in classrooms during instructional time. So now students in elementary and middle schools have to keep devices off and put away during the school day, though high school students can use their smartphones or watches between classes and at lunch.
Now, she says, she feels like she has most students’ attention during classes since she no longer has to compete with buzzing devices. “In general, students are ready to learn,” she says. “As a teacher, I need to make sure that I have an engaging lesson that will keep their attention and help them to learn and help them to continue to want to be engaged.” And she says there are fewer fights at the school, too.
The district is one of many across the country that have instituted new smartphone bans this year, in the name of increasing student engagement and counteracting the negative effects that social media has on youth mental health. And at least four states — Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida — have enacted statewide bans limiting school smartphone access.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we set out to get a sense of how the bans are going. To do that, we talked with Fleck, as well as a high school teacher in Indiana, where a new statewide law bans smartphones and other wireless devices in schools during instructional time.
Fleck is a fan of the ban, and says she hopes the school never goes back to the old approach. But she admits that she misses some aspects of having phones available to integrate in a lesson when needed.
In the past, for instance, she allowed students to take pictures with their phones of the slides she was showing. And she would often designate a student as a researcher during lessons who could look up related material online and share with the group. Now she’s finding ways to adapt to keep those positive aspects of online access, she says, such as having student researchers use a computer in the classroom, or to make more use of the school-issued laptops for some lessons.
Adam Swinyard, the superintendent of Spokane Public Schools, acknowledges that there are trade-offs to the new ban when it comes to the use of tech in instruction.
“We absolutely have lost some power of the opportunity that those devices provide, whether that's, ‘I can really quickly look something up,’ or ‘I can quickly participate in a class poll’ or ‘I can tune my music instrument,’” he told EdSurge. “But I think where we landed in our community, for our schools and for our kids, is what we gain in their level of engagement and ability to focus far outweighs what we're losing in a device being a powerful pedagogical tool inside of the classroom. But I think it's important to acknowledge.”
What they end up teaching students, he argues, is more important. The mantra for the district is that there is a “time and place” for smartphone use, says Swinyard, and that a classroom is not the right setting or occasion, just as he wouldn’t pull out his phone and write a text while he was being interviewed for this article, or sitting in an important meeting.
Some schools with new bans have faced pushback from students, especially where there has been a zero-tolerance for phones even during social time. At a Jasper High School in Plano, Texas, for instance, more than 250 people signed a petition calling on the principal to revise a new ban on smartphones, which forbids use of devices all day, even during lunch and in the halls between classes. “Before the restricted use of cellphones was prohibited, they were a social link, connecting students during lunch and hallway breaks,” the petition reads.
And some parents have complained about the new bans, out of concerns that they would not be able to reach their children in the event of an emergency, such as a school shooting. A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that about 7 in 10 Americans support cellphone bans during class, while only about a third favor an all-day ban.
So one takeaway is that how schools design their smartphone restrictions — and how they communicate the policies to students and parents — are important for how well they work in practice.
Hear more about the pros and cons of new smartphone bans on this week’s EdSurge Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.
The COVID-19 pandemic has left a lasting impact on students’ social-emotional well-being. As schools return to in-person learning, educators face the challenge of addressing the diverse emotional needs of students who have experienced unprecedented disruptions. Research shows that the pandemic has heightened feelings of anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty among young learners, making social-emotional learning (SEL) more critical than ever.
Kezie helps students identify their feelings. Image credit: Khan Academy Kids
Unique Strategies for Implementing SEL With Limited Resources
Emotional Check-In Stations
Create simple, designated spaces in classrooms where students can "check in" with their emotions at the beginning and end of the day. These stations can include mood meters, emoji charts, or even a "feelings box" where students can drop in anonymous notes. This practice not only helps students identify and express their emotions but also provides teachers with insight into their emotional states.
Allowing students to express themselves creatively can be a powerful outlet for processing complex emotions.
Storytelling and Role-Playing
Encourage students to share their stories and experiences from the pandemic or other challenging moments through creative storytelling or role-playing activities. This approach allows students to process their emotions and build empathy by understanding the experiences of their peers.
Mindful Moments
Integrate short, mindful moments throughout the school day to help students manage stress and focus. These can include breathing exercises, guided imagery or simple stretches. Mindfulness practices are quick to implement and can be done as a class or individually, providing a calm and centered start to the day.
