On Screens, School, and Your Child

Parents, real talk: kids should not have ANY screen time during the school week. Otherwise, you encourage an addiction that will retard their growth now and well into the future.

Screens have pernicious and lasting downstream effects on children.

But, wait! Your kid is obedient at home. He isn’t allowed on his device until he finishes his homework. True, you don't really love how much time he spends gaming, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting him. His grades are fine. If they drop, taking away screens motivates him to get his grades back up in a hurry. Then again, you do have to fight to get him off the screen, and then he’s cranky. But he still obeys, although he can be really sneaky with his phone after the 9 p.m. family device surrender.

Be that as it may, allowing your child daily screen time means you're unintentionally incentivizing the formation of harmful habits, and those habits have serious neurological consequences.

Short-form content like YouTube shorts, TikTok, Insta Reels or games like BrawlStars and Fortnite offer frequent “rewards” that trigger a release of the feel-good chemical dopamine. Game and app developers have honed their products to ensure the user’s brain frequently releases dopamine. In effect, developers hijack the human brain to keep our eyeballs locked on their content.

School is the diametric opposite of this. An academic task like reading fails to deliver rewards at anywhere near the same rate as the typical app or game. On top of that, if a kid isn’t used to reading printed text and he’s dealing with challenging novels or textbooks like the ones assigned in school he’ll want to run to his dopamine source to cope with the discomfort and insecurity that comes with feeling incompetent.

Brief lectures and reading assignments just don’t provide rewards very quickly, if at all, so a frustrated kid may rely on social interaction during instructional time to get his fix. While most kids eventually learn to control behavior that results in punishment, that doesn’t mean they’re focused at school. The attention of heavy screen-users drifts off frequently. This lack of ability to focus wreaks havoc on academic performance for many kids.

Focus is so important that weakening it can hamstring the learning of even very bright kids. On the other hand, I’ve now seen that academically weak kids who have no access to devices grow more rapidly. They get their work done. While they may earn low scores on some assignments, they show more openness to feedback and more willingness to do the work necessary to improve. They study more, read more, ask more questions in class, and come in more often for help. In contrast, students who have unlimited screen time tend to put in only enough effort to maintain full access to their screens. Over time, they fall further and further behind their classmates. Unfortunately, not all parents make the screen use -> poor ability to focus on low-reward tasks -> poor grades connection until bad habits are deeply ingrained.

I purposefully torched my high-paying job and moved to a classical charter when I saw what all-day screen use was doing to my son in middle school, where the District policy is to give a device to every child; part of the District's mission statement is that students will be "digital learners". Meanwhile, my kid would have As in everything but spend his day browsing YouTube shorts, rarely having to put in more than ten minutes of work in any single class, except P.E. I worked caddy-corner to the middle school, and when I looked across the road, the kids weren't on the fields playing, they were sitting together, not talking, all looking at their own devices.

Isn't the main reason people give against homeschooling socialization?

Then I'd watch my own students on their school-issued laptops in my high school classroom. Almost no work got done in class. You'd teach the lesson, give them some time to start working and they'd immediately either pull out their own phones or futz around on their student devices and tell me they'd do the homework at home.

Many parents have been led down the garden path, told that the school-issued device has safeguards that block non-academic content. The reality? My students figured out how to get VPNs on their laptops within the first month of school and could watch sports, binge-watch Netflix, go on on sports gambling sites (yes, really), and play any and all games available on the internet. Even the kids who weren't tech-savvy knew that Google would never be blocked so they could use Alphabet, Inc. to get their doses of dopamine.

And then teachers send them home and tell them to do homework and parents look the other way when they have their phone next to them, pretending to believe that the phone is not a distraction.

Let me explain what that does. Just having the phone in eyeshot drives distraction. Kids are used to frequent notifications. Even if you put the phone on airplane mode and only listen to music, students habitually pick up their phones. It's no different during homework time, especially when a student is struggling. If the homework doesn't come easy, their dopamine-addiction drives them to pick up the phone to cope with the niggling discomfort of incompetence. Even if the kid picks up his device, sees no notifications, and has the discipline not to open an app or indulge in a quick game, his brain needs time to reorient to the task. That can take quite a long time.

Imagine being in the middle of a math problem. You’re struggling. You know you should review your notes, but your phone is right there. You pick it up. No notifications. Block Blast is right there. You’ve been working hard; you’ve earned a game or two. Or three. Then your friend texts you. That’s a five minute distraction. You may open up YouTube Shorts, then glance at the clock and realize you’ve burned 15 minutes. You put the phone down and look back at the problem. You have completely forgotten what you were doing. You go back through it step-by-step. You get to the part that had you stuck before and stay stuck a little longer but reach for your notes this time when your phone buzzes again. Even the buzzing draws you away. Your brain switches to the phone because when it vibrated, your brain released a hit of dopamine since a notification generally signals a positive interaction with a friend or content you really enjoy. This time, you muster the self-control not to pick up the phone, but you forgot which notes you were looking for. You have to go back to the problem once again and figure out what you needed to look for in the notes again.

Can you imagine how often this might happen with a difficult assignment? How much longer it would take you to finish anything, even something not all that demanding, especially if you have very online friends going through the same thing?

