Phone Bans and Parental Choice: Thinking Twice About Smartphone Freedom

Over the past few months, school districts and state governments across the country have suddenly been tripping over one another to ban cell phones at public schools. Does this represent a long-overdue return to common sense, or just another of the periodic moral panics to which our febrile body politic seems increasingly prone? 

Conservatives, in particular, may find themselves ambivalent: on the one hand, conservatives are more likely to worry about the harmful effects of technology on kids; on the other hand, conservatives tend to balk at school boards or state legislatures telling citizens what they can and can’t do. The backlash against smartphones, to some at least, might reek of safetyism, evoking the libertarian maxim, “Those who are prepared to trade freedom for security deserve neither.” 

Do phone bans, then, represent an unacceptable attack on our freedom—the freedom of students to stay connected, or the freedom of parents to make their own choices about what’s best for their kids? Or can we instead see them as an exercise of true freedom?

The rapid adoption of smartphones among school-aged kids in the early 2010s, after all, took place largely in the name of freedom. Kids wanted to be free to go out with their friends without supervision, or be free to stay in touch with each other, or be free to pursue their interests and hobbies through the universe of information available online. Some parents had misgivings, but others were excited to give these real freedoms to their kids. More than a decade on, however, we have come to realize that there are other kinds of freedom that phones have taken away from our kids: freedom from distraction, freedom from being placed under the constant gaze and judgment of one’s peers, freedom to focus and concentrate on a great book, or just to be fully present with a friend or teacher. The negative impacts on learning have become too great to ignore, as a new Ethics and Public Policy Center memo underscores. 

Indeed, if we are honest with ourselves as adults, few of us feel freed by these insatiable attention-hogs in our pockets, and many of us breathe a sigh of relief on those rare occasions when we experience the freedom to be fully present in a phone-free zone. If that is true for those of us whose brains had room to develop in a pre-smartphone world, how much more suffocating is the continual buzz of anxiety and distraction engulfing young minds that have never known anything else? In the unequal battle against the armies of addiction engineers programming these devices, it is a mockery to pretend that our children have been empowered or liberated.

Most of us, I think, know this deep down by now. But still, we may resist large-scale policy actions out of well-honed skeptical reflexes. Since when have our public educators always deserved our trust about what was best for our kids? The past four years have witnessed an intense conservative backlash against our public educational establishment, carried out largely within the language of “parental choice.” Parents, not brainwashed bureaucrats, should get to decide how to talk to their kids about race or sexuality; parents, not teachers’ unions, should decide whether their kids need to wear a mask or not. So why should it be any different for phones?

Many parents, after all, may agree that smartphones are bad for most kids—but perhaps not their kid. Every child is different, we hear, and some can be trusted to use these devices more responsibly. And every family situation is different; some parents may feel the need to contact their child at school pick-ups or drop-offs, or in case of emergency. Obviously, there are downsides to phone use at school, but there are upsides too, and every parent should be free to make their own decisions when it comes to such tradeoffs. 

This is a reasonable instinct, but on closer examination it, too, trades on a very blinkered conception of freedom. For one thing, most parents do not feel free to make their decisions about when and whether to get their child a phone, and when and how to allow them to use it. Most feel trapped in a circular tug-of-war against every other parent who has chosen to get their kid a phone, a peer pressure network effect in which everyone feels constrained by everyone else’s decision, and almost no one feels able to provide their kids the phone-free childhood that many would really like to. Indeed, even if one family has the stubbornness to hold out, their children will reap few benefits so long as all their classmates still have their heads in the cloud.

It turns out that the most important freedoms are those that we cannot exercise as individuals; they require collective action. Consider something as simple, but so basic to our humanity, as a conversation. We talk a lot today about the individualistic “freedom to express myself,” but in fact, I can only express myself if there is another human being to listen. And only a self-centered sociopath wants only ever to be listened to, and never to listen in return. What most of us crave more than “expression” is conversation, an activity that requires two or more of us attending and responding in turn. This freedom demands something of both of us, but if it is a good conversation, both of us will feel enhanced, rather than limited, by this minor sacrifice.

A congregation, choir, or orchestra will experience the exhilarating collective freedom of making music together only to the extent that each member renounces his “freedom” to start humming or play whatever tune comes into his head. A football team will be free to run a play and score a touchdown, only if they all agree to run the same play—even if several of them grumble that it’s a bad idea. And of course, a classroom will only be free to learn together if they follow the same curriculum and participate in the same conversations. Education has always depended upon collective action.

Such collective action can be consensual and spontaneous, and around the country, groups of parents have self-organized to make mutual commitments to help their families go phone-free. Such efforts should be celebrated, but they will face an uphill battle so long as they remain islands within a larger community. While we sometimes think of freedom and authority as in tension, in fact, larger groups seeking to exercise collective freedom usually require the agency of an authority who can make decisions on behalf of the whole. The congregation follows the music director, the orchestra follows the conductor, the football team follows the coach or quarterback. Good leaders will not lead where no one is willing to follow; they will spend time educating, listening, and adjusting their plans to increase buy-in. But they do not need to wait for 100% agreement, without which nothing would ever happen.

As school districts and legislators across the country take action to rid phones from schools, we should be able to celebrate this as a form of collective action that enhances the freedom of both parents and students. The only loser in this movement is Big Tech, who is losing eight hours out of every day in which to addict and spy on our children—and that’s a loss of freedom we can all live with.

Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program.