I'm so tired of our enslavement to researchers. Parents know when their children have been affected, and they don't need anyone else to prove it. Sigh.
Some parents have excellent senses of what's best for their kids; others don't, or may have weaknesses or biases that can cause them to do real harm to their children, no matter how much they might love them. Similarly, some researchers or "experts" do careful, unbiased work that produces valuable results; others' work may be shoddy or motivated by personal or political gain.
In the end there's no substitute for thoughtful, honest, and open-minded discernment about complex social questions while trying to avoid making blanket judgements about large groups or classes of people.
The expert class has insisted that we all believe too many obvious lies. It started during Trump #1, ramped up during COVID, and finally jumped the shark with nonsense like "men can get pregnant".
Fortunately, it's coming to an end. One of the few good things about Trump #2: he's demonstrating that the "expert class" can (and should) be ignored.
Mary, you are correct! I don’t need a fancy and expensive medical study by experts to tell me that more time on smartphones for kids/teens is detrimental to their mental and physical health. Just like we were all suspicious when doctors spoke to us on TV commercials about their favorite safe cigarette brand. I trust my gut and feel vindicated from my own experience in my home and my classroom. Time away from the cell phone now is a gift, and our kids deserve that gift.
Disappointing response. Parents cannot fathom what it is like for a teenager to grow up in a world with infinite distractions. The surface level solution is taking their phones away, but this is about as sound of a solution as taking a meth pipe away from a chronic addict. Outsiders looking in like Jonathan Haidt overestimate their ability to solve real problems.
The problem of course is not just the study, but also the way the media reported on it. Instead of "School Phone Bans Don't Work, Scientists Say" (which I suspect even the authors of the study would agree is a wildly exaggerated version of the study's actual claim), the headline should have been "The Lancet Publishes Yet Another Questionable and Largely Useless Study."
There's a reason that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Silicon Valley tech execs don't give their children phones, and it's not b/c there's "no effect" on academic performance:
...and it's not because Wi-Fi is inherently hazardous, either. Please stop hijacking After Babel's posts, and learn the difference between "possibly carcinogenic" and "carcinogenic".
I'm not hijacking, but adding to the conversation. I beg to differ re: health effects:
Research literature going back to the 1950’s shows that EMF from magnetic fields, electric fields and microwave radiation (used in common wireless products) can cause significant health effects at levels far below what the government officially states to be safe.
Here are the most common symptoms that are linked to EMF exposure:
Headaches
Difficulty Sleeping
Heart Arrhythmia/Palpitations
Tinnitus (ringing in the ears)
Fatigue
Depression/Anxiety
Difficulty Concentrating/Forgetfulness
Infertility
Skin Rashes (facial redness)
Vertigo/Nausea
Reduced Immune System Function
Cardiac, Nervous and Endocrine System Dysregulation
These symptoms are a sign that something is wrong in one’s environment and actually help to wake-up individuals. It is a good sign when someone reacts naturally to a toxic substance.
Unfortunately, most people do not feel EMF pollution so they do not take the simple steps to reduce their exposure. If these people are unlucky, in 10-30 years time, they could experience the long-term effects. These include cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other illness’s related to immune, cardiac, nervous and endocrine system dysfunction. EMF affects all of these critical systems.
For a small percentage of individuals, the reaction to EMF pollution can become disabling. This condition is called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity or EHS. This is a condition that has been know about since 1932 and is officially recognized in some European countries (Sweden, for instance, recognizes nearly 300,000 citizens with this condition)
I will not stop calling attention to the elephant of the room - synthetic wireless radiation, and how it harms humanity, and nature. I will do a better job of trying to make my comment relevant to the thesis of the article. Are you aware the FCC, who regulates wireless radiation from our devices, has been called a "captured agency" by the Harvard Center for Ethics?
In 2015, the Harvard Center for Ethics published an expose by investigative journalist Norm Alster on the financial ties between the US federal government’s Federal communications Commission (FCC) and how, as a result, the wireless industry gained access and power over the FCC.
The WHO / IARC refers to EMF as "carcinogenic agents". A carcinogen is defined as: any agent that promotes the development of cancer. Why should we not practice the precautionary principle?
I refuted this claim three times in the thread that I linked to, and you walked away from the conversation with no explanation. I'm not addressing it again.
You never addressed the precautionary principle, and you said the WHO never called wireless a carcinogenic agent - I then linked to WHO's own document stating them to be "agents."
As I said in the other thread, I'll address the precautionary principle if and only if you acknowledge that your claim about the WHO is false. Lamentably, you continue to defend it.
