When Naomi Wynd was preparing her daughter to start high school this year, one thing was crystal clear from the outset. Subscribe now for unlimited access . Login or signup to continue reading $ 0 / $ NaN /year All articles from our website & app The digital version of Today's Paper Breaking news alerts direct to your inbox Interactive Crosswords, Sudoku and Trivia All articles from the other regional websites in your area Continue Twelve-year-old Nina would not be getting a smartphone.
Wynd and her partner were completely united on this front - no endless scrolling or social media complications for Nina as she began at Campbell High. But there was still the question of staying connected. Heading to high school meant being away, beyond sight and hearing, for so much longer than a primary school kid.
So Wynd settled on a "dumbphone" - that is, a phone that can only make and receive calls and send texts. You know, like we all used to get by with just fine. In the end, Nina was almost the only of her peers to have a dumbphone, but there was one development that made the whole process much easier - the territory-wide phone ban in public schools.
"I was so happy that policy came in when Nina was just starting high school," Wynd says. The ban, which came into effect at the beginning of the current school year, has brought the territory in line with other states and allowed many parents to breathe a sigh of relief. Think of it: eight beautiful hours in which you can be reasonably certain your child is not looking at a phone.
Naomi Wynd and daughter Nina Henery, who has a dumbphone in high school. Picture by Keegan Carroll And yes, breaking down the day in this way does suggest there's a balance involved, in weighing up school and home time, and negotiating the boundaries we, as parents, are willing to set. But it's all baby steps in this vast, unstoppable experiment the world has subjected itself to, almost without thinking.
'We're comfortable with the science' Wynd is just one of the vast numbers of parents stranded - or moving forward - at the mobile phone crossroads. But she says there's no doubt that she and her partner have made the right decision for Nina. "Both of us are scientists, and we're pretty comfortable with the science in terms of kids' development," she says.
And there's plenty of science to draw upon. Just this week, a new report from the Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at the University of Wollongong suggests that we stop focusing on screen "time", and think more about how screens can be used effectively. There are also questions around moral panic, about whether mobile phones are simply the next iteration of what television was in the 1980s and 90s.
But in the here and now, mobile phones are everywhere, and we're all susceptible. The best many of us can hope for, really, is to make the right decisions for our own children around mobile phones - if only they weren't so damn useful. 'The difference was instantaneous' Andy Mison had no doubt in his mind that banning phones was the right thing when he was principal of Harrison School last year.
A 15-year veteran of the top job, and now the president of the Australian Secondary Principals' Association, he only spent two years at Harrison, but it turned out to be a crucial turning point in the phones-in-schools debate. "First thing's first - Blind Freddie can see the impact that these have on the culture of a school," he says. He said the fallout from negative social media interactions was everywhere he looked, in a way that it hadn't been at his previous school, Hawker College, where the students were older, in Years 11 and 12.
Harrison School year 8 student, Hannah Vidal, 14, with a lockable phone pouch students use to secure their phones during the day. Picture by Elesa Kurtz "With that older age group, I was able to work through a really great democratic process with them, actually work with the student group to come up with a sort of co-design way to regulate it," he says. But at Harrison, a school for Years 7-10, the upshot was that teachers were spending too much time dealing with phones.
"Teachers were spending ...
enormous amounts of time in conflict with kids around phone use, trying to get kids to exercise responsibility about their use of it," he says. "Also enormous amounts of time cleaning up the messes as a result of really terrible bullying and unsavoury stuff going on the web and through social media ..
. about 40 per cent of our negative incidents were related to phones in some way or another." At that stage, despite public pressure, and the fact that other states had already instituted phone bans in schools, the ACT government was moving relatively slowly, waiting to see how each school would address the problem.
But teachers are not trained to deal with phones and social media, and nor should they be. "There was an expectation, as with a lot of new things in society, that schools have a responsibility to help kids learn how to use these things, and that was probably the main struggle for us, to go well, is it our responsibility to do this?" Mison says. "And what we came to was .
.. and no amount of training, actually, from a pedagogical point of view, can overcome the physiological health side of this.
"Actually, we're dealing with highly addictive things that are having an influence on kids' brain chemistry, and there's no amount of lesson planning around how to use it responsibly that can overcome that. We're not health professionals." And so, with the overwhelming support from teachers and families, he instituted a ban on mobile phones at the school, a full six months before the rest of the territory followed suit.
The effects were immediate. "There were so many kids on the playground, we had to adjust our supervision roster - kids playing sport, kids talking to each other in groups," he says. "And then probably within a few days - and I don't think I'm exaggerating - I was starting to see some of the weight lift from teachers.
" 'Part of the school culture' Over at Orana Steiner School in Weston, a phone ban has been in place for Years 7-10 for the past 10 years. Principal James Goodlet says this adheres with the overall Steiner philosophy, and, at least at Orana, has never been difficult to enforce. "Steiner schools in general have fairly well-developed policies on digital technology and the use of screens in school," he says.
