"I just need to be able to get in touch with my kid"
Part 2 of some occasional thoughts about kids and screens
Welcome to Chief Complaint! For those of you who are new, this newsletter features intermittent musings about medicine, gender, parenting, and body liberation — all from your friendly neighborhood primary care doc. I’m so happy you’re here.
“Something’s wrong at school.”
Those were the terrifying words that came out of a coworker’s mouth the other day, the kind of words I dread hearing as a mom.
“What?” I asked, quickly walking over to her desk.
“None of the kids are being allowed inside the high school,” she said. She looked up at me, her face fearful. “I might need to leave work.”
She had dropped off her kids on her way to the office, and usually trusted that they’d head straight into the school building. But today, she realized as she drove away, all the kids were being corralled outside. What was going on?
“I’m going to get in touch with my son,” she said.
She started furiously texting, her brow furrowed. I could imagine the long list of fears her mind, because they were crossing my mind, too: School shooting. Bomb threat. Fire. Flood.
I started thinking of my own child’s preschool, the strollers lined up outside, the Hispanic Heritage Month posters hanging in the windows. What would an emergency look like, there? The toddlers hanging on to the walking ropes that keep them corralled when they cross the street. The infants gathered up by panicked teachers.
Then, I saw my colleague’s face relax. “My son texted me back,” said, sighing deeply. False alarm. Out of respect for her privacy, I’ll spare you the details of what happened at the school, but suffice it to say: The kids were okay.
But was she?
She was panicked that something was wrong when she realized her son and his friends were lining up outside. She was livid that the school didn’t contact parents about the crisis, and rightly so.
So she turned to her phone, and texted her kid.
I’ve been thinking a lot about smartphones, my own relationship with mine, and how I’m thinking about them for my kid after reading The Anxious Generation earlier this summer.
Like I mentioned in Part 1 of some of my thoughts about kids and screens, there’s lots of thoughtful criticism of Jon Haidt’s work, and I’ve been devouring it eagerly. But the fact, for me, remains: I don’t feel great when I spend too much time on my phone, and I want to be thoughtful about the role it plays in my life.
I’ve been loosely categorizing some of the reasons a smartphone-free (or at least smartphone-light) childhood feels so out of reach for my kid and his peers. In Part 1, I talked about why the breakdown of the “it takes a village” parenting culture makes it so hard to trust that other adults will be looking out for our kids. (So we give our kids smartphones, so we can keep an eye on them.)
This time, I’ve been thinking about a growing wariness around institutions that supposedly exist to safeguard our kids. I’ve been watching, concerned, as pundits wring their hands: parents just don’t trust schools any more.
What does that mean? At a basic level, more and more American kids simply aren’t going to school.
There’s a growing phenomenon of chronic absenteeism, which means increasing numbers of kids who miss 10% or more of school days each year. We have major problems with absenteeism in the Philadelphia area, a trend that’s reflected nationwide.
I see this in my clinic every day; it’s real. Many education experts theorize it was exacerbated by the pandemic, when so many districts turned to remote learning and not going in to school became the norm.
There are so many factors that can contribute to kids experiencing chronic absences. Here are a few that I’ve talked about with my patients and their parents:
Housing insecurity, which means kids change schools and districts and miss days of school in the shuffle
Chronic illness
Unreliable transportation
Family responsibilities — I take care of a few families, for example, where the parent works night shift, so my teenage patient takes care of his younger sibling and gets both of them off to school in the morning
But while the list above might prompt me, as a family doctor, to reach out and try to help, there’s a much more mundane mistrust I sense even from families who aren’t in crisis.
I get requests for “sick notes” every week, when parents keep their kids home for anything resembling a cold. A runny nose, a little sore throat. I get phone calls days after the fact: Can I get a doctor’s note for three days last week? I had to keep Monica home because she had a cough.
Monica can go to school!!!!!! I want to scream. She probably got her cough from school, and even if she didn’t, she already spread the germs around for days before she was symptomatic.
