Opinion | Banning phones at school is difficult. But it’s the right thing to do.

The hardest rule I ever imposed on my kids was refusing cell phones until middle school.

I had seen the research into the sad consequences of… social media, screens And parenting supervision on the mental, physical and cognitive well-being of children. If the data turns out to be wrong, I thought, they will have survived a mild hardship in their relatively privileged lives and provided fodder for a future therapist’s couch.

“How did you do it?!” other parents asked, and I knew exactly what they meant. Even though parents don’t want to admit it, we need – or it feels like we need – our children to have phones.

They will be safer walking to school, we tell ourselves. We are fully aware that if they are hit by a car or snatched, they will not text their mother about the situation. Even in a school shooting, cell phones have just as much impact potential for danger as they do for safety.

We tell ourselves that the phone will give our children a sense of independence, even though phone trackers let us know exactly where they are. It will teach our children to be responsible, even if we pay the bill.

We can honestly believe these little lies; we may just like the convenience. Phones allow kids to check the weather forecast themselves instead of shouting for a weather report while getting dressed. Phones allow kids to distract themselves instead of distracting us when we’re on the phone.

Much as we deplore those in love and tormented, needy relationship our children have with their phones, that same phone sets parents free. If we mess something up, we can always text: Remember your grandfather’s birthday! Don’t forget violin. Sorry, I can’t pick you up this afternoon. You forgot your Chromebook!

The news that some districts Are breaking down on mobile phones is therefore a bewildering case of competing interests between children, administrators, teachers, parents and other parents. It ends many pro-tech school policies embraced pre-Covid and decided upon during lockdown. It’s also the smartest thing schools can do, and it’s time it was done.

Years ago, schools largely turned to technology in the name of inculcating “21st century skills.” Schools had Chromebooks for every child, wired education and all kinds of apps. According to the Ministry of Education, from 2020 approximately 77 percent of schools prohibited non-academic use of mobile phones. Note the caveat “non-academic”; many schools had simply integrated telephones into their curriculum.

For example, when my kids were in high school, teachers repeatedly told kids to take pictures of assignments; in science, recording images on mobile phones was part of the lesson. In the Atlantic Ocean, Mark Oppenheimer described a school that “made no pretense of controlling phone use, and absurdly tried to turn an aggressive technological advantage into a virtue by requiring phones for trivial tasks: at the start of the school year you had to scan a QR code to add or drop out of a course.”

It’s no surprise that a new study from Common Sense Media has discovered that 97 percent of teenagers and pre-teen respondents said they use their phones an average of 43 minutes during the school day, mostly for social media, gaming and YouTube. According to the authors, students reported that policies regarding phone use in schools vary (sometimes from classroom to classroom) and are not always enforced.

Now the enforcers are coming in. As Natasha Singer recently reported in The Times, Florida has passed a nationwide ban on cell phone use by students in the classroom, and by school districts elsewhere, including those in South PortlandMaine, and Charlottesville, Va., have taken similar steps. One district in Florida, Orange County, went so far as to completely ban phones during the school day. The not shocking result: less bullying, greater student involvement, even actual eye contact between students and teachers in the hallway.

We should know this by now. In 2018, a secondary school in Ireland decided to do this ban cell phones altogether. The result: a significant increase in face-to-face social interactions between students. “It’s hard to measure, but we are seeing a happier atmosphere for everyone,” one administrator told The Irish Times.

It is not the school’s job to monitor children’s phone behavior, something that parents are well aware is not easy. And that gets to the thorny core of the problem: parents are often the problem. When a group of parents in my district confronted the government about its lax cell phone policy, the principal said that whenever he raised the issue, it was the parents who complained. How would they reach their children?!

But if we expect our children to adhere to the no-phone policy, we must overcome the hardship. Our own parents simply called the front desk an emergency. Not because they wanted to make sure we remembered to walk the dog.

And really, if we’re trying to teach children to be safe, responsible, and independent, shouldn’t we give them the space to do that? Phones don’t teach children these values; parents do.

If schools want to achieve what research overwhelmingly shows will benefit students, we as parents must support them. When parents say that our children are the ones with the cell phone problem, we are fooling ourselves.