I strongly agree with Brooke’s profound analysis of how we have 'hollowed out' the space for children’s agency. However, I would like to add a critical biological layer to this 'downstream' problem that often remains invisible: The systemic sacrifice of early childhood sleep for the sake of economic growth (GDP).
Before a child even reaches the age where they struggle with smartphone autonomy, their basic biological autonomy is often already compromised. In many urban environments (like Munich, Germany), we see a 'Death of the Nap.' To accommodate parental work schedules and the demand for children to be 'tired' by 7:00 PM so parents can continue to function or work, the afternoon rest in daycares (ages 1–6) has been systematically abolished.
This creates a devastating biological chain reaction:
1. The Sleep Debt: Children are forced into 14-hour days of high-stress institutional environments. Many are missing 20–30% of their required sleep during the most critical windows of brain development (synaptic pruning and amygdala regulation).
2. The Loss of Impulse Control: A chronically sleep-deprived brain is physiologically incapable of the 'guided autonomy' Brooke describes. When the prefrontal cortex is exhausted, the brain operates in a permanent state of hyper-arousal (high cortisol).
3. The Digital 'Sedative': When these children come home, they are 'over-tired' and emotionally fragile. Parents, also exhausted by the same system, use digital devices as a 'sedative' to shut down a brain that is too tired to fall asleep naturally.
We are pathologizing the 'addiction' to screens, but we are ignoring the fact that we have built a society where children are too biologically depleted to exercise free will. The smartphone didn't just move into a cultural vacuum; it moved into a biological vacuum created by chronic exhaustion.
If we want to restore agency, we must first restore the biological foundation of resilience: Sleep. We cannot expect children to resist the most powerful algorithms in history if their nervous systems have been running on empty since they were toddlers. We have traded child biology for economic efficiency, and the 'Anxious Generation' is the physiological bill coming due.
I’m a school board member and we are discussing the proposed phone policy at our meeting tonight, so this post is timely. Thank you! I’d love to know if you have access to any of the data collected using TAPS tools or if that data remains private for district use only.
Thanks for discussing this important topic at the board meeting!
There are different ways to use TAPS. With google forms, the data will be collected through the district and be private for district. With qualtrics surveys, the qualtrics surveys are hosted at Stanford. Stanford research team can see the data along with the district. But we can figure out multiple ways to protect privacy.
Thank you. I have another question. How soon will the dashboard feature be ready to use? We are scheduled to vote on the proposed policy in two weeks. One out of our six high schools has a Yondr system and ideally I’d like to compare the responses from that school with the rest in order to guide our decision of whether to expand that system to all our high schools. I’m guessing that process would take longer than two weeks and we’d have to table the decision. Please advise.
The dashboard feature will take about a month. We try to host it under Stanford to protect the data privacy. Setting the dashboard under Stanford takes about a month. But schools can start data collection before the launch of the dashboard. The dashboard will be used after all data are collected through Google forms.
AI is used in schools to support children with disabilities in several impactful ways: 1. Personalized Learning: AI adapts educational content to meet each child's unique learning pace and style, helping children with learning disabilities grasp concepts more effectively. 2. Communication Aids: AI-powered speech recognition and synthesis tools assist children with speech impairments to communicate more easily. 3. Accessibility Tools: AI enhances accessibility by converting text to speech, providing real-time captioning for children with hearing impairments, and using eye-tracking or gesture recognition for those with mobility challenges. 4. Educational Apps: AI-driven apps offer interactive and engaging learning experiences tailored to children with various disabilities, fostering motivation and participation. 5. Behavior and Emotional Support: AI systems can monitor behavior patterns and emotional cues, providing timely intervention strategies for children with autism or other emotional difficulties. 6. Assistive Technology Integration: AI integrates with devices like smart prosthetics or wheelchairs to aid physical mobility and independence in school settings. Overall, AI helps create an inclusive learning environment, promoting equity and enhancing educational outcomes for children with disabilities.
