ALBANY COUNTY — Nearly 500 people met this week in Albany to hear experts, educators, and the governor express their concern about what, in recent years, has increasingly been seen as the primary driver in the youth mental-health crisis: cell phones. 

The summit, hosted by New York State United Teachers, was designed to promote conversation about how children are using technology, particularly in the classroom. 

Governor Kathy Hochul, who favors a statewide ban on phones in the classroom, told audience members that the crisis facing children today, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic that had disrupted their social, emotional, and educational lives, meant that the state could no longer ignore the role of phones in that crisis.

By talking with parents and kids, she said, “We learned that coinciding with the pandemic was the rise in addictive algorithms intentionally designed by social media companies to keep them captive.”

After acknowledging that “every generation has its struggle” with emerging technologies and shifting cultural practices, Hochul said that “parents and teachers of today are struggling with something that’s unprecedented.” 

So far, concern about phones is shared by a large majority of educators in the state, with NYSUT reporting that 80 percent of its members believe phones and social media are negatively affecting students’ mental and physical health, and that the same percentage would support a “new or stricter policy” to curb their influence.

And although Hochul framed this endeavor at the summit as “bold and audacious,” if New York goes through with a ban, it would be hopping on a national bandwagon: seven states have already implemented a ban or restriction, 14 have introduced legislation, and six state education departments have either made a policy recommendation or are moving through a pilot program.

After the conference, NYSUT came out in favor of a “bell-to-bell” ban on electronic devices, including earbuds and smartwatches.

The momentum is backed by personal observations as well as a growing body of research that suggests, to varying degrees, that tech poses at least some problems, if not necessarily every single one attributed to it. 

Observations

As indicated by the increasing number of bans nationally and New York educators’ widespread support of a statewide ban, the anecdotal side of the issue is robust. 

After Hochul spoke, the summit audience heard from Mary Rodee, a school teacher in Canton whose 15-year-old son killed himself after a scammer posing as a “beautiful girl,” Rodee said, convinced him to send sexualized images of himself which the scammers then used to try and blackmail him for $3,500, unbeknownst to his parents.

“He got braces on that day,” Rodee said. “We didn’t go to school. I dropped him off at his dad’s house at 10:30 with ibuprofen and a milkshake with plans to see him at the athletic thing we had to go to, to say he wouldn’t do drugs while he played lacrosse that year.

“At 2:30,” she said, “he was in a body bag, because someone separated him from everything he knew to be true and right.” 

Rodee is now an advocate for the Kids Online Safety Act, introduced in 2022, which would place “duty of care” on social media companies with regard to minors, meaning that the companies would be accountable for the wellbeing of those users on their platforms. 

Holly Dellenbaugh, president of the board of education for the Bethlehem Central School District — which implemented a phone ban last year where students lock up their phones in magnetized Yondr pouches, and which then had the policy tested against safety concerns when several, ultimately baseless threats were made against the school in recent weeks — said that she heard from parents that they felt the lack of phones during the school’s emergency responses reduced the spread of misinformation. 

She also said that her own child had acknowledged to her that the phone ban made the school day better. 

“That’s huge,” she said. 

One teacher, whose name could not be heard clearly, described the impacts he saw phones have on students’ in-person social abilities.

Explaining that he has been collecting phones from students at the beginning of class for several years, independent of any policies, the teacher said he once saw students spend the few minutes of free time they had at the end of his class in total silence. 

“It was the quietest classroom I’ve ever been in,” he said. “They couldn’t speak to one another. They didn’t know how to communicate with their peers. It was heartbreaking.” 

Some examples presented during the summit, however, highlighted the murky distinction between the kinds of situations that are caused or made significantly worse by technology, like that which led to the death of Rodee’s son, and those that are timeless but now occur in new kinds of spaces that are foreign to some parents and teachers. 

New York State School Counselor Association President-Elect Mary Banaszak acknowledged the “judgment and ridicule” that students face through their devices and that bring them to guidance offices “in tears.” 

“One elementary school counselor mentioned that there was a third-grade girl who reported a boy called her the name ‘big back,’ and she didn’t know what it meant,” Banaszak said. “She came to the counselor crying, the counselor looked it up and it was a [Dora the Explorer parody] song from YouTube that means, ‘You’re fat.’” 

She went on to describe another incident where “another child was singing, ‘You got something up your nose.’ The students were unsure what that meant. When the counselor looked it up, it was a YouTube song [by the recording artist Steve Lacy] referring to snorting cocaine.” 

