Comment by Aurornis

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.

In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.

In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.

So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.