The Smartphone Genie Is Not Benevolent!

In focus groups with elementary and secondary teachers, by far the most frequent complaint voiced during the past 9-12 months is one about smartphones. Specifically, the teachers say that students all the way down to the early elementary grades can't set the devices aside to focus on anything else. By middle school, the pernicious impact of social media dominates their complaints of students who are damaged and damage each other on Instagram, Snapchat and more.One would be tempted to dismiss the teachers' complaints as just another version of inter-generational angst, where the adults believe the next generation is going to hell in a proverbial basket. But this article in The Atlantic by Jean M. Twenge suggests that the teachers may be onto something important. The mental health implications of chronic smartphone use by the very young are seriously worrying, if the studies Twenge cites are even close to accurate. In a nutshell: the more a kid uses a smartphone, the unhappier and more depressed they become. Twenge acknowledges the correlation-causation issue by admitting that unhappy children may be more prone to use smartphones, but her close reading of the data suggests otherwise.We aren't going to put the smartphone genie back in the bottle, technological change doesn't work that way, so the upshot is that schools are finding a need to help students find healthier ways of using the devices. Sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and smartphones, anyone?