Late-night host Bill Maher and his guest demanded schools bring back a ban. The group argued that somewhere along the way schools stopped enforcing the ‘no phones’ rule on school grounds. While discussing how to protect kids from the influences of media one guest suggested that phones have to go.
“What we need to do as a starting move – this is something we all can do – is get the phones and social media the hell out of middle school,” NYU professor Jonathan Haidt said. “Let’s just protect the middle school, OK?”
Haidt noted the powerful addiction kids have to their phones and compared it to heroin stating that the kids feel like they need to ‘shoot up’ to get through the day.
“Talk to the principal … and say, ‘Can you help us?’” Haidt said, saying he was told teachers and administrators hated the presence of phones in class.
Guest CNN host Laura Coates previously stated that she does not allow her kids to even own a phone.
“Don’t your kids complain to you that the other kids have this and we don’t?” Maher asked.
“For me, no,” Coates responded, laughing, adding that she tells her kids that the prohibition can be “added to the bill for their therapy in 20 years.”
Until recent years schools would confiscate phones found on school grounds. Sometimes keeping the device until a parent came to retrieve it or even until the end of the school year. At some point, most schools relaxed the ‘no phones’ policy and it’s done a terrible disservice to kids who are heavily influenced and susceptible to social media madness.
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A National Institute of Health (NIH) study released in 2018 discovered that 9 and 10-year-old children who started at smartphone screens for more than two hours a day had a thinning of the cortex and scored lower when tested on language and thinking.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson called on Congress to raise the age to use smartphones like the Apple iPhone to 18 in 2019, saying that taking an iPhone from a teenager was a way to discover “what addiction means.”
