Submitted by Heather Thacore
Tuesday and Wednesday night BEST offered a viewing of the Screenagers documentary at the JGMS auditorium. The first viewing on Tuesday was the full-length version for parents only and the second viewing on Wednesday was the shorter classroom version for kids and parents alike. If you are not familiar with the movie it shows a mother (who happens to also be a pediatrician) and her story as she struggles with the best approach to allowing her children, the use of personal smart technology. The movie follows her as she researches school bans in NYC to forming smartphone contracts and how these efforts did and didn’t work. There is a lot of time spent in the schools talking with kids about how they use, rely on and are dependent on their smartphones.
For all of us in our 30s and 40s, this phenomenon is brand new. Even for Mrs. Smith the Lane School guidance counselor who attended last night, this trend didn’t take hold for her kids until they were in college. So, it is US, now who are feeling the effects of this smartphone addiction. OUR kids are the guinea pigs for this social experiment. The movie did not leave you with any clear answers. But what it did was open the eyes of all the parents and kids that were in attendance. I’m guessing it will prompt a great deal of dinner time discussions over the coming week.
During the film they highlighted
- A focus on violent video games and these “other worlds” that can fully enrapture a young mind. It was noted that while the use of these games is not the only influence on violent episodes, these games do have the impact of reducing a child’s sense of empathy and sense of their place in the world around them. The same almost realistic feeling a child gets in these other worlds can start to reduce their real-life experience to almost realistic and the lines between virtual and real get blurred, inhibiting the natural sense of empathy that one develops as they grow and mature.
- A girl’s perception of herself and how everything that gets put out there must be “liked” or taken down. Their entire self-worth is based upon acquaintances clicking their approval. At young ages, they are fixated on touching up their photos to make them look like this imagined image of what they should be again inhibiting their true sense of self.
- One of the most surprising aspects was a child’s use of smartphones to escape awkward or difficult situations. Being at lunch and escaping into their phones instead of having to find a way to develop their communication skills or build stronger relationships. The kids are learning avoidance instead of engagement and when presented with a hard situation they can just avert it. These are not life skills that will serve them well as an adult.
After each viewing, there was a discussion amongst Bedford residents that occurred. There was a lot of questions posed and excellent insights offered by the middle school and Lane school kids in attendance. The transition from 5th grade to 6th grade sees an enormous spike in use of both smartphones and dumb phones (without data). The middle school kids in attendance confirmed the JGMS rules about no phones in the classrooms which was a relief to many parents at the viewing as there were schools shown in the film where that is not the rule and the class distractions were unrelenting. It’s hard enough to get through as a teacher to kids at the middle and high school levels, imagine if they are checking their phones constantly and thus checking out of class.
There were many researchers, scientists, psychologists, and doctors interviewed for this film and one of the interesting points was that unlike doodling back in our day where you can hear what is happening around you and the doodling may be helping you process the information, cell phones completely take you out of the experience. It is nearly impossible to text while you carry on a conversation with someone directly in front of you without it being paused, broken and illiterate. Similarly, kids can’t take in the class information when their cell phones are around, and they are checking texts, or playing games or on snap chat.
JGMS has its share of smartphone challenges where clusters of kids may end up in the bathroom during class time, snap chatting away…kids will be kids after all. But JGMS is putting in effort on their end to minimize their access during learning time.
The biggest take away was the desire as a community to talk about these issues. There are so many aspects of our lives that are now impacted positively and negatively) by smartphones. How do we peel this onion and deal with each layer? It’s overwhelming! One group that presented themselves was an organization that spoke about responding to this need called the Bedford Promise. The founding principal of the Bedford Promise (www.bedfordpromise.org) is a pledge to not give your child a smartphone until at least 8th grade. But the other integral aspect of this group is to provide opportunities for education and community discussion about these issues like what occurred briefly after each screening the past 2 nights.
There was some discussion about trying to host these Screenagers screenings every couple of years to provide access for each new class of students and parents since there is no other way to view this documentary other than at a hosted screening.
SO, look for invitations from Bedford Promise to continue to peel this onion with community conversations and for future Screenagers viewings in Bedford and surrounding towns.
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