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School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

york.ac.uk

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Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#551

Post by MoreMoore »

O5vYtytb wrote: post #526
madjam002 wrote: post #513

I find all of these bans quite interesting because when I was at school we would be figuring out how to circumvent the web filters and would be building apps to hide the games we had open on Miniclip when a teacher walked past. I think I kind of owe my software development career to these early days as that is what inspired me. We didn’t have smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren’t as optimised to…

I agree it's interesting. But back then (I'm 34) we only had desktop computers so the distraction time was limited. I remember being forced to take a typing class my senior year in HS, at which point I was already a very proficient typer. So I figured out how to hexedit the program save files and mark my exercises complete. I feel that the new era of phones and apps have two major drawbacks: 1. The always on distract…

I had a T9 dumb phone because that's all that was available. Smartphones didn't exist yet. There was no reason to be on your phone the whole time, at most I might be distracted because I'd be texting a crush during class. I wouldn't be scrolling through social media - it didn't exist yet or what did exist wasn't accessible by phone.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#552

Post by dmart »

Vegenoid wrote: post #483
sebgan wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS…

Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.

No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on. It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#553

Post by warner25 »

bluGill wrote: post #456
wholinator2 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by…

My kids are addicted to reading and I don't like it. Reading is great but not at the expense of staying up until 3am on a school night, not helping with basic household chores, not practicing music, not doing homework.

I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure, absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not hearing any directions given.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#554

Post by causality0 »

quotemstr wrote: post #515
KaiserPro wrote: post #508

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…

[flagged]

I had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I would have been much better off as a person without it.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#555

Post by warner25 »

Levitating wrote: post #438
agile-gift0262 wrote: post #397

When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addiction)? Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.

Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with it all the time. Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your face. It's extremely add…

Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. Take away either one (or take away the unlimited, always-on network access, like I have a 500 MB per month data plan) and I think we're having a very different conversation.

> seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing

I'll make the obligatory point that the situation seems not much better for older people (Millennials, Boomers, etc.) who are also consuming a shocking amount of video on their phones throughout the day, to the point of it being anti-social.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#556

Post by temporarara »

tclancy wrote: post #519
washadjeffmad wrote: post #404

Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.

It would also be nice to attach what ages your kids are, because someone arguing against Big Brother and censorship sounds a lot like someone who doesn’t have to get a kid to bed tonight. Not that opinions can’t be valid, but let’s have our cards on the table.

Reading a book to young kids worked wonders back then and once they were old enough to run outside without supervision they exhausted themselves quite naturally at the end of the day. You can really do million productive things with kids if they aren't feeling sleepy instead of dooming them to bad sleep with those screens.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#558

Post by interludead »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #404

Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.

Yep, there's often a lot of money at play, and it’s easy for the conversation to become less about kids' well-being and more about protecting profits

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#559

Post by awfulneutral »

madjam002 wrote: post #513

I find all of these bans quite interesting because when I was at school we would be figuring out how to circumvent the web filters and would be building apps to hide the games we had open on Miniclip when a teacher walked past. I think I kind of owe my software development career to these early days as that is what inspired me. We didn’t have smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren’t as optimised to…

I think about this a lot because I was the same, I couldn't stop messing around with computers and I owe my career to it. But if I was a kid today I'd probably just get caught up in the easy distractions and not learn to program. It's a very different environment now.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#560

Post by interludead »

KaiserPro wrote: post #508

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…

I agree, we need to regulate tech more thoughtfully, yet we also need to rebuild a culture that allows kids to connect
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