Smartphones and social media can overwhelm the human limits of a young mind: the ability to focus, to delay gratification, to form identity, form meaningful relationships, and to maintain mental health. We highly recommend that communities delay the introduction and use of smartphones/social media in young people’s lives. Please also remember that you can delete problematic apps altogether.

• The Wait Until 8th pledge is an effective way for parents to stave off smartphone peer pressure by rallying together, classroom by classroom, to delay giving children a smartphone until at least 8th grade.
• Gabb Wireless is a wireless network and phone provider that offers a first phone for kids that includes unlimited talk and text, with a camera, calendar, FM radio and so forth...but no Internet, games, social media, app store, picture messages or group texts.

SAFElab is a research initiative that does great work focused on examining the ways in which youth of color navigate violence on and offline. Drawing on computational and social work approaches to research, they engage in qualitative and natural language processing methods to understand the mechanisms of violence and how to prevent and intervene in violence that occurs in neighborhoods and social media environments. 

SAFElab is working on a variety of different projects to improve wellbeing outcomes for youth of color. You can learn more about and support those specific projects here.

• Common Sense Media—if you’re looking for a better understanding of what your children are doing on their phones, Common Sense Media addresses many concerns in their Parents Need to Know guide. We recommend beginning with their video, Truth about Tech, in which teens talk about how technology design affects them. The site explains and reviews popular apps your children might be using and how to set controls on them.
• Screenagers and LIKE are two documentaries that address parts of this issue. Their websites offer curated resources, including Screenagers’s weekly Tech Talk Tuesday newsletter, in which Dr. Delaney Ruston shares conversation starters from a physician’s perspective about social media, video game use, tech tips, latest research, and more.

If excessive gaming is getting in the way of your or your child’s life, here are some powerful resources:

• Gamequitters—this support system helps people and families struggling with gaming addiction. The site features affordable step by step programs as well as free resources and hundreds of supportive articles, videos and podcast episodes.
• Family Exercise: The Empty Glass—Dr. Michael Rich is a Harvard University pediatrician and the founder of the Center on Media and Child Health. His podcast, Ask the Mediatrician, answers questions about media’s influence on children’s health. He shares this helpful exercise:

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Both academic and social learning is jeopardized by the presence of phones in schools.

• Away for The Day provides parents, teachers, school leaders, and concerned individuals tools so that you can go to your school and help institute policies where phones are put away for the day.

As technology companies know more and more about us with every click and scroll, it is essential that we help the next generation win the race to know themselves. We are big advocates for the SEL movement as a way of arming young people with a fighting chance to have healthy relationships with technology.

• The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) works with experts to support districts, schools, and states on the research, practice, and policy fronts. CASEL is a great place to get started researching different SEL programs in action around America.

Communicating behind a screen seems to obscure our ability to empathize with one another, and has invited new forms of bullying.

• Research shows (Divecha, Brackett, 2019) that the best approach to reducing bullying’s impact includes the adoption of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs, see above.
• The Yale Emotional Intelligence Center helped create this guide with Facebook, containing tools and advice for students and parents dealing with bullying.

As human beings, we are very prone to bias, and social media has poured gas on this fire. We are seeing rising cross-partisan hatred and an “us versus them” attitude that motivates people to accept the worst possible version of the other side’s beliefs, and the most flattering version of their own. These visions are distorted and counterproductive to learning and growth.

• OpenMind Platform provides a set of tools which universities and other organizations can use to depolarize their communities.

Many schools have integrated technology into their systems without understanding persuasive design and before the harms of these products were well-known. Here are some recommendations to re-evaluate.

• Everyschool has developed a useful framework for helping school leaders embrace healthy, research-based educational technology with their Ed/Tech Triangle.
• CHT’s Administrative Recommendations (For in-person school):
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  1. Integrate SEL, Mindfulness, & Communication Skills. These are important new categories in response to the digital world the next generation lives in.
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  2. Check and return phones at the door (with exceptions, i.e. vulnerable populations seeking online community and specific classes that have thoughtfully required them.) Away for The Day has examples of school policies.
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  3. Audit yourselves. Is what you’ve implemented achieving what it was meant to?
  
  4. Pay attention to what we’re losing as we’re gaining. Move slow and test before making sweeping implementations.
  
  5. Approach tech in schools with a skeptical eye. Measure success not just in use, but in human results. Start from the assumption that new tech or ed tech won’t improve the learning experience and work backwards from there.