Virtual Pen Pals and Buddy Systems
Foster connections and reduce feelings of isolation by setting up virtual pen pals or buddy systems within the school or with other schools (feel free to use dictation or voice recording for students still gaining writing confidence!). This initiative allows students to share their thoughts and feelings with peers, providing a sense of community and support. It also enhances communication skills and empathy.
Creative Expression Through Art and Play
Provide opportunities for creative expression through art, music and play. Allowing students to express themselves creatively can be a powerful outlet for processing complex emotions. Activities like drawing, crafting or playing musical instruments can be integrated into the school day without requiring extensive resources.
Educational technology has become an invaluable resource in addressing the diverse SEL needs of students, especially in the post-COVID era. With many schools facing resource constraints, edtech provides scalable and flexible solutions that can be easily integrated into daily routines. Here’s how edtech can support SEL initiatives:
Scalable Access to SEL Resources
Edtech platforms like Khan Academy Kids offer a vast array of SEL content that students, teachers and parents can access from anywhere. This accessibility ensures that SEL resources are available to all students, allowing them to utilize them when they need support the most.
Reya helps users explore their feelings through storytelling. Image credit: Khan Academy Kids
Personalized Learning Experiences
One of the significant advantages of edtech is its ability to personalize learning experiences. Platforms can adapt content to meet each student's specific emotional and developmental needs. For example, the interactive activities in Khan Academy Kids’ SEL curriculum can be tailored to help students explore their emotions at their own pace, making the learning experience more relevant and impactful.
Integration of Interactive Tools
Edtech enables interactive tools, such as digital mood meters, emotion charts and story-based scenarios, which can be more engaging for students than traditional methods. These tools can help students better understand and express their emotions. For instance, Khan Academy Kids’ use of expressive characters and voice recordings allows students to explore a range of emotions in a fun and engaging way.
Edtech platforms provide valuable support for teachers and parents by offering ready-to-use resources and activities. This support is crucial, especially in environments where educators may lack specific training in SEL. Khan Academy Kids offers comprehensive guides and activities that can be used in both classroom and home settings, ensuring consistent SEL support across different environments.
Data-Driven Insights
Many edtech platforms offer data analytics tools that help educators track students’ progress and identify areas where additional support may be needed. This data-driven approach allows for more targeted interventions, ensuring that students receive the help they need when they need it.
Mila and Juliet identify feelings. Image credit: Denisse Chao / Khan Academy Kids
Building a Resilient Future Together
As we navigate the complexities of the post-COVID educational landscape, prioritizing social-emotional learning is more important than ever. By leveraging sustainable practices and scaling them using edtech, schools can provide scalable, personalized and engaging SEL experiences that support students’ emotional and mental well-being.
That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.
They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.
One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.
Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.
These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.
“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”
What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?
Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.
“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”
Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.
“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.
But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.
“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”
Changing the Narrative
Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.
Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.
“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”
View From a School District
Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.
Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.
“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”
Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.
It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.
While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.
“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”
Educator wellness is more than buzzwords. Living a well-balanced and fully engaged life is essential for building a safe, supportive and collaborative school culture that positively impacts both student achievement and teacher retention. Learn the 4 dimensions of educator wellness and how they can help strengthen work-life balance and teacher efficacy.
Colleges are adjusting to a lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept kids out of physical schools at key points in their social development: It’s harder than it used to be to teach students to adjust to college life when so many are coming to campuses nervous about making social connections.
As a result, many colleges and universities are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder this summer, for instance, administrators are offering incoming students three orientation options to choose from. One effort lets new students meet classmates in breakout Zoom calls. Another program brings students and families to campus for a day to learn about university traditions and how to get involved on campus. And those looking for an immersive experience can attend ‘Camp Chip’ — they’ll spend two nights on campus connecting with other students, getting to know the campus and seeing what life will be like in college.
Before the pandemic, the university’s summer orientation had been mostly online, with an in person “welcome week” before classes began. But these days there’s a greater interest (and expectation) from students and families in the need to help students feel like they belong on campus, says Joe Thomas, president of Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, known as NODA.
“In 2019, I probably would have heard from parents and students, ‘It's annoying,’ ‘It's hard to get here,’ ‘How could you possibly require this in-person orientation?” he says. “Now they're like, ‘Oh we get it, we would really love to be there and watch our student get to know other folks.’ There's just more buy-in now.”
Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other colleges.