AI is increasingly being used in public schools to support blind children in several impactful ways: 1. Personalized Learning: AI-powered educational software can adapt to the individual learning pace and style of blind students, providing tailored content and feedback. 2. Text-to-Speech and Speech Recognition: AI enables more advanced text-to-speech engines that read textbooks, assignments, and digital content aloud with natural-sounding voices. Speech recognition allows students to interact with devices and input answers verbally. 3. Image Recognition and Object Detection: AI tools can identify objects, text, and scenes through cameras, helping blind students understand their environment, including classroom materials and signs. 4. Braille Translation and Production: AI systems can convert printed or digital text into Braille automatically, facilitating access to a wide range of educational materials. 5. Navigation Assistance: AI-powered apps can assist blind students in navigating school buildings and outdoor areas safely using audio cues and GPS data. 6. Communication and Collaboration: AI-driven communication tools help blind students participate more easily in group activities and classroom discussions through voice commands and speech-to-text. By integrating these AI technologies, public schools enhance accessibility, foster independence, and improve the educational experience for blind children.
Excellent points on the 'Great Rewiring.' But what if we look deeper than anxiety? In my latest work, I track the Domestication Syndrome in Sapiens—where digital 'tameness' triggers the same biological collapse Belyaev saw in foxes. We aren't just anxious; we are becoming unnecessary to ourselves. I’ve mapped the morphology of this collapse here: https://homovisionarius.substack.com/p/the-biological-evidence-of-our-dissolution
Every single cel phone is a porthole into pornography. Every single parent who gives their children a cell phone is handing their children pornography. That’s where we live now.
This article is primarily about the TAPS framework — a toolkit for evaluating the effects of phone policies in schools. Before addressing TAPS directly, though, I think it’s necessary to step back and look at this problem from a wider angle. My concern is that much of the current debate — including well-intentioned efforts around evaluation — is taking place downstream of deeper cultural and developmental failures that remain largely unexamined.
In previous comments on *After Babel*, I’ve argued that social media and AI systems are being misidentified as the root cause of harm. These technologies are better understood as *symptoms* of a deeper, long-running developmental and cultural failure. Over decades, we have stripped children of ordinary agency, freedom of movement, intergenerational connection, and relational depth through fear-based parenting, over-supervision, and moral panic. When children’s real-world emotional and relational needs go unmet, they do not simply seek stimulation — they seek **substitutes for connection, presence, and belonging**. Mediated systems step into that vacuum, offering the *illusion* of relationship while extracting attention and shaping behaviour. We then pathologise the outcomes and regulate the platforms, rather than confronting the social conditions that made those systems so compelling in the first place. Regulation that focuses on platforms without repairing those conditions treats symptoms while entrenching causes.
Links to those previous comments:
* Australia’s new social media regulations put childhood first -
Let me return to the current topic with a related but distinct nuance: **autonomy**.
I agree that smart devices and younger people don’t mix well — the empirical harms are real and documented. But the **knee-jerk response** (bans, restrictions, enforcement policies) misunderstands both *why* teens gravitate toward screens and *what actually influences their wellbeing*.
When I spoke to my teenage daughters about phone bans, they immediately pointed out the obvious outcome: kids don’t become safer — they become sneakier: secondary phones, hidden accounts, feigned illness, disengagement from school, and workarounds for age-verification systems. In doing so, we are actively training young people in how to evade surveillance and control architectures. That is a genuine risk: sustained exposure to adversarial systems teaches adversarial thinking, and over time this becomes a pipeline for producing individuals highly skilled in operating below detection — the very skill set associated with black-ops security, intelligence, and cyber-evasion work — rather than fostering trust, judgment, and civic responsibility, **driving the world further into disrepair rather than restoring social cohesion**.
What my daughters articulated most clearly — reflecting a wider pattern I’ve observed — wasn’t screens themselves, but the **destruction of autonomy**. Blanket bans communicate that young people are not to be trusted as thinking agents, only managed as risks. That’s not a quirk of adolescence; it’s a developmental reality. Children are autonomous beings from early childhood — certainly well before adolescence — a point strongly supported across behavioural and developmental psychology. Exploration, choice, resistance, and negotiation are not flaws to be eliminated; they are how judgment develops. When adults systematically override autonomy through surveillance and restriction, rebellion is not a failure of character — it is a predictable response to disrespect.
