By now, most peo­ple will have heard that sev­er­al coun­tries, led by Swe­den and in­clud­ing the Nether­lands, Spain, Fin­land, France, Italy and Den­mark, are scal­ing back dig­i­tal-first ed­u­ca­tion, re­duc­ing com­put­ers, tablets and phones in class­rooms and re­turn­ing to a fo­cus on books and hand­writ­ing. These coun­tries have ob­served de­clines in lit­er­a­cy, mem­o­ry and con­cen­tra­tion since the in­tro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal ed­u­ca­tion.

At the same time, a num­ber of coun­tries, start­ing in Aus­tralia, are look­ing at ban­ning chil­dren un­der the age of 16 from us­ing smart­phones. While de­bate goes on over that move­ment, over half the coun­tries in the world have banned smart­phone use in schools. The per­cent­age goes up to over 80% in schools in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca (82%) and Cen­tral and South­ern Asia (85%), two ar­eas of the world that tra­di­tion­al­ly come first in ed­u­ca­tion. Here in T&T, I know of at least one school that re­cent­ly banned smart­phones from class­es.

These are huge de­ci­sions that have prob­a­bly come too late to save the dam­aged minds of mil­lions of chil­dren who used smart­phones to ex­cess for the last ten years and they fly against lo­cal think­ing that chil­dren need more ac­cess to com­put­ers and smart­phones to be able to “get ahead” in a fu­tur­is­tic so­ci­ety.

So why are these ed­u­ca­tion­al­ly ad­vanced so­ci­eties do­ing this? There are two rea­sons. One, while it is true that chil­dren must be­come tech-lit­er­ate to thrive in the fu­ture, they do not need smart­phones to build these skills. In fact, in­tro­duc­ing per­son­al smart­phones too ear­ly ap­pears to hin­der the ex­act de­vel­op­men­tal and cog­ni­tive skills re­quired for fu­ture tech suc­cess.

Adults who are adept at ma­nip­u­lat­ing com­put­ers do not un­der­stand this. They do not un­der­stand that the ex­pe­ri­ences they un­der­went in school with pen­cil and book and fel­low stu­dents trained them to be­come com­put­er-friend­ly be­cause it en­cour­aged them to be cre­ative and to think.

Smart­phones are de­signed for pas­sive en­ter­tain­ment, so­cial me­dia scrolling and al­go­rith­mic dis­trac­tion. Us­ing an app seam­less­ly does not mean a child un­der­stands the tech­nol­o­gy. Swip­ing a screen is an in­tu­itive phys­i­cal mo­tion, not a tech­ni­cal skill. Two-year-olds learn ef­fort­less­ly to swipe screens and ob­tain videos that give them plea­sure. That does not mean it’s good for them or that they will go on to be­come com­put­er ge­nius­es. Suc­cess in the fu­ture work­place will re­quire deep fo­cus and pro­longed at­ten­tion. Smart­phones are built to frag­ment at­ten­tion through con­stant no­ti­fi­ca­tions and short-term con­tent.

Bore­dom is good. That’s how New­ton dis­cov­ered the Law of Grav­i­ty and Ein­stein the The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty. When chil­dren face bore­dom, they in­no­vate, play around with things and solve prob­lems. Smart­phones do the op­po­site. They oc­cu­py time, sti­fle cre­ative thought and in­de­pen­dent play. Fu­ture work­places will need hu­man-cen­tric skills like em­pa­thy, col­lab­o­ra­tion and lead­er­ship. Ex­ces­sive screen time re­places the count­less face-to-face in­ter­ac­tions need­ed to de­vel­op those so­cial skills.

Sec­ond, the side ef­fects of ex­ces­sive smart­phone use are dis­as­trous for chil­dren. The stats from the UK are stag­ger­ing­ly wor­ry­ing and from my ob­ser­va­tions, no dif­fer­ent here in T&T.

The av­er­age time teens spend on smart­phones is 35 hours a week. The av­er­age teen gets 237 smart­phone no­ti­fi­ca­tions a day.

One in four chil­dren have smart­phone ad­dic­tion. Two in three of 11- to 17-year-olds “of­ten” or “some­times” find it dif­fi­cult to put down their smart­phone. Thir­ty-three per cent of par­ents of chil­dren with smart­phones have cried over their child’s phone ob­ses­sion.

Play­ing out­doors has fall­en by 30% while screen-based ac­tiv­i­ties have risen 23%.

Teens who spend more than three hours a day on so­cial me­dia face dou­ble the risk of anx­i­ety and de­pres­sion.

Chil­dren at smart­phone-free schools get CSEC/CXC re­sults 1-2 grades high­er.

Four out of every five chil­dren who are bul­lied ex­pe­ri­ence it through a smart­phone.

Chil­dren us­ing smart­phones have dou­ble the risk of a dis­rupt­ed night’s sleep. It’s now au­to­mat­ic when a child comes in with dis­turbed sleep to ask about smart­phone use at night. Most of the time, the par­ents have no idea what is go­ing on.

Nine­ty per cent of girls and 50% of boys have been sent un­so­licit­ed ex­plic­it sex­u­al con­tent.

Eighty per cent of teenage girls have been put un­der pres­sure to pro­vide sex­u­al im­ages of them­selves.

Sev­en­ty-five per cent of 15-year-olds have seen a be­head­ing video.

If most of these com­ments do not make you think about the ef­fect of smart­phones on your chil­dren, the bot­tom line should be whether you agree to give a 13-year-old boy or girl dai­ly, free, easy ac­cess to porn and to peo­ple be­ing de­cap­i­tat­ed.