“It is truly the kickoff to retention,” says Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University. “If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
Flexibility Is Key
Many institutions are still in the process of “throwing darts at a dartboard” to see what sticks best for orientation, says Thomas, of NODA. This means they need to be adaptable, and offer a range of ways students can prepare to enter college.
Most colleges now have some online component to their orientation process that’s left over from the pandemic, Thomas says. Often the online portions are more “transactional,” he notes. Students learn about registering for classes, connect with their academic advisor and go through required trainings. The number of topics these trainings cover has increased as colleges feel pressure to better regulate artificial intelligence, create stricter free speech regulations or enforce hazing regulations, among other changes.
"It is truly the kickoff to retention. ... If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
—Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University.
As a result, orientations are required to cover much more information now than even a few years ago, says Jenny Osborn, associate director of the first year experience at The Ohio State University. In Ohio, for example, state lawmakers passed anti-hazing legislation in 2021 that requires colleges to create an educational program on hazing that students can complete during orientation.
Once students have finished the online portion, colleges bring them into in-person or virtual sessions either during the summer or right before classes start to help students connect with one another.
At Towson University, for instance, students must complete a series of online modules, which typically take a total of about 35 minutes, before they come to orientation, Murray says. Then, they attend a one-day session in the summer, which can be in person or virtual, followed by a four-day program before the first day of classes.
The goal, Murray adds, is to spread information out over time, while also encouraging students to connect with one another.
“We know that sense of belonging ebbs and flows throughout a student's experience,” Murray says. “But if we can start off on the right note, that information piece can happen in a bunch of different ways.”
Creating a range of orientation options also helps colleges assess what students need, says Thomas, who is also the associate vice chancellor for student affairs at Boulder. Much of Boulder’s student population comes from out of state, he says, which makes it difficult to visit the city, where summer is one of the peak tourist times. If students can’t come to Colorado but still want to connect with future classmates, they can attend a virtual session, where they’ll be split into breakout rooms led by orientation leaders.
“We're hyper aware of making sure that our orientation programs are accessible to students, whether you have the financial means or not,” Thomas says. “We're gonna use that information to then say, ‘Ok, [for] future summers, here's what we need to be the balance to meet our first generation students with what they need, what any of our marginalized populations may need that may be different, and the population en masse for our 7,000 plus students at CU Boulder.’”
Changing Social Skills
Colleges have also begun adapting their orientation programs to the ways students’ social skills have changed coming out of the pandemic.
Many students now have a harder time saying goodbye to their families, Osborn says. Before the pandemic, about 70 to 80 percent of students would stay in residence halls during the university’s overnight summer orientation. Now more than half of the students opt to stay with their parents in a hotel. Students also usually turn to their siblings or parents for information about college rather than relying on orientation, she adds.
When it comes to choosing a date for orientation, students used to go for the earliest possible dates. Now, they want to try to coordinate with a future roommate or classmate they met online, Osborn says.
“What we're seeing student-behavior-wise at orientation is a real sense of clinging to safety,” she says.
To help students feel more comfortable meeting other students, Ohio State has begun offering more small-group and “low- risk” activities, Osborn says. Rather than hosting a large scavenger hunt, for example, Osborn says students can do jewelry making, coloring, board games and pick-up volleyball or basketball games. That way, students can connect with one or two people rather than be overwhelmed by a large group.
Other colleges have created small group atmospheres that bring students together based on similar interests or identities. This gives them a leg up when they meet each other because they already have something in common, says Gregory Wolcott, the associate vice president for student success at San Jose State University.
During San Jose State’s two-night orientation, students are split into groups of about 20 based on what they’re studying, Wolcott says. Orientation leaders host interactive activities with their groups.
CU Boulder also splits students up based on commonalities. During the university’s fall welcome program, orientation leaders host about 40 “Buff Meet Ups” for students who all have shared interests, such as gaming or music. The “meet-ups” could also be taking a tour of local restaurants or going on a hike together, which helps them connect in a smaller setting, says Lizzie Brister, director of new student and family programs at Boulder. Some of the events are also identity based, such as one for Latinx students.
Coming out of the pandemic, “there was an indication that [students] wanted to be together, they wanted to do stuff in community, but didn't know how to engage or interact with each other,” Thomas says. “Orientation programs are shifting more toward that — getting to know each other again, which is the classic thing that we try to do, but it can't just be in solely one program type.”
Orientation offices have also changed the way they train their student leaders, often to account for the same issues the pandemic has caused for incoming students.