Banaszak described yet another incident where a fourth-grade student and her friend were being bothered in an online multiplayer game by one of their classmates. 

“She asked the other student to please leave them alone and leave the game,” she said. “She [then] did what she thought she should do: she blocked that person. Instead, that student made a new ID and joined the game again. He had no concept of the boundaries of saying, ‘Stop, please leave us alone.’ He said, ‘It’s just a game.’” 

Research

Technology and its influence on children is a complex topic in part because of the way it mediates other aspects of life — politics, economic factors, world events, etc. — that are traditionally more influenced by generational personalities and outcomes. 

What is clear is that students are experiencing more mental health struggles than they used to. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 42 percent of students in 9th through 12th grade experienced depressive symptoms in 2021 than in 2011; and 10 percent of students in that range have attempted suicide, compared to 8 percent in 2011. 

The data also shows that the upward trend for both of these had started before the pandemic, seeming to originate in 2017. 

Meanwhile, research compiled by KFF, a health policy publication, shows that, while there are correlations between phone use and negative outcomes like loneliness, evidence on the impact of phone bans is mixed, and top health figures are not at a consensus as to how much attention the tech aspect of kids’ lives should be the focus.

United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for warning labels on social-media platforms, akin to those found on tobacco and alcohol products, based in part on correlative research. 

Meanwhile, the director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, Linda Charmaraman, told Vox that this call from Murthy was “a little bit of hysterical panic.” 

“People want something to stop that rise of mental illness as if this was going to be the magic bullet,” Charmaraman told the publication. “I think it could actually cause people to not look at the other root causes of mental illness.”

But even if phones and social media turn out not be the first, second, or even third biggest factor contributing to poor outcomes in teens, the sum of all the observations and research suggest that it is nevertheless a large enough factor to warrant close attention, as the panel of experts in the second portion of the summit made clear. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that it’s important to “reject the binary choice” that conversations about technology can sometimes point toward, acknowledging that, while the tools in question have been useful in creating connections, their dysregulated use can create lots of confusion for children. 

Dr. Jeff Kaczorowski, chair of the New York State chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that cell-phone use impacts children in four ways: distraction, mental health, physical and psychological safety, and loneliness, which Kaczorowski said “we don’t talk enough about.”

“Remember the old Bruce Springsteen song ‘57 Channels and Nothing On?’ … It was an allusion to cable television and all these new channels,” he said. “Today, it’s kind of like constantly interacting but never communicating.”

Guilderland school psychologist Nicholas Harris said that this dynamic has affected the social-emotional development of students in his district. 

“They’re struggling to talk to students, talk to adults, problem-solve, navigate social situations, look people in the eye … They hide their feelings, they hide their comments in the social-media world,” he said. “And most of the time, our students are reporting that, whatever site they’re on, whatever they’re doing, they feel more depressed, more anxious, more distracted.” 

Superintendent of the Shenendehowa Central School District, L. Oliver Robinson, explained why the school board there voted to sue social-media companies for their impact on students. 

“We’re coming from the standpoint of upholding our responsibility as a school system to ensure how students come to school, recognizing that, in order for students to learn, they must be available psychologically to learn,” he said.

Robinson said that the intent is primarily to “send a message” to social-media companies that school systems, which receive the “blind faith” of the community for care of their children, intend to uphold a certain standard for the platforms.

He also said that adding financial implications is a key ingredient for change since “money talk, the other stuff walk.” 

Robinson went on to say that, while change is in progress, it’s important for educators to make sure they understand deeply what kids are experiencing online and how challenging it can be for kids to build an understanding of what these things mean in real life, particularly when adults are relying on old models of the world that are less and less relevant as time goes on.

“Kids used to have little knock-down, drag-outs in parks and playgrounds and you kind of go over to each other’s house and talk it out and resolve, but nowadays you have a knock-down, drag-out with people you have never met, and that’s a whole different set of circumstances,” he said. 

“I think that’s the challenge in terms of the training that we have to do as educators and counselors within our schools, and also the conversation we need to have with parents in terms of the conversation they have with their children,” Robinson said, explaining that kids rely on the more fully-developed adult minds around them to provide guidance. 

The gap between them, he said, “is why we have some unfortunate crisis situations, much less what I call the everyday, run-of-the-mill harassment, bullying things that we deal with in our schools.”