A teacher watches a student tap phantom game controls after her phone is confiscated. The question of who teaches kids when to put the phone down has no clean answer.
A girl sat through a graduation ceremony for 20 minutes, phone in hand, flicking through content every five to ten seconds. When asked to put it down, she picked it back up 30 seconds later. When the phone was finally taken away, she sat there mimicking the tapping motions with her fingers — her hands moving through the game in her head, because she'd played it so many times the muscle memory had taken over. That image stuck with me. If I ask that same student to debate something in class, she cannot do it. Her social skills are poor. And the connection between those two facts feels pretty direct.
Today was graduation day at school. I teach grades 5 and 6, and I'd spent the whole year talking to them about the dangers of social media, internet addiction, and what that does to your ability to concentrate. I told them before the ceremony: respect the people graduating, put the phones away, take in the experience. Photos and videos, fine. But be present. They know what I'm like, because if I catch them doing something I've asked them not to do, I take the phone straight to mum and dad.
It didn't quite work.
What that girl was doing at the ceremony has a name: doom scrolling. You're not interested in anything in particular. You're just doing it because you need something to do. The scroll becomes the default state.
Are you that addicted to it that you cannot put it down? What do you think it's gonna do — is it gonna blow up? Is it gonna run away?
The Friday before graduation, we had a rehearsal. It was the last day of school, so the kids were allowed a classroom party. There was no mention they could bring devices in to play games. They were told they could use phones for photographs. Instead, I walked in to find 14 students sitting in a row, none of them talking to each other, all looking at their iPads. I collected every device, put them in a box, and took them down to reception. Then I told them: this is my space. I educate you the way school asked me to educate you.
What struck me most wasn't the defiance. It was the silence. Fourteen kids sitting together, saying nothing to each other. Social skills — being able to communicate with the people around you, your peers — are eroding, and the devices are a big part of why.
When I asked Adrian, my student, who he thought should be responsible for teaching kids when to use a phone and when not to, he came up with the word "boundaries" before I did. He landed on something sensible: give kids more phone time gradually, but teach them how to use it as you go. Don't just hand them the device and walk away.
Screen time should be a reward, not a default.
I know three students whose parents decided at ages 11 and 12 that their children were too young to have their own devices. That doesn't mean those kids don't use devices at all — it just means they don't own one. One of them earns a month of Minecraft or Roblox every time he gets good grades in an exam. For me, that's exactly the right approach. Screen time as a reward, not a default.
The problem is that young teenagers want to be treated as adults, and some parents respond by giving them adult-level freedom with their phones before the boundaries are anywhere near established. That's when concentration disappears. That's when a teacher asks a student to focus and gets 30 seconds of compliance before the phone is back in their hands.
Governments are starting to move. On the Chinese mainland, there are restrictions on gaming hours for minors. Countries around the world are banning under-16s from TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. Whether those bans hold up is another question, but the direction of travel is clear: unchecked access at a young age is producing kids who cannot sit still long enough to hear their principal give a speech.
One thing I try to teach in English class is writing a postcard. Describing where you are, what it looks like, what you're doing. The last time I wrote one myself was around age 19. Now, we take a video, post it up, send a few emojis, use slang. The skill of describing an experience in words — real words, in sentences — has quietly faded.
"We've lost that ability. Like I was just saying about social skills. We've lost those abilities."
China holds onto calligraphy, which I genuinely admire. Even with apps that let you practice strokes on a screen, you still have to learn the actual movement. That physical connection to writing keeps something alive that purely digital communication doesn't. But Adrian pointed out that even in China, secondary school students are now showing up unable to differentiate basic Chinese characters — because typing has replaced writing to the point where some students simply don't know what certain characters look like anymore.
Adrian's vision of where technology goes next involved wires connecting to the brain, AI floating somewhere in the sky, catching your thoughts and acting on them. My version is simpler: no more phones, no more iPads, just a command code and a screen that appears in the air in front of you.
Neither of us thinks hackers won't find a way in. They hacked computers, then systems, then AI. Whatever comes next, someone will find the loophole.
The future — some pipes, some wires connecting to your brain, and whatever you think of, the AI catches the information and immediately does what you want.
The deeper issue Adrian raised wasn't about technology at all. It was about who controls the information that flows through it. Governments and platforms can amplify a hashtag or bury one. They can shift where people's attention goes and what they believe is true. Social media didn't create that dynamic, but it scaled it in a way that makes the truth genuinely hard to find. As Adrian put it, it all becomes very distorted and grey.
What I keep coming back to is this: the phone itself isn't the problem. The problem is what happens when no one ever teaches a child that there's a time to put it down. A girl who can't stop tapping her fingers even when the phone is gone isn't addicted to a device. She's lost the ability to just be somewhere without it. That's what worries me. And it's why I'll keep taking the phones at the door.