These days many students are reluctant to sign up as orientation leaders, Osborn says. In the same way that new students don’t want to stay in the dorms, families would rather have their older students spend time at home than stay on campus during the summer, she says.
They’re also coming in with less background knowledge, Brister says. Before the pandemic, orientation leaders typically held leadership positions in high school, as a club president, for example, Brister says. Now students are coming in with less experience public speaking or facilitating a small group. Some also haven’t ever experienced an in-person orientation, but now need to lead most of the activities for the incoming class (though that has become less of an issue as students who experienced the pandemic in college graduate).
Journey leaders, as CU’s orientation leaders are called, now attend an eight-week leadership course to prepare them for orientation. They learn how to run orientation events, leadership skills and ways to engage students who may be more socially anxious, among other things, Brister says. Before the pandemic, that information was all squeezed into just four days of training.
“That's pivotal to build our culture for those student leaders of how we want to share what it means to be a Buff, how we want to present the university and be ambassadors for the university to these new students and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Brister says. “That's been huge in building that culture for our student leaders and then hopefully communicating that to our whole incoming student population.”
And with high college costs, it’s more important than ever for colleges to offer supports and to make sure students and families know where to find that help, says Wolcott, of San Jose State.
If colleges don’t provide all the support orientation programs need, students may end up transferring to somewhere that does.
“College campuses need to understand that it's a competitive market,” Wolcott says. “If you're not rolling out the red carpet, if everyone's not on board with ‘this is orientation season and it's everybody's job,’ then campuses are really gonna struggle.”
“Are you a boy or a girl?” the 5-year-old asked, staring at me as she waited for my response. I froze. Having worked primarily with middle and high schoolers, I wasn’t yet used to the blunt inquisitiveness of our younger students. I was caught off guard.
It was 2022 and I had recently been hired as the principal of an all-girls elementary school in New York, and it was my first visit to the school to meet students, staff and families.
“I’m a girl,” I said, smiling through my discomfort, before slinking away to chat with another student. The moment was brief, but it stuck in the pit of my belly throughout the day.
When I arrived home, I debriefed the day with my wife. I told her about the exciting moments from my visit — learning about the school culture, seeing teachers in action, and meeting my incredible new students. When I mentioned my experience with the pre-K student, she sensed my unease and asked me how I was feeling about it.
As I reflected, I found myself wondering aloud what it would be like leading an all-girls elementary school as a masculine-presenting queer woman. I was worried that the community would not accept a woman who wears suits and ties to lead their daughters’ school, that I would be too different. My wife reassured me that my individuality was valuable and my students would love and respect me as they always had when I was a teacher.
Since becoming principal of an elementary school, I have been asked the same innocent, yet awkward, question by multiple students and have still not found out the perfect response. But each time I’m asked, it reminds me of the fact that young people are constantly exploring identity and part of my job is to foster a community where curiosity, individuality, and diversity are seen as assets.
To create this kind of inclusive community, I want to develop a thoughtful response that challenges students to cultivate their own worldview — one that gets them thinking about why this question is coming up for them and helps them understand how they can ask questions about identity with care.
Identity exploration is a key element of childhood and adolescence and working with young people requires us to support it. There’s a body of research showing the importance of identity development and a positive self-concept for social and emotional growth. Since our school is an all-girls institution, gender identity is something we think a lot about — and it starts early. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children typically develop a sense of their gender identity by 4 years old. As children explore, they often express curiosity about aspects of their own identity and the identity of others in their community.
Most of the staff and students at our school identify as girls or women. But none of us is the same. We each show up and represent our identity in unique ways. There’s no singular expression of girlhood or womanhood. How, then, in a space that is organized around a shared gender identity, can we create an environment that embraces diversity and difference?
As a leader, I believe in order to create this type of environment, I have to start with myself.
While considering how to respond when a student asks a question about my identity, I’ve been thinking about where my insecurity stems from and I’ve recently come to realize that it’s fueled by traumatic experiences I had when I was a student. Today, I am a school leader, but I was once a child who was looking for a safe space to become myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t find that at school. Instead, I experienced rejection and bigotry, living through years of racist and homophobic bullying. Clearing the emotional rubble created by those experiences, I now have an important perspective on what our young people are going through in school today.
