Parents also have role in limiting kids’ screen time

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/08/2024 (412 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Imagine you’re the parent of an elementary school student who goes to a school in the Brandon School Division.

You had bought them a cellphone so that you could contact them in case of an emergency, or for when you need to contact them for something less urgent — like picking them up after school. It’s a normal practice in modern times for many parents, especially those who have the resources to pay for them, and even sometimes for those who really don’t.

But now, the province has decreed a provincewide ban on cellphone use in classrooms for kindergarten to Grade 8 students, slated to begin this September when school restarts. High schoolers will be asked to leave their phones in their locker, with a teacher or at the principal’s office when classes are going on.

So what do you do now?

It’s a question that I’m sure more than a few parents will be asking their respective schools over the next few weeks as we move closer to the “most wonderful time of the year,” as the sarcastic back-to-school jingle goes.

So, too, are teachers wondering how this newly-announced ban by Manitoba Education Minister Nello Altomare will affect their day-to-day classroom life.

On Thursday, the Manitoba Teachers’ Society welcomed the prospect of a blanket ban that will relieve teachers from having to repeatedly tell their students to put their phones away. But union president Nathan Martindale told our sister paper, the Winnipeg Free Press, that he wants to know how members will be expected to police phone use, what would happen if a confiscated device is damaged or lost, and how the policy will impact workloads overall.

There are a few answers to these questions, but I’m not entirely sure that teachers and parents will necessarily love to hear them. Or perhaps they will.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my own experience in addictive cellphone use and how easily distracted I found myself becoming over the years. There is no doubt that I use my smartphone as a tool for my job as a journalist here in Brandon, but there is a point in time when it can and does become too detrimental to my own mental health.

I’m not the only cellphone user who feels that way.

As a parent myself, I am applauding the government’s decision to ban cellphone use in elementary schools. I’ve seen firsthand how kids can become so engrossed in the screen in front of them that they fail to hear their names when called, or fail to notice what is happening around them. And that’s just at home when they borrow one from their parents.

As such, there is no good reason for an elementary school student to have a phone in the classroom.

No doubt, my kids might accuse me of being a Luddite — if they knew what that meant. So might a few parents of my acquaintance. But I would argue that kids need better social interaction than the majority have been getting in recent years.

I saw many educators applaud Altomare’s decision this week, and so they should. In fact, it was widely lauded by organizations across the province, including the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which said the ban would make our kids less vulnerable to online harms.

Truth be told, we’re churning out socially anxious adults from our school system right now, and the problem is only worsening. And while a cellphone ban alone will not turn that around, it’s a step in the right direction.

In answer to at least one of the union president’s questions, my hope is that the kids’ teachers will feel empowered to lay down the law when it comes to cellphones. By all means, a teacher should have the right to confiscate a phone in elementary school if the ban is broken, just like anything else that distracts the student or the class from the task at hand.

Learning to read from a book, learning the task of working out a math problem on a piece of paper and the blackboard, having class discussions and doing handmade art projects — these don’t need screen time. And the best tools we have are the pencils in our hand and the brains in our heads.

To parents concerned about an inability to contact their kids, there remains the old standby — calling the school’s main office to reach the student, or using the office phone to call home. That was always the way when I was a kid. While there may be necessary exceptions, bringing back this habit would be a good move.

As part of the government’s announced cellphone ban, school division leaders and private school principals have been asked to ensure they have clear guidelines on employee phone use in their buildings. To my mind, that means teachers need to clearly model the behaviour they expect from their students by putting away their own phones during class time.

But I would go one step further — the responsibility also rests on us as parents to act as better role models for our kids, take the responsible step of limiting their time online and spend more time with our kids than with the technology we have in hand.

It’s getting pretty nasty on the interwebs anyway. Perhaps a break from social media would do us all some good.

» Matt Goerzen, editor