On Wednesday, Mayor Eric Adams made New York the first major city in the country to declare social media a public “mental health crisis,” comparing it to tobacco and guns.
In his third State of the City address, the Mayor called out platforms including TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for “fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features” and demanded they “take responsibility for this crisis.”
“We cannot standby and let Big Tech monetize our children’s privacy and jeopardize their mental health,” he declared.
Adams is right to call out Big Tech. It’s a great first step — but, amidst a public health crisis, we need actions in addition to words.
The mayor promised to “protect our kids from harm online” and “correct the crisis facing our children.” If he means business, it’s time to tackle phones in schools.
Of course, parents are the first line of defense when it comes to smartphones and social media. But the government has a role to play, especially in public schools.
Should kids be learning and socializing, or surreptitiously scrolling throughout the school day? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
In 2010, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the wise move to ban phones in public schools. Unfortunately, Mayor Bill De Blasio reversed course and called the policy “out of touch.”
We now know — as we face down an unprecedented teen mental health epidemic and skyrocketing rates of tech addiction in our youth — that it was, in fact, Mayor De Blasio who was out of touch, and Bloomberg who was prescient.
I know well as a Gen Zer myself just how tempting it was to check a text under the table while in class, or hide behind my phone if I didn’t know anyone at the lunch table around me.
But, looking back, the missed lessons and social interactions are a tragedy. Not to mention, my phone undermined my educational experience.
I was fortunate that I didn’t suffer more acutely, but many of my peers can’t say the same.
Since the popularization of smartphones and social media, the percent of 8th, 10th and 12th graders who agree with the statements “my life is not useful” and “I do not enjoy life” have doubled, according to a University of Michigan poll.
Meanwhile, self-harm hospitalizations among young people are up 163% in just the last decade, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, and more than a third of teen girls admit to feeling suicidal.
With stats that bleak, we should be throwing everything at the wall. And public officials like Adams should be eager to do whatever they can to make public schools as conducive to good mental health and healthy habits as possible.
There’s no downside, in my estimation, to getting rid of cellphones in classrooms — and there are plenty of solutions on the table that are already being enacted around the country.
One rudimentary age-old solution is simply to deposit phones into a teacher-monitored bin at the start of each class, though that doesn’t solve the issue of socialization at lunch and during free time.
A company called Yondr produces pouches for cell phones that can only be unlocked with a magnet key, kept by a teacher. Kids lock up their pouches for homeroom and then get them back at the end of the day.
For the sake of mental health and educational achievement alike, the case for phone bans is clear.
We already know, thanks to researchers at the London School of Economics, that banning phones in schools improves test scores and especially helps underprivileged children close learning gaps.
In New York City, where 15% of children live in poverty, we should be eager to narrow disparities in the classroom by any means possible.
It’s an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: improving mental health and maximizing learning potential.
Mayor Adams should bring back the Bloomberg prohibition and get the screens out of our classrooms.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