My own feelings of being misunderstood in my youth, as well as the homophobia I’ve lived through for being open about my identity as a queer educator, inform my passion for creating spaces where our girls can just be, without the fear of having to fit into a specific mold. I feel a great sense of responsibility to lead a school community that expands the definition of what it means to be a girl, supporting whatever identities our students bring to the classroom each day, and empowering our students to become adults who are beacons of our community.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that every student should question their gender. Instead, I’m proposing that all students deserve a safe space to explore their identities, ask questions, discuss identity openly and learn about individuals who are like them — and not like them.
When I model vulnerability and authenticity as a leader, I invite others to do the same. The challenge? Leaders like me are not really encouraged to be vulnerable. As a young Black queer woman in school leadership, embracing vulnerability has felt frightening at times.
Facilitating open conversations about identity is important and can lead to validation and support, but there can also be potential backlash. For example, I’ve worked in schools for nearly a decade and in every space I’ve taught in, we’ve gotten pushback from families about celebrating, or even acknowledging Pride Month in reaction to activities promoting inclusivity for LGBTQ+ people because they feel it is inappropriate. Each time, I assure families that we value an inclusive curriculum and anything we’re teaching is in service of supporting our students.
These sentiments are hurtful personally, but that’s not my main concern. It’s not just about me. It’s about my students and my staff and the kind of environment we cultivate for them. An environment where everyone can bring their full selves to school. Our students deserve to have a school where they’re being challenged to learn about their own identities and the identities of others.
Our school was founded to provide the empowering experience of an all-girls education in a public school environment. The International Coalition of Girls’ Schools, which researches the impact of girls’ schools across the globeargues that girls’ schools are uniquely positioned to develop girls into leaders precisely because we are honest with our students about the real world. Sheltering our girls from exploring conversations about identity, flattens their voices into a two-dimensional box. Girlhood — or womanhood — is not monolithic. The beauty of a space dedicated to women and led by mostly women is in the variety of who we are, how we show up, and how we support our girls.
I want to create a learning environment that nurtures curiosity and promotes diversity, not one that encourages everyone to be the same. To do that, I have to stand in who I am despite the potential backlash, knowing the space I am creating for my students to one day stand in who they are proudly.
Moving forward, if a student asks me if I’m a boy or a girl, or any other question about identity, I will pose a question to open up the conversation before I share my response. I will ask them why they are asking and why this is coming up for them. I will take their curiosity as an opportunity to encourage them to articulate their own ideas about identity because girls’ schools do not teach girls what to think, but how to be critical thinkers and agents of change.
The movement to keep smartphones out of schools is gaining momentum.
Just last week, the nation’s second-largest public school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, voted to ban smartphones starting in January, citing adverse health risks of social media for kids. And the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for warning labels on social media systems, saying “the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency.”
But some longtime teachers say that while such moves are a step in the right direction, educators need to take a more-active role in countering some negative effects of excessive social media use by students. Essentially, they should redesign assignments and how they instruct to help teach mental focus, modeling how to read, write and research away from the constant interruptions of social media and app notifications.
That’s the view of Lee Underwood, a 12th grade AP English literature and composition teacher at Millikan High School in Long Beach, California, who was the teacher of the year for his public school system in 2022.
He’s been teaching since 2006, so he remembers a time before the invention of the iPhone, Instagram or TikTok. And he says he is concerned by the change in behavior among his students, which has intensified in recent years.
“There is a lethargy that didn't exist before,” he says. “The responses of students were quicker, sharper. There was more of a willingness to engage in our conversations, and we had dynamic conversations.”
He tried to keep up his teaching style, which he feels had been working, but responses from students were different. “The last three years, four years since COVID, my jokes that I tell in my classroom have not been landing,” he says. “And they're the same jokes.”
Underwood has been avidly reading popular books and articles about the impact of smartphones on today’s young people. For instance, he read the much-talked-about book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation,” that has helped spark many recent efforts by schools to do more to counter the consequences of smartphones and social media.
Some have countered Haidt’s arguments, however, by pointing out that while young people face growing mental health challenges, there is little scientific evidence that social media is causing those issues. And just last month on this podcast, Ellen Galinsky, author of a book on what brain science reveals about how best to teach teens, argued that banning social media might backfire, and that kids need to learn how to regulate smartphone use on their own to prepare them for the world beyond school.
“Evidence shows very, very clearly that the ‘just say no’ approach in adolescence — where there's a need for autonomy — does not work,” she said. “In the studies on smoking, it increased smoking.”
Yet Underwood argues that he has felt the impact of social media on his concentration and focus firsthand. And these days he’s changing what he does in the classroom to bring in techniques and strategies that helped him counter the negative impacts of smartphones he experienced.