The irony is that we then take this rebellion as evidence that children *cannot* be trusted, and respond by tightening control further. We mistake evasion for incapacity, and compliance for wellbeing.
This is not a call to unleash children into unsupervised chaos — I am not suggesting we let four-year-olds roam the streets on their trikes and hope for the best. The alternative is not neglect; it is a shift from **control** to **guided autonomy**. True guidance doesn’t pre-decide every choice; it frames options, teaches reasoning, and allows young people to experience the consequences of choices within a supportive relational context. It means gradually expanding freedom as capacity develops, not replacing trust with surveillance. Had we normalised this from early childhood — offering meaningful choices, honouring developing agency, and helping children reflect on outcomes — we would not now be trying to “fix” adolescence through bans, enforcement, and technical controls.
This brings me back to the TAPS framework discussed in the article. As presented, TAPS is not itself an enforcement system or a technical control stack; it is an evaluation toolkit designed to measure the effects of whatever phone policies schools choose to adopt, using surveys and structured feedback from students, teachers, parents, and administrators. The intent is to support evidence-based decision-making rather than to prescribe a single policy approach.
My concern, however, is more fundamental. Even when framed as evaluation rather than enforcement, TAPS still implicitly treats phone restriction as the primary object of inquiry — as if the central question were how well different controls perform, rather than whether control-centric approaches are addressing the right problem at all. By focusing attention on measuring the outcomes of restrictive policies, we risk reinforcing a narrow framing in which childhood wellbeing is approached through management, compliance, and optimisation, rather than through the deeper developmental conditions that shape behaviour in the first place. **At the same time, real money, time, and institutional effort are being spent on evaluation infrastructures that could instead be directed toward making better choices upfront — rebuilding environments, relationships, and practices that reduce harm without needing constant measurement and correction.**
In that sense, evaluation frameworks like TAPS can unintentionally legitimise increasingly complex and institutional responses — not because they mandate them, but because they normalise the idea that childhood difficulties should be solved through policy instrumentation rather than social repair. The danger is not bad data, but misplaced focus: we become better at measuring the effects of control while leaving unexamined how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the relational environments that once made healthy development possible.
More broadly, this reflects a deeper mistake. We should not be trying to make life *more* complex in response to social breakdown. Excessive complexity — procedural, technological, and institutional — is a large part of how we arrived in this situation in the first place. Layering ever more systems on top of already fragile social foundations does not create resilience; it obscures responsibility and fragments trust.
If we are serious about long-term wellbeing, the direction of travel should be the opposite: **simplification**. That means rebuilding social practices around behaviours and traits that are deeply ingrained in our biology and psychology — practices that evolved because they *worked*. For hundreds of thousands of years in Homo sapiens, and for millions of years across our ancestral lineage, humans raised children in environments characterised by gradual autonomy, rich intergenerational presence, shared responsibility, exploration, and guidance rather than control. These were not romantic ideals; they were adaptive solutions refined over deep time.
I respect you as one of the most authoritative voices in this field, which is precisely why I feel compelled to be direct. The danger here is not simply misdiagnosis, but misdirection. The way these issues are framed creates space for those in power to respond with control, surveillance, and technical complexity — solutions that are politically convenient and institutionally legible, but developmentally counterproductive. By concentrating attention on platforms and mechanisms, we risk legitimising responses that manage symptoms while avoiding the deeper causes: **how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the social conditions that once made healthy development possible**. That, in my view, is where the real harm now lies.
Technical containment cannot substitute for relational guidance, and it cannot repair the developmental deficits that made such containment seem necessary in the first place.
Phone policies that treat children as compliance problems miss the deeper issue. They confuse authority with protection, restriction with care, and control with connection. They assume the problem is behavioural compliance rather than developmental context.
Social media and smartphones didn’t erode children’s agency. They moved into the space that our culture had already hollowed out.
I explore these themes — agency suppression, moral panic, developmental harm, and why fear-based systems reliably backfire — in more depth in my ongoing writing at
Really, thank y'all so much for your work on this.
I strongly agree with Brooke’s profound analysis of how we have 'hollowed out' the space for children’s agency. However, I would like to add a critical biological layer to this 'downstream' problem that often remains invisible: The systemic sacrifice of early childhood sleep for the sake of economic growth (GDP).