I responded to your citation by noting--once again--that your source didn't actually describe 2B agents as "carcinogenic agents", contra your original claim. You never replied.
For the same reasons Jon talks about here: distraction, lack of focus, negative cultural influences, social contagions. Compared to all of those things (which Jon has documented extensively), any minor increase in cancer rates is negligible.
To be clear, I don't doubt that holding a phone (or bluetooth headset) next to your head all day is a bad idea. Just that, compared to everything else bad with smartphones, it's a negligible risk.
Hi Jon -- one of the reasons I really trust this movement is that it's led by you, someone famously empirical, who wrote the book on bias. But as someone who gets a zillion emails and mostly keeps tabs on the movement through the After Babel headlines, I'm starting to lose a little bit of trust in After Babel because it seems like every single headline bolsters the forcefulness of the core position. There never seems to be anything moderating.
Bothsidesism is its own fallacy, for sure -- perhaps it really is true that there are no caveats and everyone else is wrong. But I thought it might be useful feedback for you to hear that my reaction upon seeing today's headline in my email -- effectively "The Latest Evidence Disagreeing With Us Is Wrong" -- was to decrease my trust slightly in After Babel's levelheadedness.
I appreciate this comment. While I think it is a point well-taken insofar as some of the readers of After Babel are not "the choir," however I am in the choir when it comes to bans in schools. It is one of the few issues in education where I just don't find the other side workable, even if there might be valid concerns. My hopefully-not-too-ranty rant here: https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-teachers-collect
If you move beyond the paradigm that believes children must be controlled by adults in order to be educated, there is absolutely legitimate reason to have cell phones in schools. They promote all the three core psychological needs- autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Having a computer in your pocket is how we all self-educate on a regular basis.
I'm supportive, but I want to be supportive because the recommended approach is right, and appropriately nuanced, and not because we're all on the ban train.
You need to start reading Peter Gray or Christopher Ferguson or Mike Males, then. This substack community is absolutely an echo chamber that has no interest in getting at the truth of what is truly harming our children
> When social media time was greater than Smartphone Time, instead of excluding it like we did for the phone reported data, we set the Smartphone Time to equal the social media time
What?!? Are these researcher completely unaware of the existence of PCs or something?
In addition to the numerous issues with the Lancet study, this stood out to me:
"Within each school, the heavy users of smartphones and social media are doing worse than light users, across multiple important outcomes including mental health and educational attainment. However, the fact that the two groups of schools did not differ on average leads the authors to conclude that while there are consistent associations with harm, phone-free policies alone don’t reduce those harms."
This seems like the real story. From a nested data perspective, the primary issue seems to be the within-person effects of phone use, more so than the between-school effects. Presumably, school-level phone policies are intended to be mechanisms for moderating students' phone usage, with more restrictive school-level policies hopefully encouraging decreased within-student use. For the study's authors to make the story "Between-school differences in phone policies (based on dubious methods of categorizing those policies) don't matter," rather than "Student phone usage matters quite a lot" seems disengenuous.
Thanks for this helpful critique. When I read that kids are using their phones on average for 90 minutes DURING THE SCHOOL DAY (see https://www.the74million.org/article/alarming-national-data-teens-use-cell-phones-for-quarter-of-school-day/) I just want to scream. I'm a middle school teacher. The phones are a huge problem. I know that banning phones will not solve all the problems in education. I accept that teachers and schools have the responsibility to provide meaningful alternatives to the phones, i.e. a good education. But even the most creative, exciting, knowledgeable teachers have a tough time competing with TikTok.
I have dug into the research and the criticisms lobbed at Haidt and the rebuttals. I understand parents concerns about phone free schools. I’m a parent, too. I've had students who probably truly needed to have their phones with them. But they are the exceptions, not the rule. The threat to kids' education is real and obvious to even a casual observer at a typical middle or high school.
The MSN headline, “School Phone Bans DON’T Work” (seriously?? All Caps for “don’t”?!) is sensationalist and, frankly, irresponsible.
This is an impossible question to answer with any certainty at all. My God when I was a child we had no cell phones. But we did get a movie projector and we got to see some video of the nuclear bomb exploding. Turns out that was fake. Nuclear explosions are a hoax. Maybe you still believe in them. But a little poking around on cell phones convinces us that nukes are fake. So I’m not sure. This is a tough question to answer. I prefer the Internet over controlled textbooks. I’m pretty sure the young people prefer the truth over lies too.
Are you saying that the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Trinity test, and other "nuclear" tests were just conventional explosives? Also, how is this related to cell phones at all?
