Ok, but how about student grades? I wouldn't have expected any impact on mental health resulting from a school ban considering the exposure they get every other hour of the day.
I think the point is all the "kids are getting damaged by phone use" talking points. It's using the school bans as a useful study; we can see what happens to kids if they're not allowed to use phones here.
iirc a similar study on the Aussie age ban is finding similar results; basically no difference. Some kids benefit, others suffer.
Isn't it the inverse? i.e we think it is bad for students to have phones in schools, but it might be a problem for the students if we ban them, so let's do the test ... yep, no problem for the students, so let's definitely ban them for educational reasons?
Maybe there is a difference in phone addiction management if they are allowed to use it every 45 minutes and if they are forced to be abstinent for 7 hours straight.
I personally would've guessed many immediate positive effects just from a phone ban in school, TFA claims they have a measurement against that.
maybe it's more like banning smoking - stopping a smoker for 8 hours a day would definitely positively impact their health, even if they find it incredibly annoying.
Or it could make it worse, depending a lot on highly-specific details of the school and the student's personality. A lot of people really hated the social environment of the schools they were forced to attend as children, and carry the scars into adulthood. On the other hand, a lot of other people liked doing things with their friends at school and have fond memories of it.
Wat? Why would there be a difference? It only takes an hour a day or less of social media with an algorithm designed to make you anxious to really affect your mental health, how would limiting available social media time to 8 hours help?
The bans are very lackadaisically enforced, and this is in a state where the ban is actually mandated by law (Missouri). My daughter says in high school kids regularly have phones out in class. And a ban even if enforced would not keep kids off these harmful platforms for the many other hours in the day.
Why anyone would expect phone bans to improve mental health is beyond me when the majority of phone use is not happening at school.
Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?
> Analyses using a more stringent definition of school phone bans (ie, requiring phones to be stored away and not carried on the student’s person) also yielded findings consistent with the main results
I actually read it as "They're no more unhappy without than with them" . Kinda occam's razor of if they're not unhappier without their phone, then there's no harm taking it from them.
Here is a thought. Perhaps phones are not the root issue. Look at the state of society right now. So many of us are ideologically divided to the point where people are afraid to be themselves. This is not an environment where the youth flourish.
We do most of our communicating via phones on platforms that encourage flip, nuance-free takes, are hotbeds of disinformation, and so on. Nothing about the environments we exist in foster positive, meaningful communication that collectively benefits us. Everything we used is designed to divide.
Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.
Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.
Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.
Media illiteracy coupled with the sweet, sweet comfort of a screen. People love screens. Just look at how much awe young children (I say this as a parent of two littles) have when they first see a TV. Now look at how much we all love to look at screens of any kind.
We're absolutely fascinated by them. Gobsmacked.
And many people blindly believe what they see on their screens because they don't know any better. They trust the article they read without thinking too deeply about it or looking for alternative perspectives. They gobble up the reel they just watched and are irate about whatever it told them to be irate about. But this isn't anything new, just look at how easily grandma and grandpa gobbled up whatever Fox News fed them in 1998, or what heavily edited images designed to manipulate their thoughts and opinions they were exposed to in the 70s, the 80s when they turned the television on.
Screens have always, and will always, be used to manipulate people, and that's been incredibly amplified over the past 15-20 years.
Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you. Understanding one another is a hell of a lot easier. Everyone can see exactly the same thing as the other person - the analog, meatspace world around them that isn't being manipulated and twisted in an effort to get them to think a certain way.
"It's the screens" feels too broad, it's not obvious that loving screen time is inherently bad. I do buy that the way news is now presented,and the insidiousness of social media algorithms is worth tackling.
But there are plenty of places in the world that don't seem quite as negatively affected to me, and even where screens are not the main culprit behind government/corporate manipulation and control.
You're never going to get people to stop using social media, but maybe it ought to be possible to regulate better.
I also raised two children. My eldest is 18 and only now has a phone. When your children are adults you may no longer feel that phones, or screens, are the root cause. But, the whole world will have changed by then, so time will tell.
> Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you.
I am not disagreeing with you here. My point is that the reason society is divided is not fundamentally because of phones or screens and removing them does not magically remove our ideological differences.
It doesn't remove our ideological differences, no. Nor should it. What it does is make us more likely to understand and communicate better with one another. That's the first step towards getting along and finding a path forward together in spite of our differences.
Differences of opinion are okay, but it's harder to get along when our lives are lived in spaces that silo us off and encourage distrust and anger. Screens do that to us, meatspace doesn't.
Another thought: maybe society as you describe it isn't all that different today than at many other points in history. It's called the human condition.
It seems really, really obvious to me that phones are bad for learning, mental health, social connection, etc. But nobody has been able to prove this in any studies, even in ones outside of the school environment. At some point I think we just have to do school phone bans regardless of the science.
This happens a lot in social sciences; more than once I've gotten my intuition "disproven" by a study only for that study itself to later be proven wrong.