Before a child even reaches the age where they struggle with smartphone autonomy, their basic biological autonomy is often already compromised. In many urban environments (like Munich, Germany), we see a 'Death of the Nap.' To accommodate parental work schedules and the demand for children to be 'tired' by 7:00 PM so parents can continue to function or work, the afternoon rest in daycares (ages 1–6) has been systematically abolished.
This creates a devastating biological chain reaction:
1. The Sleep Debt: Children are forced into 14-hour days of high-stress institutional environments. Many are missing 20–30% of their required sleep during the most critical windows of brain development (synaptic pruning and amygdala regulation).
2. The Loss of Impulse Control: A chronically sleep-deprived brain is physiologically incapable of the 'guided autonomy' Brooke describes. When the prefrontal cortex is exhausted, the brain operates in a permanent state of hyper-arousal (high cortisol).
3. The Digital 'Sedative': When these children come home, they are 'over-tired' and emotionally fragile. Parents, also exhausted by the same system, use digital devices as a 'sedative' to shut down a brain that is too tired to fall asleep naturally.
We are pathologizing the 'addiction' to screens, but we are ignoring the fact that we have built a society where children are too biologically depleted to exercise free will. The smartphone didn't just move into a cultural vacuum; it moved into a biological vacuum created by chronic exhaustion.
If we want to restore agency, we must first restore the biological foundation of resilience: Sleep. We cannot expect children to resist the most powerful algorithms in history if their nervous systems have been running on empty since they were toddlers. We have traded child biology for economic efficiency, and the 'Anxious Generation' is the physiological bill coming due.
Stanford Media Lab? Really? In light of how they were caught trying to globalize DEI etc?
I’m a school board member and we are discussing the proposed phone policy at our meeting tonight, so this post is timely. Thank you! I’d love to know if you have access to any of the data collected using TAPS tools or if that data remains private for district use only.
Thanks for discussing this important topic at the board meeting!
There are different ways to use TAPS. With google forms, the data will be collected through the district and be private for district. With qualtrics surveys, the qualtrics surveys are hosted at Stanford. Stanford research team can see the data along with the district. But we can figure out multiple ways to protect privacy.
Thank you. I have another question. How soon will the dashboard feature be ready to use? We are scheduled to vote on the proposed policy in two weeks. One out of our six high schools has a Yondr system and ideally I’d like to compare the responses from that school with the rest in order to guide our decision of whether to expand that system to all our high schools. I’m guessing that process would take longer than two weeks and we’d have to table the decision. Please advise.
The dashboard feature will take about a month. We try to host it under Stanford to protect the data privacy. Setting the dashboard under Stanford takes about a month. But schools can start data collection before the launch of the dashboard. The dashboard will be used after all data are collected through Google forms.
Thanks to the Envision Ally AI agent for the following info:
https://www.ally.me/
AI is used in schools to support children with disabilities in several impactful ways: 1. Personalized Learning: AI adapts educational content to meet each child's unique learning pace and style, helping children with learning disabilities grasp concepts more effectively. 2. Communication Aids: AI-powered speech recognition and synthesis tools assist children with speech impairments to communicate more easily. 3. Accessibility Tools: AI enhances accessibility by converting text to speech, providing real-time captioning for children with hearing impairments, and using eye-tracking or gesture recognition for those with mobility challenges. 4. Educational Apps: AI-driven apps offer interactive and engaging learning experiences tailored to children with various disabilities, fostering motivation and participation. 5. Behavior and Emotional Support: AI systems can monitor behavior patterns and emotional cues, providing timely intervention strategies for children with autism or other emotional difficulties. 6. Assistive Technology Integration: AI integrates with devices like smart prosthetics or wheelchairs to aid physical mobility and independence in school settings. Overall, AI helps create an inclusive learning environment, promoting equity and enhancing educational outcomes for children with disabilities.