I understand that given modern society’s general lifestyle, working parents need to be able to contact their kids re unexpected emergencies but real or imagined emergencies that occur during the school day can almost always be handled through the school’s admin office. You don’t need to call your kid during school hours to say that you might be late coming home and that they should make themselves a PB&J sandwich.
There are likely to be flaws in any study of this kind trying to piece out one of many interacting variables that effect people differently to begin with. Phones are a variable, but there are many other differences that have affected children/teenagers of this generation compared to those of prior generations.
Thank you, thank you for taking the time to share why the Lancet study is not reliable. As a clinician who treats problematic online/tech behaviors, I once again am extremely disappointed in our media sources publishing a headline that appears so profoundly true. In general, a Journalists manta is, “if it bleeds, it leads”. We are by nature drawn to emotionally charged news. And sadly, a much smaller percentage of people actually read beyond the online headlines and if they do read beyond it, they only skim and deep thinking doesn’t occur, which allows us to critically think about the information. And I would be remiss in not focusing on the researchers and Lancet as the culprits in spreading misinformation, done intentionally, well I can’t say, and yet, given their past history with publishing research with flawed designs, we all must be very critical of the content before we quickly believe and share with others.
Yet another reason not to trust academia that is bought and paid for. The study conclusion was pre-determined.
Kinda like how when Ivermectin was being trialed for Covid19, multiple studies were conducted in parts of the world where it was available over the counter as an anti-parasitic (ie Brazil). The trial protocols didn't check if the placebo group was already using it (some undoubtedly were), and so any "efficacy" of the trial arm appears minimized when compared to the control.
I'm so tired of our enslavement to researchers. Parents know when their children have been affected, and they don't need anyone else to prove it. Sigh.
Some parents have excellent senses of what's best for their kids; others don't, or may have weaknesses or biases that can cause them to do real harm to their children, no matter how much they might love them. Similarly, some researchers or "experts" do careful, unbiased work that produces valuable results; others' work may be shoddy or motivated by personal or political gain.
In the end there's no substitute for thoughtful, honest, and open-minded discernment about complex social questions while trying to avoid making blanket judgements about large groups or classes of people.
The expert class has insisted that we all believe too many obvious lies. It started during Trump #1, ramped up during COVID, and finally jumped the shark with nonsense like "men can get pregnant".
Fortunately, it's coming to an end. One of the few good things about Trump #2: he's demonstrating that the "expert class" can (and should) be ignored.
Mary, you are correct! I don’t need a fancy and expensive medical study by experts to tell me that more time on smartphones for kids/teens is detrimental to their mental and physical health. Just like we were all suspicious when doctors spoke to us on TV commercials about their favorite safe cigarette brand. I trust my gut and feel vindicated from my own experience in my home and my classroom. Time away from the cell phone now is a gift, and our kids deserve that gift.
Disappointing response. Parents cannot fathom what it is like for a teenager to grow up in a world with infinite distractions. The surface level solution is taking their phones away, but this is about as sound of a solution as taking a meth pipe away from a chronic addict. Outsiders looking in like Jonathan Haidt overestimate their ability to solve real problems.
I have already lost faith in The Lancet for their politically driven studies.
Like the Hydroxy chloroquine study from 2020 that was pulled because the entire dataset was fake?? 😂🤡🌎
The problem of course is not just the study, but also the way the media reported on it. Instead of "School Phone Bans Don't Work, Scientists Say" (which I suspect even the authors of the study would agree is a wildly exaggerated version of the study's actual claim), the headline should have been "The Lancet Publishes Yet Another Questionable and Largely Useless Study."
There's a reason that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Silicon Valley tech execs don't give their children phones, and it's not b/c there's "no effect" on academic performance:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/children
...and it's not because Wi-Fi is inherently hazardous, either. Please stop hijacking After Babel's posts, and learn the difference between "possibly carcinogenic" and "carcinogenic".
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-harm-tiktok/comment/85452474
I'm not hijacking, but adding to the conversation. I beg to differ re: health effects:
Research literature going back to the 1950’s shows that EMF from magnetic fields, electric fields and microwave radiation (used in common wireless products) can cause significant health effects at levels far below what the government officially states to be safe.
Here are the most common symptoms that are linked to EMF exposure:
Headaches
Difficulty Sleeping
Heart Arrhythmia/Palpitations
Tinnitus (ringing in the ears)
Fatigue
Depression/Anxiety
Difficulty Concentrating/Forgetfulness
Infertility
Skin Rashes (facial redness)
Vertigo/Nausea
Reduced Immune System Function
Cardiac, Nervous and Endocrine System Dysregulation
These symptoms are a sign that something is wrong in one’s environment and actually help to wake-up individuals. It is a good sign when someone reacts naturally to a toxic substance.
