Evaluate Your Relationship with Your Phone
The writing prompt that broke my brain and ended my teaching career
Note: I initially posted this piece in the winter of 2023-2024. I’m reposting it now as, the deeper we get into this process, the more I’m realizing that presenting kids or anyone with a writing task like the one discussed below is potentially invaluable. As Gabriela Nguyen, the 23 year old founder of Appstinent has put it - “Gen Z, social media is optional. Why isn’t anyone telling us this?” When I asked my students to evaluate their relationship with their phone, I made a similar realization. Nobody - not even the great Jack Simons - ever seemed to have asked the kids if they wanted or liked the screen-oriented lives they’d been handed. This demands discussion, I think, if we really want to heal. I hope this piece helps our present work at Simpson. I wouldn’t be resharing it if I didn’t think it could.
It’s often useful to understand our issues through metaphors and analogies, comparisons. And I do think the comparisons between social media and/or video games (or, as in my case, just general phone over-use) and drugs are fairly valid, but the key difference between a phone problem and a drug problem is that the damage incurred through a phone tends to be so subtle and slow-coming that it’s hard to detect and it’s therefore understandably common for people to avoid attributing issues arising from the phone to the phone. Even if he denies it outwardly, an alcoholic tends to know that alcohol is playing a major role in his life collapsing because the relationship between the drinking and the implosion is so relatively obvious both to himself and to onlookers. Hangovers and blackouts and DUIs and liver failure are messages that eventually almost no one can ignore.
I started my teaching career in 2009 so from the time smartphones with social media hit the broad market in 2011 till the end of my teaching days in 2023 I was well-positioned to observe the ways that smartphones and smartphone culture have changed kids in ways they – and we – are almost never aware of in the moment. Based on my direct observations of several thousand Iowa teenagers over the last 12 years, some of the unheeded “messages” I believe smartphones have been sending us, through kids, regarding the threats they pose include:
Rampant adolescent depression and anxiety
A rise in self-harm especially among girls (especially cutting and eating disorders)
Rising attempted suicide rates
Rising suicide rates
Rising obesity rates
Teen sleep deprivation
Teen reliance upon energy drinks
Teen reliance upon melatonin
Explosion in the diagnosis of ADD and ADHD
Posture issues resulting from being hunched over (over a phone)
Culture of entitlement
Kids making friends with kids around the world through video games while having few “real life” friends in the place where they live
Middle school kids huddled at bus stops in the morning not talking to each other, just staring down (at their phones)
Precipitous decrease in classroom participation
Diminished or devastatingly-diminished attention span
Kids engaging in hours-long FaceTime conversations in class, hallways, etc.
Increase of students never looking up (from their phones) for entire classes
Increase of inability to hold a basic in-person conversation
Rise in tardiness and truancy
Kids filming fights and rushing to share the videos online
Fights at school stemming from online disputes
Kids wearing pajamas to school
Steep increase in kids sleeping in class
Kids skipping class to sit on the toilet (on their phone)
Kids wearing “the same hoodie” every day
Kids wearing headphones/earbuds all day
Kids wearing headphones/earbuds all day explicitly to keep others from talking to them
Kids watching entire streaming series/movies in class (on phones)
Kids lying on classroom floors watching entire streaming series/movies (on phones)
Kids sitting in stairwells during classes (on their phones)
Large groups of kids sitting in stairwells (often on their phones) during classes refusing to move as people try to use the stairs
Kids compulsively checking their phones when they have to walk by someone they don’t know – like a teacher – in the hallway (to avoid eye contact, etc.)
Total abandonment of the use of lockers
Kids filming TikTok dance videos in the hallways during class
Kids feeling free to walk into any class at any time whether or not they are on the roster
Kids laughing at and cussing out administrators in hallways with no fear of consequences
Decrease in “killer instinct” among student athletes
Decline in number of kids who want to get their driver’s license ASAP
Increase in the length and complexity of school “drop off” lines
The abandonment of homework in many school districts
Decline in teen dating
Decline of teens in the workforce
Decline of individuality among kids
To be clear: These are my observations of the students I worked with and around for over a decade. Over the past 18 months I have read extensively on this topic (essentially, what is happening to our children and our culture) but I’d noticed many of these issues on my own well before I began to read or even speculate about potential causes for the behaviors I was seeing.
If you’re at all skeptical about the connections between adolescent smartphone use for social media and/or gaming and the behaviors I’ve noted – some of which are admittedly highly specific – this is where I will begin to encourage you neither to strain to see those connections nor to rush to dismiss them. Rather I’d encourage you to ask whether compulsive smartphone use among adolescents is likely to be able to help us address any of these concerning behaviors. If it can’t help, then…
Their Phones Must Be Hurting Them?
