July 10—Every time Falmouth resident Stacy Taylor tells her 9-year-old son Niko that it’s time to put away his iPad, he fights it. He argues, begs for more time, and tells his mother that she is a horrible mother.
Eleanor Keeler, a science teacher at South Portland High School for 20 years, struggles every day to get her students to put their phones in their backpacks and pay attention in class. It’s an uphill battle.
Matthew Pines has owned and operated Maine Teen Camp with his wife in western Maine for 27 years. Starting in the 2010s, Pines began to notice more children struggling with anxiety, depression and attention deficit disorders. He began to think about what had changed in that time. The answer he found: access to technology.
These parents and teachers are part of a coalition of nine Maine groups advocating for less access to technology for children. Inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” they are working to create new norms around teen cellphone use. They want schools to ban phones during the school day and for parents to delay giving their children cellphones until after eighth grade and accessing social media until age 16. .
The coalition is part of a state and national movement that has been gaining significant momentum over the past year.
Last month, Regional School Unit 1, which serves Bath, Arrowsic, Woolwich and Phippsburg, voted to ban the use of smartphones and smartwatches during the school day for grades 6-12.
At Gorham High School, students leave their cell phones in bags before each class. The practice began last year. Students dubbed the exchanges “phone hotels,” Superintendent Heather Perry said.
Los Angeles also banned students from using cellphones during the school day starting in the fall. And New York City’s school district, the largest in the country, appears poised to follow suit.
In Maine, cell phone policies are implemented locally, so it’s difficult to say exactly how many schools in the state have bans.
The Maine Principals Association lists 30 district and individual school cell phone policies currently in effect. The list includes policies from schools across the state, including those in Blue Hill, Augusta, Readfield and Cape Elizabeth. Steven Bailey, executive director of the Maine School Management Association, talks regularly with superintendents and school board members and said conversations about limiting cellphone use have increased significantly over the past year and a half.
Policies vary by district and school, with some limiting cell phone use to only during class time and others prohibiting students from using their cell phones from the time they enter the school building in the morning until last bell. play in the afternoon.
But all policies aim to solve the same problems of technological dependence, cyberbullying, anxiety induced by technology and social media, and students’ lack of concentration in class.
MORE ENGAGED STUDENTS
RSU 1 board president Lou Ensel said in an interview this week that once the board did its homework, the decision to ban cell phones during the school day was a no-brainer.
Information gathered from schools and districts that implemented cell phone bans showed that within weeks of implementing them, children were accepting of the new policies and their anxiety lessened and depression lessened, Ensel said.
“The research was clear,” he said.
Perry, the Gorham superintendent, said Gorham High students and teachers love the cell phone policy.
“Children say they can concentrate, talk to their peers more and feel better during class,” Perry said. “Teachers feel that children are more engaged and participating more.”
Smartphones have been around for almost two decades. The first iPhone was released 17 years ago. But in recent years and months, the negative impacts of technology have been gaining attention.
Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatry professor Anna Lembke argues in her 2021 book “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence” that technology is addictive. She wrote that it interacts with the chemicals in our brains, making us feel happy when we use it and exhausted when we don’t.
Too much technology, especially for children and teens whose brains are still developing, she said, can lead to depression and anxiety.
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a call to action in May and said “there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”
‘A CONSTANT STRUGGLE’
Day after day, Keeler, a high school science teacher in South Portland, sees firsthand the impacts of technology on her students.
Students in her classroom are distracted and their attention spans seem to be short, she said. They shouldn’t use their phones in class, but they often disregard this rule. Instead, they roll them under their desks or sometimes just blatantly display them.
“It’s a constant struggle,” she said.
And kids aren’t just scrolling through their phones during class. They’re in them pretty much all the time.
In a study conducted by Common Sense Media and the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, researchers found that children ages 11 to 17 were on the phone an average of 4 and a half hours a day. Some study participants worked an average of more than 16 hours a day.
Taylor, Falmouth’s mother, always tried to give her son a childhood in the light of the screen. But it’s not easy, she said. Niko is an only child and they don’t live in a neighborhood where he can walk to his friends’ houses.
“I spend a lot of time as a parent trying to keep my son off screens,” she said.
And when she does give him screen time, there is a fight when it comes to the end.
Along with other parents and educators, Taylor believes that children are no match for addictive, all-consuming technology and that they should not be expected to be able to limit their own use of such attractive devices.
Although Niko doesn’t have a phone, Taylor said she can tell from his iPad use that he’s addicted to technology.
“He has a really hard time putting up a screen,” she said. “There’s no way he would be able to manage a phone.”
Parents like Taylor believe the best solution is community-based, where parents and educators work together to get kids off screens inside and outside of school.
“It’s hard to be the only parent who says no,” said Pines, the summer camp director, who has a rising eighth grader. “I think there’s a real recognition that this needs collective action.”
Scarborough mother Ellen Coughlin-Quinn said if she’s the only parent who doesn’t give her son a phone, they’ll be left out.
“This simply cannot be done one family or one child at a time,” she said.
In schools, coalition members hope to change policy, advocating a ban on cell phones and smartwatches from the moment students enter the school building until the moment they leave in the afternoon.
Outside of schools, they have even loftier goals. They hope to change the culture around technology in their communities, ending an era when kids played video games, watched YouTube and scrolled through TikTok after school, and bringing back playdates and running around the neighborhood.
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