Unfortunately, most people do not feel EMF pollution so they do not take the simple steps to reduce their exposure. If these people are unlucky, in 10-30 years time, they could experience the long-term effects. These include cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other illness’s related to immune, cardiac, nervous and endocrine system dysfunction. EMF affects all of these critical systems.
For a small percentage of individuals, the reaction to EMF pollution can become disabling. This condition is called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity or EHS. This is a condition that has been know about since 1932 and is officially recognized in some European countries (Sweden, for instance, recognizes nearly 300,000 citizens with this condition)
You absolutely are hijacking. For the year that I've followed After Babel, this is what I've observed:
- None of your comments relate to the specifics of the post they're made under.
- You've made no attempt to integrate your thesis with Haidt's, despite the fact that his is theoretically and empirically well-supported.
- All of your initial comments link to your own blog.
- You upvote people who call you out without ever admitting error--presumably to boost the visibility of your comment threads.
- When people reply to you, you pick from a grab-bag of scripted talking points instead of addressing their points.
These are all behaviors of someone who's hijacking the conversation, not contributing to it. Knock it off.
I will not stop calling attention to the elephant of the room - synthetic wireless radiation, and how it harms humanity, and nature. I will do a better job of trying to make my comment relevant to the thesis of the article. Are you aware the FCC, who regulates wireless radiation from our devices, has been called a "captured agency" by the Harvard Center for Ethics?
In 2015, the Harvard Center for Ethics published an expose by investigative journalist Norm Alster on the financial ties between the US federal government’s Federal communications Commission (FCC) and how, as a result, the wireless industry gained access and power over the FCC.
👎
The WHO / IARC refers to EMF as "carcinogenic agents". A carcinogen is defined as: any agent that promotes the development of cancer. Why should we not practice the precautionary principle?
I refuted this claim three times in the thread that I linked to, and you walked away from the conversation with no explanation. I'm not addressing it again.
You never addressed the precautionary principle, and you said the WHO never called wireless a carcinogenic agent - I then linked to WHO's own document stating them to be "agents."
As I said in the other thread, I'll address the precautionary principle if and only if you acknowledge that your claim about the WHO is false. Lamentably, you continue to defend it.
I responded to your citation by noting--once again--that your source didn't actually describe 2B agents as "carcinogenic agents", contra your original claim. You never replied.
I worked in Silicon Valley tech for a number of years. I can assure you that EMFs aren't the reason tech execs don't give their kids smartphones.
Thank you for your comment.
Do Silicon Valley execs not know about the health impacts of EMF?
What is the reason then?
For the same reasons Jon talks about here: distraction, lack of focus, negative cultural influences, social contagions. Compared to all of those things (which Jon has documented extensively), any minor increase in cancer rates is negligible.
To be clear, I don't doubt that holding a phone (or bluetooth headset) next to your head all day is a bad idea. Just that, compared to everything else bad with smartphones, it's a negligible risk.
Hi Jon -- one of the reasons I really trust this movement is that it's led by you, someone famously empirical, who wrote the book on bias. But as someone who gets a zillion emails and mostly keeps tabs on the movement through the After Babel headlines, I'm starting to lose a little bit of trust in After Babel because it seems like every single headline bolsters the forcefulness of the core position. There never seems to be anything moderating.
Bothsidesism is its own fallacy, for sure -- perhaps it really is true that there are no caveats and everyone else is wrong. But I thought it might be useful feedback for you to hear that my reaction upon seeing today's headline in my email -- effectively "The Latest Evidence Disagreeing With Us Is Wrong" -- was to decrease my trust slightly in After Babel's levelheadedness.
I appreciate this comment. While I think it is a point well-taken insofar as some of the readers of After Babel are not "the choir," however I am in the choir when it comes to bans in schools. It is one of the few issues in education where I just don't find the other side workable, even if there might be valid concerns. My hopefully-not-too-ranty rant here: https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-teachers-collect
If you move beyond the paradigm that believes children must be controlled by adults in order to be educated, there is absolutely legitimate reason to have cell phones in schools. They promote all the three core psychological needs- autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Having a computer in your pocket is how we all self-educate on a regular basis.
Here’s an example of the next paradigm-
https://petergray.substack.com/p/what-do-kids-at-a-center-for-self?utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
This is exactly why I don’t trust this blog.
I'm supportive, but I want to be supportive because the recommended approach is right, and appropriately nuanced, and not because we're all on the ban train.
