Screen use amongst children and teens in the U.S. and elsewhere is an enormous concern, with adolescents ages 13-18 spending an average of 8.5 hours each day on screen-based media. This is at least one-half of all their waking hours—and it is time that could be spent in so many other ways.
Moreover, the issue of whether kids should have their smartphones with them during the school day is one that comes up again and again. Some parents feel it is a safety precaution in case their children need to get in touch with them during the school day. Others feel that phones are a distraction from learning and are better left in lockers or a central location at school. But there has been very little good data concerning how much time kids actually spend on their phones at school.
Fortunately, a recent study, just published in the Journal of The American Medical Association Pediatrics, helps us start to understand phone use at school. The researchers not only answered the question of how much time kids spend on their phones but they also looked at what kids are looking at on their phones during this time.
As it turns out, the researchers found that kids spend an average of an hour and a half on their smartphones over the course of a six-and-a-half-hour school day. However, a quarter of kids spend more than two hours on their phones while at school. The most looked-at apps or categories of phone use are messages, Instagram, video streaming, audio, and email.
These are very revealing findings. The researchers who performed this study say, “Parents and adolescents may derive benefit from access to phones for communication and learning purposes during school. However, application usage data from this study suggest that most school-day smartphone use appears incongruous with that purpose. The analyses show high levels of social media use during school.”1
Given this data, the question again arises: Should kids have their smartphones at school? Do we want our kids looking at social media at school when they could be interacting with other kids in person? And do we want them looking at their phones while in class when they could be listening to the teacher? The answers to these questions, I think, are obvious.
But what about concerns regarding communicating with kids while at school? One possible solution would be providing kids with flip phones that serve only this purpose—rather than smartphones, which can be distracting. Regardless, it’s time for us as a society, and for parents as individuals, to think about whether time on phones is the best use of kids’ time and energy—both in school and out.
This is the third in a series on phone use in school.