However this study in particular is pretty bad, see the comment elsewhere about the screentime not spent not going down (possibly cause of extant classroom bans)
What seems blatantly obvious does not always represent the underlying reality. This can also be taken as a chance to discover better solutions to a given problem than banning phones.
On the flip side, when measurements don't reveal something that is completely obvious, especially in social sciences, it is very possible the measurement is measuring the wrong thing.
In this case the prevailing theory is that the phones were already banned in classes, so the schoolwide ban didn't do anything to screentime. Which, duh.
Am I reading Table 1 correctly? It seems to indicate screen time (social media, gaming, etc) is the same between both groups (phones allowed and phones banned). Is that right?
If so, it's no wonder they see no difference. They didn't see a change in the presumed underlying cause.
The narrative says that phone use was already banned during classroom instruction in many of the schools that later instituted school-wide bans. The impact on students would've been minimal because realistically the only time they would've been able to use phones beforehand was passing between classes or at lunch/recess.
Though this is still relevant to policy-makers who are thinking of instituting district-wide bans. It's sorta like all the heat around critical race theory: banning something that doesn't actually happen much in schools.
We live in a society that makes chasing after pleasure very easy therefore nothing feels special or fulfilling anymore. You have to make a serious effort to limit yourself on what you experience. Not because you lack the resources or you're some kind of religious zealot. But because you give yourself the opportunity to truly enjoy little things when you can't have them all the time.
Pleasure is cheap, even addictive. Fulfillment and meaningful work are extremely difficult to come by. Everything is monetized, every interaction, every experience... money makes experiences transactional, they lose their meaing.
To have a fulfilling live people needs to participate in society, have opportunities, education, basic needs covered... and that is our failure. A kid can get 24/7 entertainment while lacking food or good education.
Are we willing to trade off the convenience of perpetual connectivity to increased well being?
Two things.
1. There is no evidence. Mostly because Well being cannot be really quantified.
2. Convenience and comforts trumps well being. Basic human nature. Are we willing to teach kids abstract concepts such as wisdom and "nishkamakarma" so that they will have well being instead of conveniences and comforts? They will be less of a "knowledge worker" and more of a philosopher. They will consume vastly less, thus would hurt the current system of capitalistic indulgence.
We are not willing to do any of these. At the root, it is you that is causing your unwellbeingness...But you can't change. Deal with it. Stop the whining! Let the kids have what ever fun they want..Don't snatch the phones from their hands. Teach them stuff so that they can see it for what it is (an instrument of manipulators and exploiters), that they are repelled by it.
I’m not sure there’s any real convenience and comfort to it for school kids through the day. For coordination of pickups etc yes, but the rest is just dopamine chasing.
If anything, it appears the bans were associated with slightly worse mental health:
> In the full sample, the estimated postpolicy association was 0.65 (95% CI, 0.01-1.30; P = .05) for depressive symptoms, 0.21 (95% CI, −0.08 to 0.50; P = .16) for anxiety, 0.23 (95% CI, −0.12 to 0.59) for hostility, and −0.52 (95% CI, −1.08 to 0.03; P = .06) for mental well-being.
> Although a small number of estimates were suggestive of worse outcomes before multiple testing correction, none remained statistically significant after prespecified correction. Results were similarly null in gender-stratified analyses.
Very interesting. Can anyone explain why phone ban / no phone ban has pretty much the same screen time? Also, is Iceland one of those countries where children have personal computers in class?
I’m reading a lot of cope here. This is not some isolated study. From all the evidence I’ve seen, the disastrous effect of social media is everywhere but in the data. I’m fine with phones being banned at school. It’s not like we allow TVs in classrooms either. And on net I think kids are better off with limitations on their phone use, just as they should have limitations on TV and gaming. But the Haidt narrative of phones as the root of all evil is nonsense. Would that the world were so simple.
When I was in high school in the age of the LG Chocolate, we’d come home and hop on Facebook. So this pretty much tracks. Stopping phone use in schools is probably good for grades but it can’t help whatever goes on after school.
It's amazing what you manage to not find when you try really hard to not find it.
Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!
... for youth in Iceland aged 13 to 15 years in February 2016, February 2018, and November 2023.
Apparently they did not control for medication or supplements, such as vitamin D treatments, artificial UV light exposure, or antidepressants.
Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access. School's probably a social, cognitive and energy highlight in the otherwise permadark day.
> they did not control for medication or supplements
The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?
This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)
> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.
This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.
I was suggesting that one can't generalize from an Icelandic case because any effect perhaps isn't visible for local reasons. That's perfectly correct.
You're inventing a plausible-but-probably-irrelevant cause when a more likely cause is mentioned in the study: students were not using their phones a lot in school before the ban.
school phone bans in brazil appear to increase test scores by 0.06 SD (although the identification strategy is a bit sketchy): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35233/w352...
Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on road death toll.
iirc a similar study on the Aussie age ban is finding similar results; basically no difference. Some kids benefit, others suffer.
Agree that a study on grades would be useful too
And ofc AI is busy messing all of this up.