Nowhere does this have a more pernicious and devolving effect than it does on reading. Kids will dutifully send their eyes down the page, but because the book will not deliver dopamine the way the device does, it's very, very hard to attend to text. When I assign reading, I ask that students take at least two notes on plot developments on each page. Otherwise, they return to me having no idea what they read, even though I believe almost all of them when they say they did read. It can take anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes for a student to reorient to a task. If it's reading, they may have to go back and re-read multiple pages. Assignments that should take no more than twenty minutes take an hour or more when your kid has a screen nearby. As students fail to read or attend to reading, they miss out on touch points with information covered in class, making them less likely to remember it than a student who can focus on text. I could go into great detail on how the losses stack up when kids can’t read, but you probably can extrapolate them from the above thought experiment.

For this reason, I have a special loathing for schools that require all assignments to be completed on and turned in through a device. Have you ever looked at a teenager's open tabs? If you have an anxiety disorder, I do not recommend it.

In effect, a kid's habituation to frequent injections of dopamine into their system destroys their ability to pay attention. In a recent roundtable in England, Jonathan Haidt said, in passing, the biggest harm of EdTech and phones isn't suicide or anxiety or depression -- it's the destruction of attentional focus because of the long-term implications to the individual's education, career, and in the long-haul, to a nation's standard of living. (If you have the time to watch this, it offers a roadmap for long-term success in fighting the influence of screens at home, at your kid's school, and in your community.)

This made me think of Cal. Cal is a very bright young man. He was, until very recently, allowed unlimited screen time at home. I live in his neighborhood and when I'd run into his parents and sisters, they'd sheepishly tell me that he rarely came out of the house, even in gorgeous weather, unless forced. In class, Cal will do his work, but he only does the bare minimum, and it's often not very good. When I'm talking, I have to cold call him to snap his vacant stare. I always have him repeat directions for assignments because if I don't, he'll stare off into space, and while everyone else is getting started on their work, he's motionless, lost. Once I redirect him, he gets to work. I check in with him often. He knows that his focus is shot. He wants to get better because his parents have taken all screen time from him and are doing his homework with him. He is never disruptive, but when I check his work, even if I've had him repeat my instructions, it's clear that when I was teaching students how to do something, his attention was elsewhere. He's one of at least half a dozen boys in every class who struggle like this.

Families are under a lot of stress in our culture. Parents don’t want to fight their kids. If grades are the only metric a parent monitors, a screen-addicted kid has a lot of incentive to figure out how to “do school”. By only working hard enough to earn grades good enough to prevent their parents from revoking access they waste their potential by short-cutting the important work of learning. Sadly, because they’re children, they won’t see the long-term costs of this behavior until they’re much, much older—if ever.

As a veteran teacher, I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you of this: the kids who don’t put in the hard work and time to build their academic stamina early on will struggle as curriculum increases in difficulty through high school. The extra opportunities that some schools are great at providing will fall by the wayside. The curiosity that might've helped your child find a lifelong passion won't develop. Short-cut the work to free up time for swiping or gaming and the potential for greatness radically declines.

Personal growth is not the only place heavy-screen-users suffer. Their interpersonal relationships are harmed as well. I’ve been frequently saddened to hear from students that they’d love to meet up with friends, but their friends would rather stay home where screentime is unlimited than play outside or talk face-to-face. Boys are deprioritizing in-the-flesh friendships and outdoor venturing for a couple of extra hours of a false reality where they can always start over if they screw up and where a win doesn't mean anything but bragging rights with a 24-hour expiration, bad posture, and myopia. Your girls are doom scrolling, comparing themselves endlessly to people they don't know, feeling lonely and frightened when the people they do know leave them “on read”, don't "like" their posts, or mention something from a group chat she wasn’t invited to join.

As you are probably aware, there is an epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people. Notable child development experts increasingly attribute the decline in the mental health of adolescents to increased screen time and the resulting decrease in the quality of their interpersonal relationships. Screens also steal the time where a young man or woman could pursue real-world accomplishments, like doing physical chores that help the function of your family, working on high-interest projects in the garage, playing a sport really, really well, getting a job, starting a small business, or just being a kid and getting dirty and bruised and scraped—outside.

You parents who’ve gone to all the trouble of seeking out remedies to what is plaguing our children, our culture, by taking the time to read things like this from people like me on the front lines, must not allow your children to retreat from reading hard books, writing reasoned arguments, and building relationships in favor of pretend worlds where they get a sweet chemical kick every time they wiggle a thumb.

Instead, teach them to work hard at important things, knowing they’ll fail, but, in the process, will learn the vital lesson of how one picks oneself up, dusts off and soldiers on. While it can be very hard to say no to an adolescent, and even more difficult to help a kid break a bad habit in order to build better ones, it’s part of our moral obligation as parents to do just that.

Last year, I ran into Jonny, a weak student from early in my teaching career who was working at my local Costco. He recognized me and we exchanged pleasantries. Eventually, he said, “You know, everything you told us back in high school was true. I wasted a lot of time. I have a kid and a girlfriend, but I get it now and I’m learning how to work hard. Thank you for being honest with us.”

It doesn’t win me many friends, but honesty is my guiding principle. And I’m honestly telling you: your kid is spending too much time on screens and not enough time outside playing or learning to manage real-world problems. The courageous thing, the honest thing, the right thing is to help him take responsibility for his long-term success by eliminating screens most days. While he may despise you for it now, when he’s 27, he’ll understand and will be thankful, and you’ll have reared a confident young adult you’re proud to call your child.

P.S. For more information about the neurological, psychological, and social effects of unlimited screen use, I recommend this video which summarizes and visualizes the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation. (If you only want the information on how screen-time harms focus and thought, you can skip to the 11:00 mark.)

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