The child you cannot reach

One · What happened

New rules, arriving with the new school year

New Jersey’s governor signed a law on 8 January that requires every district to adopt a policy limiting internet-enabled devices during the school day, and the deadline is this school year. Michigan’s governor signed 2 bills on 10 February banning phones in class, also starting this year, and Illinois signed a bell-to-bell law on 28 July that kicks in the year after. Whatever your district decided, a lot of families are working out new rules at home this weekend.

Opinion has moved faster here than on almost anything else in American life. On 29 July Pew released a survey of close to 10,000 adults, taken at the end of May, and support for banning phones during class is now 77%, up from 74% last year and 68% the year before that. An all-day ban gets 48% for and 43% against. That’s the first time the supporters have outnumbered the opponents.

The crosstabs are unusual. 81% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats back the in-class ban, so this is one of the last few things the country substantially agrees on. The heat around it is coming from somewhere other than politics.

The kids disagree, and they say so. Pew asked teenagers the same questions and reported the results in January. 41% supported a ban during class and 51% opposed it, and on an all-day ban the split was 17% for and 73% against.

The argument at home, though, has very little to do with test scores. When the National Parents Union surveyed just over 1,500 parents of public-school children and asked why their child should be able to have a phone at school, one answer came back far ahead of the rest.

Two · What it is doing

The tether, and what it carries

Nobody brings this part up at the school board meeting. Federal education statistics show that 96% of public schools had drilled their students on a lockdown procedure. Your child has practiced hiding, and you know they have, and they know you know. Why that’s the world your child goes to school in gets argued about at length everywhere else, and you already know where you stand on it.

A phone in a pocket or a locker can tell you sooner. It doesn’t stop anything, and the feeling attached to that phone is so much larger than what the phone can actually do.

What the phone is really carrying is a need to know, continuously, that your child is all right, and that need renews. The reply that settled you an hour ago has already worn off, because it only ever told you about an hour ago, so you check again, and you get a little less out of each one. Knowing the school’s actual plan is a real safeguard, and it doesn’t wear off every hour.

The kids feel it too. A study that read the actual phones of about 200 young people found that more than half of them were getting 237 notifications or more a day, roughly a quarter of those during school hours, and that the median kid spent 43 minutes on the phone inside the school day. Some of that traffic is their friends, and a fair amount of it, if we’re honest, is the parents.

When RAND surveyed principals about their phone policies, 1 in 5 reported that parental concern about emergency access had gone up, and 1 in 10 reported increased anxiety among the students about being able to contact their parents. Among young people who opposed the bans outright, 81% gave parent access as a reason.

The kids have picked up our worry and started carrying it themselves. We told them, without ever saying it in words, that being out of contact for 4 hours is a dangerous condition, and they believed us, because children believe their parents about what is dangerous, and they will go on believing it long after the phone policy is forgotten.

Then there’s what it does to a bad day. A child who can reach a parent during any bad 10 minutes never has a bad 10 minutes alone. The friend who was vicious at lunch, the test that went badly, those used to get carried around alone for the 3 hours until pickup, and that was unpleasant, and it was also where a person found out what they could stand. Now it routes to you in real time and you answer, because of course you answer. Nobody chose this, and an entire generation is getting very little practice at surviving an afternoon without hearing a parent’s voice, and that is a skill they are going to need.

Three · Where the ground is

You were never the one keeping the city

You can work on your child’s safety. You cannot have continuous knowledge of it, and you never could, and most of the checking comes from confusing the two.

The safety part is mostly administrative. Know your school’s emergency procedure, where they take the children, how you would be notified, and which number actually reaches a human being on a bad morning. Most parents who check a phone 11 times a day have never read that document.

The continuous knowledge has never existed, for you or your mother or anybody before 2007. Parents dropped their kids at a school building and didn’t hear a word for 6 hours, and that was just the ordinary condition of loving someone you can’t follow around. The danger has changed less than people think. A device now sells you the feeling of continuous knowledge, and you pay for it out of your attention and your child’s.

The exhausted watchman and the heritage are in the same psalm

Psalm 127 opens with a line most people have heard. Unless the LORD builds the house, they labour in vain; unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It goes on to say that rising early and sitting up late, eating the bread of anxious toil, is futility.

Four verses later, in the same short psalm, comes the line people put on baby shower cards. Children are a heritage from the LORD.

Hardly anybody reads those 2 lines together. Solomon put the sleepless watchman and the gift of children 4 verses apart, and the argument between them is pretty much the entire content of a parent lying awake at 2 in the morning. The psalm leaves the watchman on the wall, because watching is his job. It just tells him that his staying awake was never what held the city, and then right away it calls his children something given to him.

A heritage is something entrusted to you. You didn’t make this child and you can’t guarantee this child, and both of those are just as true on an ordinary school morning as they are at night. The anxious toil the psalm is talking about is the attempt to be the guarantor, and that is a job that was never open to you and that you wouldn’t survive holding anyway.

The most sympathetic idol there is

People save the word idol for money and status, and that makes this one easy to miss. The thing you can’t bear to lose is the thing you have made ultimate, and for most parents that is a person about 4 feet tall who forgets their lunch. Nobody is ever going to rebuke you for it, every culture on earth applauds it, and so it is hard to see in yourself.

You can’t love your child too much. The uncomfortable question is whether your peace has come to rest on their safety, and if it has, you’re going to live at the mercy of every notification for the next decade and a half, because that’s what it costs to build your peace on something that can be taken from you.

The alternative is putting them in God’s hands, and if you’re honest about the 29 hours a week you can’t see them, that’s where they’ve been anyway. Handing them over changes nothing about their situation and a good deal about yours.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

The checking is a real need pointed at the only instrument within reach. So give the need somewhere better to go this week, before school starts back, and let the calm show up on its own schedule.

1. 01

   Read the school’s emergency plan.

   Today. It’s on the district website or it’s one email away. Find out where they take the children, how parents get notified, where the reunification point is, and what number reaches an actual person.

2. 02

   Tell your child the plan once, calmly, and then stop.

   The plan, without the fear attached to it. This is what happens and this is how we find each other. Children are steadied by a parent who has obviously thought it through, so say it once this week and then don’t bring it up again.

3. 03

   Pick the number before school starts.

   Decide now, before the first day of school, how many times you’ll contact them during school hours in a normal week, and make it lower than last year’s. A number you picked in advance will hold better than one you argue with yourself about every morning.

4. 04

   Change the first question at pickup.

   “Did anything happen today?” teaches a child to spend the whole day scanning for something to report. Ask who they sat with at lunch. You’ll learn more that way, and you’ll stop recruiting them into the surveillance.

5. 05

   Give them back to God by name, once a day.

   In words, in the car, using the child’s actual name. This one is yours, and I cannot keep him. The first week it’s going to feel like you’re losing something, and you might as well know that going in. Every parent I know who has any real peace about this got it this way, and I have looked.