[RegW]

In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

[Aurornis]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.

In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.

In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.

So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.

[testing22321]

> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves

That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

What makes you think this is different?

[lmm]

> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.

[Muromec]

That approach works more often than it doesn’t — outside of certain spiraling situations most people don’t became alcoholics and drug addicts.

Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.

[wisty]

I don't have time to search for a credible source, but it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".

There's obvious reasons why it's not encouraged to wait that long though.

[achikin]

Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.

[nkrisc]

I mean, it does work for most people. Most people can drink responsibly. The alcoholics are the ones who can’t do it on their own.

[sapientiae3]

The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.

The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.

[Aurornis]

> The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.

This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth.

Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control.

18-25 year olds are not children and are fully capable of having impulse control. That can continue to develop as they age, but it doesn’t mean age 25 is when it happens.

I would agree that actual children need some more explicit boundaries, which is also why we don’t allow children to do a lot of things that people over 18 can do.

[bigC5560]

As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.

I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.

[kelnos]

I think the problem is that most students, (as this study shows) are not figuring it out on their own, at least not in high school. It feels like you're one of the outliers, not the common case.

Having rules about what you can and can't bring into school is nothing new. I went to high school in the 90s, and there were plenty of things we weren't allowed to bring with us into class; back then, the closest analogue to smartphones would have been pagers, probably.

It seems entirely reasonable to ban smartphones (and dumb phones, even) from schools. Frankly, I think it's absolutely insane that they were ever allowed.

And sure, maybe these students who go to high schools where smartphones are banned will get to university and go nuts, sitting in lecture halls with their phones out all the time. They'll learn very quickly that their grades will suffer, and will clean up their acts or fail out of school. But this is like everything else: the first year of university is the big year of independence, of being away from parents for the first time, and college students do plenty of dumb things in the name of that independence. That's always been the case; I'm no stranger to that phenomenon myself. They either work it out on their own, or they fail out.

[mghackerlady]

Similar situation as you, I switched to a flip phone and now use my old iPhone as a glorified youtube machine when I'm too lazy to go to my desk or don't feel like dealing with my tablets poor wifi range

[AuthorizedCust]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…

Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.

Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

[emil-lp]

> Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

You are misunderstanding the addiction part here. It's not about not having fun.

There are tech companies spending literally trillions of dollars on one goal: ensuring that kids keep looking at their phones.

Your framing this as a question of boredom is really naive.