Publisher’s Porch: Put the Phone Away

Welcome back to the porch.

As students across the Thumb head back to school, some of them may be facing a challenge more frightening than a pop quiz on the first day: putting their phones away.

Michigan recently passed a new law requiring school districts to adopt policies limiting cellphone use during instructional time.

As the father of two teenagers, I wish our teachers and school administrators the very best of luck.

I love my kids dearly, but like most teenagers, they have developed an impressive ability to stare at a tiny screen for hours at a time. TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, text messages, and whatever else they’re doing that I am apparently too old to understand can occupy an astonishing amount of their day.

Of course, we adults should probably be careful about throwing stones from inside our glass houses. Most of us aren’t exactly great at putting our phones down either.

And, in fairness to the kids, we helped create this.

When COVID hit, we handed our children laptops and tablets and told them that school was now online. Their teachers were on a screen. Their assignments were on a screen. Their friends were on a screen. For a while, seemingly their entire world existed through Wi-Fi.

Then life returned to normal, and we wondered why they wouldn’t put the screens down.

So maybe asking kids to spend a little more time looking at their teachers and classmates instead of their phones isn’t such a terrible idea.

There will undoubtedly be complaints. There will be forgotten phones tucked into pockets. There will probably be some creative interpretations of exactly what “put away” means. And somewhere, a teenager will undoubtedly insist that checking Snapchat was absolutely essential to their education.

But maybe something good will happen, too.

Maybe they talk to each other at lunch. Maybe they pay a little more attention in class. Maybe they discover that being bored for five minutes isn’t actually fatal.

Maybe they’ll even pick up a physical newspaper and read it. Which, admittedly, would be a little ironic considering we just spent a bunch of time and money launching a new online version of this one. Then again, maybe that’s the point. There’s a place for screens, and there’s also something to be said for putting them down once in a while.

And maybe the rest of us could learn something from them.

After all, if we’re going to tell our kids to put their phones away and look up once in a while, we should probably be willing to do the same, and I promise I will do that as soon as this TikTok video is over.