And he has a strong reaction to Galinsky’s argument.
“We don't let kids smoke in school,” he points out. “Maybe some parts of the ‘just say no campaigns’ broadly didn't work, but then no one's allowing smoking in schools.”
His hope is that the school day can be reserved as a time where students know they can get away from the downsides of smartphone and social media use.
“That's six hours of a school day where you can show a student, bring them to a kind of homeostasis, where they can see what it would be like without having that constant distraction,” he argues.
Hear the full conversation, as well as examples of how he’s redesigned his lessons, on this week’s episode. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
What do parents want from schools when it comes to support for their children’s mental health?
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Mainly, it’s to feel safe.
That’s according to the most recent data from Action for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit that promotes physical and mental well-being for school-aged children. The report results come from a survey of about 1,000 parents with children in K-12 schools in December 2023.
Parents’ concerns about their kids’ mental health ranged from worries about stress — “The pressure that is put on kids to do well on tests is overwhelming sometimes,” one parent wrote — to fears about their children experiencing racism at school.
The goal of collecting data on parental views of mental health is to give them what they want, says Rob Bisceglie, the organization’s executive officer and president. According to the survey responses, that means training and tools on how to talk to their children about issues that affect their well-being. Action for Healthy Kids is using the survey data to develop guides for parents on topics like overall mental health, racism, body positivity, setting body boundaries and suicide prevention.
“Our program is what you call a family-school partnership model, and so what the family thinks — parents and caregivers — that's of particular importance and interest to us,” Bisceglie says.
Strong Support for Services
Parents who were surveyed by and large agreed that having a school where their child feels a sense of belonging is important to supporting students’ mental health. They also wanted mental health services to be available at school.
Nearly 70 percent of parents say their child has “at least one adult at school that they trust or talk to.” Another 88 percent of parents said a welcoming classroom environment would help their child in particular feel safe and supported. Nearly the same percentage wanted teachers to try their best to create positive relationships between students.
Despite recent politicization of K-12 schools, a majority of parents said they want schools to include lessons about topics including “respect, cooperation, perseverance, empathy.”
“I don't think this is surprising, but [the report] reinforced something for me, that what parents really want for their kids in schools is that their kids are safe and feel a sense of love and belonging,” Bisceglie says. “We would love that nurturing relationship to be with a parent or a primary caregiver. The second most likely person to provide that kind of nurturing support for a child is in the school, and that's why this is so important.”
Feeling ‘Fine’
The barrier to accessing mental health services that parents cited most often was their child feeling that nothing is wrong despite a parent feeling otherwise — 38 percent of parents said this was a problem.
Anais Murphy is senior manager of Action for Healthy Kids’ Youth Mental Health and Social and Emotional Learning Program. She says that while parents might worry that kids are saying they feel fine when they don’t, it’s also important for parents to know which behaviors are normal for each age group.
“I think part of the goal of this campaign is to provide parents with the information they need to understand what ‘fine’ means,” Murphy explains. “We're certainly not trying to over-diagnose or to bring alarm bells that are not appropriate, but we absolutely do want parents to have an understanding of, what are the typical markers of development and mental health? A 14-year-old is really irritable. That's totally appropriate and sometimes a cause for concern, but sometimes exactly where they're supposed to be.”
The numbers also point to the fact that parents are paying more attention to youth mental health, Murphy says, and the organization wants to help parents learn where they can go for more help.
“We're in a phase of the reduction of stigma — I'm talking about mental health — at least among the younger generation,” she says. “I think that's a big part of it. It’s not something necessarily that came through in terms of this survey, but certainly something that's [confirmed] in other research.”
Racism at School
In addition to mental health concerns, 58 parents of Black parents and 45 parents of Hispanic parents are worried about their child experiencing racism at school.
Bisceglie says it’s the third year the survey has asked parents about concerns over racism.
Murphy says one of the tools the organization is working on as a result of the survey is a guide for how parents can talk to their children about racism at home and how teachers can do the same at school.
“I think one of the things that happened around the pandemic time and George Floyd was we started talking about racism and institutions like schools a lot more,” she says. “Not that people were not experiencing that before, but we weren’t necessarily bringing attention to it. So it didn't really surprise me, because schools are privy to the same kind of institutional forces that all of our other institutions are, and structural racism and institutional racism are one of those. I think it's really important that it's raised the level of collective consciousness so that we can start talking about it.”
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