In the spring of 2022, I decided to just ask my students what was going on with them and their phones. I’d been noticing the above issues and more for years and perceived an increase in the severity of these issues and for the longest time I’d allowed myself to get angry with my students for what I perceived to be a choice on their part. I thought they were choosing their phones over me, over school, and over socializing in person with one another. I thought they were choosing the path of degrading mental and physical health. This angered me and I at least try not to trust anger so I decided to ask them to write for me.
The prompt: “Evaluate your relationship with your phone.”
This prompt was born of another frustration, a more quaint frustration because it pertained only to English teaching and not the demolition of our society. For years I taught junior English and in second semester of junior English in Iowa kids have traditionally written argumentative essays. Students were typically able to choose their own topic. Over my 14 years as a teacher the most popular argument kids chose to make was for the legalization of marijuana. In my experience nearly every one of these essays came out the same – they all made the same arguments (“It’s from the earth!”) and as a result these were some extremely boring essays to read, for decades there had already been nothing new to say on this topic. In my experience, the second most popular argument students chose to make was that kids should be able to have phones in class. These essays were also almost always incredibly boring and all the “pros” were always the same (“safety,” “connection,” “educational tool”) and so were the cons (online bullying, “hate,” distractions). Despite the acknowledgment of select “cons,” the phone essays of course always concluded that phones do belong in class.
The key difference between most of the pro-weed arguments and most of the pro-phone arguments I read over the years was that, while they both covered a tired topic, the pro-weed arguments at least adhered to logic. There appear to be many logical reasons why marijuana should be legalized and many kids were able to discuss those reasons well enough to earn a decent grade for their argumentative writing. The pro-phone arguments tended to come up short in the logic department and it often felt like they were grasping for “pros” (with each passing year in the smartphone era it has become more obvious that phones are not educational tools in the way they were once considered; connectedness through social media, if it’s real at all, has clearly come at a great cost) while ignoring many obvious “cons” (much of what I listed earlier in this letter; the sense that since the inception of the smartphone era nearly every kid began to seem consistently more tired and less happy). So I decided to push the kids to actually analyze their relationships with their phones, to see if in the end a rational defense could be constructed.[1]
As I introduced this assignment I encouraged kids to not simply consider this task in general but to complete their evaluation by isolating certain aspects of their lives. I asked them to consider the ways their phone might be affecting, among other things, their: academics; relationships with parents; general habits and hobbies; self-esteem; general mental health; romantic relationships; relationships with siblings; sleep patterns; physical health; extracurricular activities; friendships; etc.
Among the students who took this assignment seriously – which was nearly all of them – I never read an essay that reflected a genuinely positive evaluation of a kid’s relationship with his/her phone. Out of the nearly 300 essays I read in two years, only a few seemed to come out even close to neutral. In these cases I wasn’t surprised as these were the “types” of kids I didn’t expect to have significant issues with their phones. These were quiet kids who seemed comfortable in their skin and who liked to be outside. Still – none of those kids, even, were able to prove their phone played a positive role in their lives. It just didn’t seem that their phones were actively hurting them in the ways nearly all the other kids were experiencing to varying degrees through social media and gaming in particular. They didn’t have to be, but nearly all my students were extremely honest in their writing. I found this itself telling and I told my students I would not waste their honesty. I wish I could share specific quotations and anecdotes from their writing with you but these were kids. Juniors and seniors in high school. I hope you’ll trust my general references to trends in their writing on the basis that I have nothing to gain by discussing these things. You could also discuss these matters with any kid you know.
Based on my observations and on their essays, if I had to produce a summation of the effect smartphones were having on my male students it would be this: Boys using their phones for social media and for gaming purposes were and likely are wasting their time and youth energy at an extremely alarming rate; they were undermining their personal strength and individuality seemingly at all times and a huge percentage of them, through their online behavior, were directly contributing to the mental health crisis among adolescent females and a concerning percentage of males were obsessed with getting rich quickly without doing much if any work. They also didn’t get nearly enough sleep, almost always due to being on their phones at night.
Based on my observations and on their essays, if I had to produce a summation of the effect smartphones were having on my female students it would be this: Adolescent females, particularly through social media, were and likely are wasting their time and youth energy at an extremely alarming rate; they were undermining their personal strength and individuality seemingly at all times and a huge percentage of them were actively – seemingly compulsively – contributing to their own serious mental health issues by exposing themselves to online content that seemed to consistently degrade their self-esteem, often leading to self-harm and the contemplation of suicide. They also didn’t get nearly enough sleep, almost always due to being on their phones at night.
My male students’ essays made me extremely frustrated but also made me more sympathetic to how little control they seemed to feel they had over their phone use.
My female students’ essays flat out broke my heart, over and over again.