AI is increasingly being used in public schools to support blind children in several impactful ways: 1. Personalized Learning: AI-powered educational software can adapt to the individual learning pace and style of blind students, providing tailored content and feedback. 2. Text-to-Speech and Speech Recognition: AI enables more advanced text-to-speech engines that read textbooks, assignments, and digital content aloud with natural-sounding voices. Speech recognition allows students to interact with devices and input answers verbally. 3. Image Recognition and Object Detection: AI tools can identify objects, text, and scenes through cameras, helping blind students understand their environment, including classroom materials and signs. 4. Braille Translation and Production: AI systems can convert printed or digital text into Braille automatically, facilitating access to a wide range of educational materials. 5. Navigation Assistance: AI-powered apps can assist blind students in navigating school buildings and outdoor areas safely using audio cues and GPS data. 6. Communication and Collaboration: AI-driven communication tools help blind students participate more easily in group activities and classroom discussions through voice commands and speech-to-text. By integrating these AI technologies, public schools enhance accessibility, foster independence, and improve the educational experience for blind children.
Would love to see you engage with this article's claims. https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/02/24/ignoring_the_science_the_curious_case_of_cell_phone_bans_1166538.html
Excellent points on the 'Great Rewiring.' But what if we look deeper than anxiety? In my latest work, I track the Domestication Syndrome in Sapiens—where digital 'tameness' triggers the same biological collapse Belyaev saw in foxes. We aren't just anxious; we are becoming unnecessary to ourselves. I’ve mapped the morphology of this collapse here: https://homovisionarius.substack.com/p/the-biological-evidence-of-our-dissolution
Every single cel phone is a porthole into pornography. Every single parent who gives their children a cell phone is handing their children pornography. That’s where we live now.
This article is primarily about the TAPS framework — a toolkit for evaluating the effects of phone policies in schools. Before addressing TAPS directly, though, I think it’s necessary to step back and look at this problem from a wider angle. My concern is that much of the current debate — including well-intentioned efforts around evaluation — is taking place downstream of deeper cultural and developmental failures that remain largely unexamined.
In previous comments on *After Babel*, I’ve argued that social media and AI systems are being misidentified as the root cause of harm. These technologies are better understood as *symptoms* of a deeper, long-running developmental and cultural failure. Over decades, we have stripped children of ordinary agency, freedom of movement, intergenerational connection, and relational depth through fear-based parenting, over-supervision, and moral panic. When children’s real-world emotional and relational needs go unmet, they do not simply seek stimulation — they seek **substitutes for connection, presence, and belonging**. Mediated systems step into that vacuum, offering the *illusion* of relationship while extracting attention and shaping behaviour. We then pathologise the outcomes and regulate the platforms, rather than confronting the social conditions that made those systems so compelling in the first place. Regulation that focuses on platforms without repairing those conditions treats symptoms while entrenching causes.
Links to those previous comments:
* Australia’s new social media regulations put childhood first -
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/australias-new-social-media-regulations/comment/188316861
* Don’t give your child an AI companion -
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/dont-give-your-child-an-ai-companion/comment/180827274
Let me return to the current topic with a related but distinct nuance: **autonomy**.
I agree that smart devices and younger people don’t mix well — the empirical harms are real and documented. But the **knee-jerk response** (bans, restrictions, enforcement policies) misunderstands both *why* teens gravitate toward screens and *what actually influences their wellbeing*.
When I spoke to my teenage daughters about phone bans, they immediately pointed out the obvious outcome: kids don’t become safer — they become sneakier: secondary phones, hidden accounts, feigned illness, disengagement from school, and workarounds for age-verification systems. In doing so, we are actively training young people in how to evade surveillance and control architectures. That is a genuine risk: sustained exposure to adversarial systems teaches adversarial thinking, and over time this becomes a pipeline for producing individuals highly skilled in operating below detection — the very skill set associated with black-ops security, intelligence, and cyber-evasion work — rather than fostering trust, judgment, and civic responsibility, **driving the world further into disrepair rather than restoring social cohesion**.
What my daughters articulated most clearly — reflecting a wider pattern I’ve observed — wasn’t screens themselves, but the **destruction of autonomy**. Blanket bans communicate that young people are not to be trusted as thinking agents, only managed as risks. That’s not a quirk of adolescence; it’s a developmental reality. Children are autonomous beings from early childhood — certainly well before adolescence — a point strongly supported across behavioural and developmental psychology. Exploration, choice, resistance, and negotiation are not flaws to be eliminated; they are how judgment develops. When adults systematically override autonomy through surveillance and restriction, rebellion is not a failure of character — it is a predictable response to disrespect.