You need to start reading Peter Gray or Christopher Ferguson or Mike Males, then. This substack community is absolutely an echo chamber that has no interest in getting at the truth of what is truly harming our children
> When social media time was greater than Smartphone Time, instead of excluding it like we did for the phone reported data, we set the Smartphone Time to equal the social media time
What?!? Are these researcher completely unaware of the existence of PCs or something?
In addition to the numerous issues with the Lancet study, this stood out to me:
"Within each school, the heavy users of smartphones and social media are doing worse than light users, across multiple important outcomes including mental health and educational attainment. However, the fact that the two groups of schools did not differ on average leads the authors to conclude that while there are consistent associations with harm, phone-free policies alone don’t reduce those harms."
This seems like the real story. From a nested data perspective, the primary issue seems to be the within-person effects of phone use, more so than the between-school effects. Presumably, school-level phone policies are intended to be mechanisms for moderating students' phone usage, with more restrictive school-level policies hopefully encouraging decreased within-student use. For the study's authors to make the story "Between-school differences in phone policies (based on dubious methods of categorizing those policies) don't matter," rather than "Student phone usage matters quite a lot" seems disengenuous.
Thanks for this helpful critique. When I read that kids are using their phones on average for 90 minutes DURING THE SCHOOL DAY (see https://www.the74million.org/article/alarming-national-data-teens-use-cell-phones-for-quarter-of-school-day/) I just want to scream. I'm a middle school teacher. The phones are a huge problem. I know that banning phones will not solve all the problems in education. I accept that teachers and schools have the responsibility to provide meaningful alternatives to the phones, i.e. a good education. But even the most creative, exciting, knowledgeable teachers have a tough time competing with TikTok.
I have dug into the research and the criticisms lobbed at Haidt and the rebuttals. I understand parents concerns about phone free schools. I’m a parent, too. I've had students who probably truly needed to have their phones with them. But they are the exceptions, not the rule. The threat to kids' education is real and obvious to even a casual observer at a typical middle or high school.
The MSN headline, “School Phone Bans DON’T Work” (seriously?? All Caps for “don’t”?!) is sensationalist and, frankly, irresponsible.
So stop competing, and let kids educate themselves like they have for millennia
This is an impossible question to answer with any certainty at all. My God when I was a child we had no cell phones. But we did get a movie projector and we got to see some video of the nuclear bomb exploding. Turns out that was fake. Nuclear explosions are a hoax. Maybe you still believe in them. But a little poking around on cell phones convinces us that nukes are fake. So I’m not sure. This is a tough question to answer. I prefer the Internet over controlled textbooks. I’m pretty sure the young people prefer the truth over lies too.
Are you saying that the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Trinity test, and other "nuclear" tests were just conventional explosives? Also, how is this related to cell phones at all?
A relevant story in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/02/14/do-bans-on-smartphones-in-schools-improve-mental-health
I understand that given modern society’s general lifestyle, working parents need to be able to contact their kids re unexpected emergencies but real or imagined emergencies that occur during the school day can almost always be handled through the school’s admin office. You don’t need to call your kid during school hours to say that you might be late coming home and that they should make themselves a PB&J sandwich.
Pretty wild to see you criticize correlational studies when you wrote a whole book full of them just to stigmatize my disability.
https://open.substack.com/pub/grimoiremanor/p/a-new-study-found-that-cellphone?r=8cb1w&utm_medium=ios
More importantly, for the vast majority, Phones in school do not help. So why are they there ?
There are likely to be flaws in any study of this kind trying to piece out one of many interacting variables that effect people differently to begin with. Phones are a variable, but there are many other differences that have affected children/teenagers of this generation compared to those of prior generations.
Thank you, thank you for taking the time to share why the Lancet study is not reliable. As a clinician who treats problematic online/tech behaviors, I once again am extremely disappointed in our media sources publishing a headline that appears so profoundly true. In general, a Journalists manta is, “if it bleeds, it leads”. We are by nature drawn to emotionally charged news. And sadly, a much smaller percentage of people actually read beyond the online headlines and if they do read beyond it, they only skim and deep thinking doesn’t occur, which allows us to critically think about the information. And I would be remiss in not focusing on the researchers and Lancet as the culprits in spreading misinformation, done intentionally, well I can’t say, and yet, given their past history with publishing research with flawed designs, we all must be very critical of the content before we quickly believe and share with others.
Yet another reason not to trust academia that is bought and paid for. The study conclusion was pre-determined.
Kinda like how when Ivermectin was being trialed for Covid19, multiple studies were conducted in parts of the world where it was available over the counter as an anti-parasitic (ie Brazil). The trial protocols didn't check if the placebo group was already using it (some undoubtedly were), and so any "efficacy" of the trial arm appears minimized when compared to the control.