Time Spent on Phones in School

Perhaps you, like me, are someone who on occasion was called back to reality by a school-teacher who caught you day-dreaming, not paying attention, or staring out a window during class. I know that it happened to me several times, from elementary school right on through to high school. In today’s world, it’s reasonable to assume that the most likely in-school distraction is a smartphone screen. Recent research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association tells us that teens spend on average about five hours a day on their smartphones, two hours of which is spent on social media. During the school day, the average amount of time spent on smartphones is seventy minutes, with thirty minutes on social media, fifteen minutes of that time on video apps, and fifteen minutes on apps for gaming. Once again, we are finding that phone time takes our kids away from learning time. Parents, if it hasn’t been done already, work with your schools to ban smartphones during the day.