(That’s a whole other topic: Why school and daycare “sick policies” are not evidence-based and don’t do much to protect kids from getting sick! I will die on this hill!)
But I’ve come to realize that parents keeping their kids home from school is usually less about their fears that their kids will infect others, and instead is about fears that the school won’t handle it well if their kid gets truly sick.
They don’t trust that the school has their kid’s best interests at heart.
For many of the families I care for, school can feel like an antagonistic place. Parents sometimes don’t feel like the teachers are allies. They worry about bureaucracy preventing timely and honest communication with parents. They worry their kids will get lost in the shuffle.
So what does this have to do with smartphones?
Getting in touch is the #1 response I get from families when I talk about smartphone use in our doctors’ visits.
I often ask teens and school-age kids about their relationship to screens in their well-child appointments. It’s part of preventive care recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and I feel like it helps me get to know the families better. And honestly? I’m worried that smartphones might be hurting our kids.
I try to frame it in a supportive way. “Smartphones are a part of life,” I say. “I love my phone, but I also hate it sometimes, too.”
The teenager usually rolls their eyes, and the parent then starts tattling on their kid to me: “Tell Dr. Gordon how much you really use your phone.”
I try to diffuse this dynamic — it’s not awesome — and say something like, “Hey, phones are pretty new technology, this is something we’re all figuring out together.”
And then I’ll say, “But I really care about you focusing in school. Do you ever find that using your phone is distracting when you’re in class?”
This is where it all starts to break down.
Over and over again, I hear from parents: “My kid needs her phone in the classroom. I need to be able to get in touch.”
Personally, I’d love to see phones permanently kicked out of the classroom. I’ve been thrilled to hear about school smartphone bans. When I read in the local news about a Philly school that makes kids lock up their phones before class, I said to my husband: “We’re sending our kid there!”
The AAP has some resources about the role of smartphones in the classroom, and interestingly, the research is mixed. It isn’t clear that banning phones in the classroom immediately makes kids’ standardized test scores go up (some studies say yes, some say no) — but then the question becomes, why are we using these awful standardized tests to measure their learning and engagement in the first place?
It’s very difficult to study the impact of smartphones on kids’ lives. Which is part of why the Anxious Generation is getting so much flak in my left-wing corner of the Internet — it’s just a really complicated thing to understand.
But does it need to be? We have plenty of qualitative data. I think back to being 16, to being in English class, to loving books and starting to understand that in the hands of a really great teacher and a classroom full of smart peers, a book could become something even greater.
Would that experience have been different with a phone in my pocket, buzzing away with group texts?
Still, I worry that advocates for school smartphone policy reform can’t make meaningful headway unless we think carefully about parents’ underlying anxiety. If schools don’t feel like safe places, parents are going to want to be able to contact their kids — via their phones — during the school day.
And that’s born out in some of the debates going on in school districts across the country. For every parent who’s overjoyed a school is considering a smartphone ban, there are parents who are terrified that schools won’t hold up their end of the bargain if there’s an emergency.
“We just need to get in touch with our kids.”
What do you think? Would you want your kids at a phone-free school, or does the idea seem crazy?
Count-down to election day, everyone! Not going to lie, feeling a little anxious about everything over here.
I plan to vote in-person with my husband and kid on the way to preschool drop-off, early on election day. What’s your plan?
One interesting piece of the (understandable) concerns about needing to contact kids in an emergency: I read that when all the students have phones in their pockets, the spread of false information can be a huge issue, not just in terms of making parents panic unnecessarily but even in terms of keeping kids safe on campus (not to mention student mental health).
There are so many systemic issues that need to be addressed (gun violence, underfunding of schools, lack of access to mental health care, etc.) that it feels overwhelming—and so the constant contact of phones feels necessary.
Strictly speaking, kids don't need smart phones for parents to contact them. They can use stupid flip phones. Dumb and dorky, yes. Still effective though.