This school year, millions of American students are returning to classrooms under a new rule: no phones. Thirty-six states now ban or limit student cellphone use, and Kansas recently implemented its first statewide ban while Indiana’s “bell to bell” law took effect, keeping phones out of sight from the first bell to the last.
The research behind these bans is solid. Devices capture attention, even when they’re off. Classrooms are calmer without them.
This is good news for parents. During the school day, one major source of distraction is being removed. While a phone ban may solve a classroom problem, it doesn’t solve what happens when kids take their phones home.
Imagine a 14-year-old on a Tuesday night, bedroom door closed, homework finished.
Someone she’s been talking to online asks for a photo. She’s said no before. This time she’s tired, and it feels easier to block the person and move on than to explain what happened to anyone else. Nothing about her day looked unusual. Nothing about it will come up at dinner.
This is the kind of moment that can happen quickly and quietly, behind a closed bedroom door.
Why kids, teens don't tell parents about sextortion, online interactions
Thorn's most recent national survey of young people, published in July, found that more than 1 in 4 minors ages 9 to 17 reported experiencing a sexual interaction online. Among teens specifically, that already rises to 1 in 3, and when the research expands to include sextortion, deepfake nudes and the sharing or resharing of nude images, the number climbs to nearly 1 in 2.
The most troubling number in the report isn’t about how often these things happen. It’s the data that reveals what the kids do afterward. When something goes wrong online, minors are nearly twice as likely to quietly block or report the person than to tell a parent or another trusted adult. One in 5 who had an online sexual interaction told no one at all.
And when researchers asked why, the leading reason has shifted. It’s no longer that kids think it isn’t a big deal. It’s that they’re afraid of being judged.
That’s the part a school policy can’t touch. You can take the phone out of the classroom. You can’t take away the hour after school when no one’s watching, or the hour before bed when a kid is alone with a decision about whether to tell you something happened.
If you feel bombarded by conflicting parenting advice right now, you’re not imagining it. One Atlantic writer described her feed as a constant stream of contradictory rules: ban social media, but also read your kids’ texts, but also respect their privacy – all delivered with the caveat that every kid is different anyway.
But when she asked experts what actually mattered, one answer kept surfacing regardless of who she asked: no screens in the bedroom, ever.
The most important rule is also easy to implement
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation,” named it as the rule he most regrets not following with his own kids. Adolescent psychologist Lisa Damour has called it the single tech rule to implement if you only implement one.
And the data backs it up: A study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health tracked more than 9,000 adolescents for a year and found that bedtime screen use predicted worse sleep outcomes 12 months later, including more sleep disturbance and less total sleep. Simply having an internet-connected device in the bedroom, whether or not it was being actively used, was enough to predict the decline.
Two experts, a year of data, one overlapping answer.
So what can we do? Implement the household version of what schools just did: no phones in bedrooms overnight.
Charge it in the kitchen. Charge it at a docking station by the front door. Anywhere but behind a closed door, alone, at night.
This isn’t about seeing everything your kid does online. It’s about making sure your kid isn’t completely alone with it.
A phone charging in a common space means the phone isn’t beside your child’s pillow at midnight. It creates a natural point of contact. A moment when a parent might walk by, notice a change in mood, ask a question or simply be there when a child decides tonight is the night to say something.
It’s a small rule. It’s also one you can start tonight, which is more than you can say for most advice aimed at parents in this space.
Schools decided the classroom doesn’t need a phone in it. Parents can decide the bedroom doesn’t, either.
Layne Shill is the director of the Parent Center at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Stephanie Trendell is a communications specialist at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Learn more at www.ParentCenter.org
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: If you only enact one rule for your kid's phone, make it this | Opinion