The irony is that we then take this rebellion as evidence that children *cannot* be trusted, and respond by tightening control further. We mistake evasion for incapacity, and compliance for wellbeing.
This is not a call to unleash children into unsupervised chaos — I am not suggesting we let four-year-olds roam the streets on their trikes and hope for the best. The alternative is not neglect; it is a shift from **control** to **guided autonomy**. True guidance doesn’t pre-decide every choice; it frames options, teaches reasoning, and allows young people to experience the consequences of choices within a supportive relational context. It means gradually expanding freedom as capacity develops, not replacing trust with surveillance. Had we normalised this from early childhood — offering meaningful choices, honouring developing agency, and helping children reflect on outcomes — we would not now be trying to “fix” adolescence through bans, enforcement, and technical controls.
This brings me back to the TAPS framework discussed in the article. As presented, TAPS is not itself an enforcement system or a technical control stack; it is an evaluation toolkit designed to measure the effects of whatever phone policies schools choose to adopt, using surveys and structured feedback from students, teachers, parents, and administrators. The intent is to support evidence-based decision-making rather than to prescribe a single policy approach.
My concern, however, is more fundamental. Even when framed as evaluation rather than enforcement, TAPS still implicitly treats phone restriction as the primary object of inquiry — as if the central question were how well different controls perform, rather than whether control-centric approaches are addressing the right problem at all. By focusing attention on measuring the outcomes of restrictive policies, we risk reinforcing a narrow framing in which childhood wellbeing is approached through management, compliance, and optimisation, rather than through the deeper developmental conditions that shape behaviour in the first place. **At the same time, real money, time, and institutional effort are being spent on evaluation infrastructures that could instead be directed toward making better choices upfront — rebuilding environments, relationships, and practices that reduce harm without needing constant measurement and correction.**
In that sense, evaluation frameworks like TAPS can unintentionally legitimise increasingly complex and institutional responses — not because they mandate them, but because they normalise the idea that childhood difficulties should be solved through policy instrumentation rather than social repair. The danger is not bad data, but misplaced focus: we become better at measuring the effects of control while leaving unexamined how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the relational environments that once made healthy development possible.
More broadly, this reflects a deeper mistake. We should not be trying to make life *more* complex in response to social breakdown. Excessive complexity — procedural, technological, and institutional — is a large part of how we arrived in this situation in the first place. Layering ever more systems on top of already fragile social foundations does not create resilience; it obscures responsibility and fragments trust.
If we are serious about long-term wellbeing, the direction of travel should be the opposite: **simplification**. That means rebuilding social practices around behaviours and traits that are deeply ingrained in our biology and psychology — practices that evolved because they *worked*. For hundreds of thousands of years in Homo sapiens, and for millions of years across our ancestral lineage, humans raised children in environments characterised by gradual autonomy, rich intergenerational presence, shared responsibility, exploration, and guidance rather than control. These were not romantic ideals; they were adaptive solutions refined over deep time.
I respect you as one of the most authoritative voices in this field, which is precisely why I feel compelled to be direct. The danger here is not simply misdiagnosis, but misdirection. The way these issues are framed creates space for those in power to respond with control, surveillance, and technical complexity — solutions that are politically convenient and institutionally legible, but developmentally counterproductive. By concentrating attention on platforms and mechanisms, we risk legitimising responses that manage symptoms while avoiding the deeper causes: **how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the social conditions that once made healthy development possible**. That, in my view, is where the real harm now lies.
Technical containment cannot substitute for relational guidance, and it cannot repair the developmental deficits that made such containment seem necessary in the first place.
Phone policies that treat children as compliance problems miss the deeper issue. They confuse authority with protection, restriction with care, and control with connection. They assume the problem is behavioural compliance rather than developmental context.
Social media and smartphones didn’t erode children’s agency. They moved into the space that our culture had already hollowed out.
I explore these themes — agency suppression, moral panic, developmental harm, and why fear-based systems reliably backfire — in more depth in my ongoing writing at
https://thesystemisbroken.substack.com.