That's like saying not eating for a few hours makes up for eating 4000 calories at dinner.
I personally would've guessed many immediate positive effects just from a phone ban in school, TFA claims they have a measurement against that.
AFAIK declining mental health was the main driver of the bans - put forward by its proponents like Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Anxious Generation."
Why anyone would expect phone bans to improve mental health is beyond me when the majority of phone use is not happening at school.
Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?
Isn't that partly the goal with the ban? Fewer distractions.
Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.
Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.
Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.
We're absolutely fascinated by them. Gobsmacked.
And many people blindly believe what they see on their screens because they don't know any better. They trust the article they read without thinking too deeply about it or looking for alternative perspectives. They gobble up the reel they just watched and are irate about whatever it told them to be irate about. But this isn't anything new, just look at how easily grandma and grandpa gobbled up whatever Fox News fed them in 1998, or what heavily edited images designed to manipulate their thoughts and opinions they were exposed to in the 70s, the 80s when they turned the television on.
Screens have always, and will always, be used to manipulate people, and that's been incredibly amplified over the past 15-20 years.
Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you. Understanding one another is a hell of a lot easier. Everyone can see exactly the same thing as the other person - the analog, meatspace world around them that isn't being manipulated and twisted in an effort to get them to think a certain way.
It's the screens.
But there are plenty of places in the world that don't seem quite as negatively affected to me, and even where screens are not the main culprit behind government/corporate manipulation and control.
You're never going to get people to stop using social media, but maybe it ought to be possible to regulate better.
I also raised two children. My eldest is 18 and only now has a phone. When your children are adults you may no longer feel that phones, or screens, are the root cause. But, the whole world will have changed by then, so time will tell.
> Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you.
I am not disagreeing with you here. My point is that the reason society is divided is not fundamentally because of phones or screens and removing them does not magically remove our ideological differences.
Differences of opinion are okay, but it's harder to get along when our lives are lived in spaces that silo us off and encourage distrust and anger. Screens do that to us, meatspace doesn't.
We're literally allowing people with bad intentions have a direct contact with children. It's insane.
Not to mention that I learned that nowadays lying for some benefit on social media is completely normalized.
Lying used to be off-putting in western society, and would be a clear red line.
However this study in particular is pretty bad, see the comment elsewhere about the screentime not spent not going down (possibly cause of extant classroom bans)
In this case the prevailing theory is that the phones were already banned in classes, so the schoolwide ban didn't do anything to screentime. Which, duh.
I’m a strong supporter of following the science. But this is a hard thing to measure. And the effects may be fairly diffuse or accumulate over time.
If so, it's no wonder they see no difference. They didn't see a change in the presumed underlying cause.
Though this is still relevant to policy-makers who are thinking of instituting district-wide bans. It's sorta like all the heat around critical race theory: banning something that doesn't actually happen much in schools.
Pleasure is cheap, even addictive. Fulfillment and meaningful work are extremely difficult to come by. Everything is monetized, every interaction, every experience... money makes experiences transactional, they lose their meaing.
To have a fulfilling live people needs to participate in society, have opportunities, education, basic needs covered... and that is our failure. A kid can get 24/7 entertainment while lacking food or good education.
Two things.
1. There is no evidence. Mostly because Well being cannot be really quantified. 2. Convenience and comforts trumps well being. Basic human nature. Are we willing to teach kids abstract concepts such as wisdom and "nishkamakarma" so that they will have well being instead of conveniences and comforts? They will be less of a "knowledge worker" and more of a philosopher. They will consume vastly less, thus would hurt the current system of capitalistic indulgence.
We are not willing to do any of these. At the root, it is you that is causing your unwellbeingness...But you can't change. Deal with it. Stop the whining! Let the kids have what ever fun they want..Don't snatch the phones from their hands. Teach them stuff so that they can see it for what it is (an instrument of manipulators and exploiters), that they are repelled by it.
Yeah...I am ok.
Isn't there a baseline saying well being is declined?
> In the full sample, the estimated postpolicy association was 0.65 (95% CI, 0.01-1.30; P = .05) for depressive symptoms, 0.21 (95% CI, −0.08 to 0.50; P = .16) for anxiety, 0.23 (95% CI, −0.12 to 0.59) for hostility, and −0.52 (95% CI, −1.08 to 0.03; P = .06) for mental well-being.
> Although a small number of estimates were suggestive of worse outcomes before multiple testing correction, none remained statistically significant after prespecified correction. Results were similarly null in gender-stratified analyses.
I expect if you took away adults phones for a few hours every day their would experience increased anxiety
That’s the most concise way I can put that.
It's certainly counter-intuitive.
All you need to know
Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!
And what-about the effect on teachers and staff? Don't they matter?
I'm being a bit dismissive. This is however a very very small study.
Apparently they did not control for medication or supplements, such as vitamin D treatments, artificial UV light exposure, or antidepressants.
Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access. School's probably a social, cognitive and energy highlight in the otherwise permadark day.
The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?
This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)
> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.
This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.