"So in general, particularly in our primary school, there's very limited screen time available to students anyway, and we have a supportive parent body in this regard, so that makes it a bit easier for us." Phones are allowed for students in Years 11 and 12, where, as Mison observed, students seemed to have better self-control and understanding of their own limits. And at St Edmund's College, the Catholic boys' school in Griffith, the middle ground has won out.
Principal Joe Zavone says he was as surprised as anyone that the school's partial phone ban - no phones in classrooms, but allowed during recess and lunch - has had almost no negative consequences. "You would think that with that sort of policy in place, that you walk out to the yard at recess and everyone's on their phones, and surprisingly, they're not," says Zavone. "I can honestly and genuinely say that when you walk around the yard at recess or at lunch, you would find maybe, out of a school of 860, 10 boys every now and then on their phones.
" He says the school decided to introduce a softer ban to allow room to move further if it wasn't effective. "We didn't go too hard because we didn't want a negative backlash or a negative reaction to what we were doing," he says. "[We] hoped the boys would engage in the policy perhaps a little bit better if there was some positive nature to it, if that makes sense.
" What about the parents? Lurking beneath, around and behind the issue of phones in schools is the responsibility (or, in some cases, lack thereof) of those who have allowed all this to happen in the first place - the parents. "If a parent makes a decision to buy a smartphone for a kid, then does not the parent have the primary responsibility to help their kid learn?" Mison says. He himself has four children - two in their 20s, and two in primary school.
He has seen the worst of what social media can do, in the early days when the world was only just beginning to grapple with its implications. And he says he won't be giving his younger children smartphones when the time comes. "Kids are different - one approach doesn't always work for the other," he says.
"With my two older ones, the elder one just sailed through. It wasn't really a thing for him. He wasn't that interested.
But my elder daughter, she went right into it, and it caused lots of problems for her and for us as a family. "I was just as guilty as everyone else - these were the new things, this is what they wanted. "And in hindsight, I feel bad about that.
" Screen time is good, but also bad Should he feel bad, though? Apparently the jury is out. In almost any social setting involving parents of kids between the ages of 10 to 16, you're likely to find yourself in a conversation about phones, and attitudes run the gamut from flat-out bans - no phone at all - through to the latest iPhone and no restrictions whatsoever, with plenty of arguments for either camp and everything in between. Canberra father Will, who preferred not to use his surname, has a 12-year-old at an independent school, and has decided not to let her have a phone at all.
She does have a smartwatch, though, on which she can make and receive calls and texts. For Will, the watch is both a boundary and an acknowledgement of the world we live in, and the need for his daughter to stay in touch. "It eliminates all the issues that come with having a smartphone," he says.
"But we're a little bit fortunate that her immediate circle of friends don't have smartphones either. The peer pressure is less pronounced." We're only half-way through the school year, but Will hopes the lack of phone will have long-term benefits for his daughter's interpersonal skills.
And he says so far, the boundaries have worked fine, and he has yet to decide whether or when he'll allow her to have a phone. "You can make age the deciding factor, but I think it also depends on the kid - her emotional intelligence and what she can handle," he says. 'No perfect answer' Bronwyn Hill, a member of Harrison School's P&C, says giving her 16-year-old daughter a smartphone is the sensible choice.
"I don't think you should stop them from using these things, because we're all on the phone - they're part of our life," she says. She also dislikes the idea of her daughter sneaking peeks at someone else's phone, or using one without permission. "Being strict isn't always successful.
I'd rather her be open and honest rather than sneak around, because they will. It's part of our social existence as humans now, and if you try to ban it, it usually backfires," she says. Happily, though, her daughter hasn't turned out to be a source of concern.
"I've tried to make sure she's aware of what can happen in social media, so we've got rules about only being friends with people she knows physically," she says. It was her daughter who first alerted her to the problems inherent with phones in classrooms. She says she spent years on the P&C pleading for the school to intervene and do something about it, but until Mison came along, no one was "brave enough" to make a move.
There's no doubt the ban has improved things, at least in the classroom, but the playground is a different matter. "They're still there, filming fights," she says. "There's no perfect answer.
" Share Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Email Copy Sally Pryor Features Editor As features editor at The Canberra Times, I love telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about the city we live in. As features editor at The Canberra Times, I love telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about the city we live in. More from Canberra Our wonderful aged care workers recognised for their hard work 8m ago No comment s The houses that made more than the average Canberran pay packet 8m ago No comment s 'Horse owner's dream' hits the market in Murrumbateman 8m ago No comment s Griffith apartment prices edge up towards fashionable Kingston 8m ago No comment s The new, must-have experience at Canberra's National Film and Sound Archive 8m ago No comment s Twenty grand or a duck: how much Olympic athletes make for winning gold 8m ago No comment s.
