New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools in 2025 | Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/30/new-york-smartphone-school-ban-bill
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From the article: The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, plans to introduce a bill banning smartphones in schools, the latest in a series of legislative moves aimed at online child safety by New York’s top official.
“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” she said.
Hochul said she would launch the bill later this year and take it up in New York’s next legislative session, which begins in January 2025. If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts, which has been a sticking point for parents. She did not offer specifics on enforcing the prohibition.
“Parents are very anxious about mass shootings in school,” she said. “Parents want the ability to have some form of connection in an emergency situation.”
The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children’s privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.
Don’t live in NY, but a kid having a phone is handy for tracking them. Parents can already lock down phones pretty easily.
We want to make sure you know when your kids are getting shot at but we won’t do jack squat about guns.
i want my kids to be able to take their phones to school, and have them after school. They don’t need them during school, and most schools already ban their use during the day, don’t they?
Smartphones to the underdeveloped brain are no different then cigarettes. I’m glad all we had in high school was a payphone in the lobby.
Years ago, I decided that in order to work better, feel better, ETC., I had to learn more about how the human brain works.
It wasn’t long before I felt much relief that smartphones weren’t around when I was a kid or even as a teen. There’s tech execs who won’t let their kids have smartphones because they know the danger.
Take “peer pressure”, for example. THAT is already very tough without social media. And smartphones means portable insta-access to 24-hour peer pressure.
The games on mobile devices also have too much baked in gambling mechanics. Even though I have tough time recalling specifics of the gambling psychology stuff I read about years ago, I can still clearly remember that what I read scared me a lot.
And there’s also what too much screen time does to the curvature of eyeballs. or something.