I left teaching feeling like my male students had been weakened and desensitized by their phone lives. If you want to have your faith tested, try breaking up a fight between teenagers. What will probably affect you most isn’t the violence – humans have always been violent – it’s all the kids who gather around to film the fight with their phones. They in fact watch the fight through their phones, as it’s occurring, as though it’s happening somewhere else. And they film the fight with the intention of sharing it online, to gain “likes,” to garner attention for…what? Having been there? For having stood by laughing and groaning while someone was humiliated and likely injured, perhaps seriously? The kids sit and watch these fights in class, especially the boys. Between their exposure to such “casual” violence and their unlimited access to pornography and quasi-pornography through their phones, I’ve felt like so many of my male students were terribly desensitized. Compulsive gaming, which is mostly a male problem, never seemed to help with any of this either.
In his writing one male student kept describing the world as “gray and sarcastic” and I felt that was a spot on description for what my boys were experiencing. That particular kid was on his phone all day every day and almost never looked up in my classroom. We never had one conversation but his words have stuck with me.
I left teaching feeling like my female students were in danger. I also felt that for understandably tragic reasons the broad world didn’t seem to know how to even consider this.
I do wish I could directly share my students’ writing with you. That was always the plan, to use the students’ words to save the district. That’s what I attempted in the spring and summer of 2022 when I took the results of a ‘phone use survey’ as well as hundreds of powerful quotations from student essays and several full essays to multiple power players within my district. I shared this information with my principal and two other secondary principals in the district. I also shared it with two school board members, the district director of technology, the head of the local teacher’s union, my school’s “school leadership team”, and the district’s interim superintendent. All of these leaders - people who chose to pursue and occupy positions of leadership - reviewed the survey results which reflected national trends. Most of my students slept less than six hours per night due to scrolling in bed and most of my students spent well over six hours per day on their phones (as measured by average daily screentime); most of my students spent a woefully little amount of time outside or exercising every week; most of my female students had self-esteem issues which they attributed largely to social media; many of my female students had developed eating disorders or engaged in cutting and they attributed this largely to social media; a few of my female students had attempted to take their own lives and they attributed this largely to social media.
These leaders also read the writings I gave them. Rather, I assume they read the writings I gave them. If they did, they would’ve seen just how miserable my students were because of their phones and how trapped they felt in their phone lives. If they did their reading, they would’ve read about how so many of my female students became addicted to social media in middle school, before they could even think for themselves, and how that addiction quickly spiraled into self-destructive thoughts and behaviors, behaviors like cutting, starving themselves, and attempting to overdose on medications. They would’ve read, too, about how all these suffering kids were in fact most worried about their younger siblings and cousins. If you think this is bad, their essays seemed to say, wait till you see my brother. My students were worried about themselves and about others and I’m sorry but it did end up feeling like if I hadn’t asked them about this, nobody else would have. Nobody would’ve asked them about the most obvious aspect of their lives, the clear source of their collective suffering.
But I’m no hero, remember. I had no clue what was going on with the kids and their phones for at least ten years. After Covid I hit a breaking point because it felt like the whole system had hit a breaking point, so I asked a question I didn’t expect them to answer honestly. Their honesty, then, blew me away.
I sat with the interim superintendent as he read a number of the quotes I’d brought to him. I believe I asked him to focus on the “self-harm section” of quotations, which were especially painful. He looked at me and thanked me for bringing all this to him and then he called the situation “a public health crisis.” And then nothing at all was done about phones in our district and within less than a year I had left teaching completely. But that’s a story for another time.
For now I’ll leave you with this: If I asked you to evaluate your relationship with your phone in the way I asked my students to - by isolating different aspects of your life and ‘measuring’ your phone’s effects on that aspect - do you really think you could construct a sufficient defense for the way you use your phone? I honestly encourage you to try, not so that I can laugh at you down the line but because this is just hard. It is so hard, when you actually dig into it, to defend almost any aspect of our phone lives. We’ve made a massive mistake.
The plan was for my former students to help me prove this, so we could get phones removed from our district’s schools ASAP. That plan fell apart when my teaching career fell apart because of phones.
If you’re a teacher and you’re reading this, I invite you to assign my prompt to your students. I’d be very surprised if the results didn’t shake up your thinking.
J.S.
[1] The idea for this writing prompt (“Evaluate your relationship with your phone”) also stemmed from my curiosity at the fact that it seems no one ever recommends social media. For something to be so widely and frequently used, you’d think it must be an amazing product. In that case, if you regularly used this amazing, transformative product then wouldn’t you actively recommend it to people who don’t use it? No one has ever recommended social media use to me and I can’t imagine anyone ever encountering a distraught friend, someone “going through something” and asking them questions like “Are you Tweeting enough??”, “Are you sharing enough pictures of your meals with the wide world?”, “Are you taking enough high-angle selfies and posting them in hopes of earning a bunch of likes?” Nobody thinks or acts that way. You’d never come upon a friend crying and tell them to begin to solve their problem by doom scrolling and comparing their life to other people’s lives. You would also never do that to your calm, secure-seeming friend who doesn’t have social media at all.