Super short post today, directed to parents and guardians. Teachers should feel 100% free to pass this URL on.

Social media, texting and playing games can effortlessly eat up a whole night. When that all-night phone trend first popped up, I sometimes wondered if my middle-school students were on drugs. Repeat offenders had ALL the signs except for the smell of smoke: frequent tardiness, red eyes, vacant expressions, difficulty communicating, and an unfortunate tendency to nod off. Sometimes a kid smells like smoke, too, and then it’s anybody’s guess what mix of factors led to the latest nap.

Eduhonesty: They will plead and even beg. They will complain vociferously. They may get so snotty and dramatic you want to hide in a hotel room in a foreign country. Nevertheless, please, pull the night phones. In the parenting game, unplugging those nocturnal distractions is truly one of those hills worth dying on.

I understand that this fight can be exhausting, not to mention tough to monitor. Those little supercomputers are small. However, sleep is essential for learning.

Sleep helps with memory consolidation, brain repair, and the retention of new information. Cognitive function depends on sleep. Lack of sleep compromises focus, concentration, logical reasoning, and complex problem-solving, and especially affects the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which manages complex thinking along with emotions and behavior.

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t even mature until the mid-twenties. Parents and teachers can’t do much about that. We can try to help children learn organization and impulse control, we can teach strategies to help them plan, make decisions, solve problems and focus. While doing this, we will hopefully work a fair amount of math, English, and other academic learning into the picture.

In the meantime, though, as we struggle and too often bog down in the myriad issues interfering with learning in US education today, I’d like to again emphasize today’s message: This is a hill we have to hold.

We can’t control the proliferation of electronics, but we can turn off the lights in boring, dark bedrooms devoid of phones.

Today’s post is only peripherally about education. We all have friends now who are virtually (pun intended) living on their phones. Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap. Adults, children and students message-game-video-photo-latte-social-media-step their way through the day, taking breaks to check weather and even answer actual phone calls.

Addiction: From the Cambridge Dictionary: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.

We associate addiction with old-time drugs, alcohol and gambling, but I will throw phones into the list without a second thought.

That word “influencer” deserves special attention. Humans dream big dreams. We do kids no favor by glossing over visions of would-be global prominence, dreams of millions of followers. While there’s no need to dump gallons of reality over aspiring fashionistas and trendsetters in our classrooms, these hopefuls will often benefit from a detox. Like the high school student who is mostly ignoring academics except for the bare minimum required to play in Friday’s football game, our fashionista needs a reality check, needs to answer a version of that basic “What if the NFL does not work out?” question:

What is your fallback plan?

POSSIBLE 2026 GOAL OR ASPIRATION

Parents: How about a regular, scheduled electronics shutdown? Kids can easily become obsessive about social media numbers, comparing follower totals to those of peers’ and unknowns online. Others simply prefer to play games, text friends, or randomly surf instead of listening to the day’s new math concept. Those reasons are only a few of today’s jagged, electronic icebergs crowding today’s adolescent shipping lanes.

I suggest starting with one day a week — one day of reading, puzzles, watercolors, mosaics, baking, card games, board games, model building, ice skating, hiking or any other creative pursuit that has nothing to do with a phone. And, yes, this is a family concept. We all put our phones down.

If this idea seems impossible or too impractical, I will observe that the very impossibility of putting those phones down supports the need to sometimes shut down the phone pipeline. According to AI, “Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disorder characterized by compulsive substance seeking or behavior, continued use despite harmful consequences, and long-lasting changes in brain function … It manifests as a need for a substance or activity (like gambling, sex, or tech) that interferes with life, causing physical, mental, or social harm.”

Note that word “tech.” Today’s phones are so ubiquitous that they become part of a 24/7 lifestyle, stealing sleep, study time, and focus on nonelectronic, alternative activities. When does a phone become part of a “compulsive behavior that interferes with life and causes harm?” There’s no easy answer to that question.

Eduhonesty: I hope some of my readers whose kids are tap, tap, tapping will try this. One day a week. Or three hours a day. Whatever works for your lifestyle that regularly turns off the phones for a while. Our kids need help. They need the down time they don’t know they don’t have.

For those not following me on Facebook, I thought I’d share this post. I mostly do food and puppy but I’m on a mission this morning:

Eduhonesty: Here’s the bit of science that education has been missing in the last few decades: You can damage or destroy a thing by measuring it. The fact that tests suck up instructional time is obvious. Less obvious is what all those tests are doing to miilions of kids. If you damage all the kids at once, it’s easy to attribute poor academic performance, along with rising depression and anxiety rates, to outside factors such as previous COVID lockdowns, poor nutrition, screen time, and changing family dynamics. We can find so many excuses for the steep dip in childhood mental health that the dip even begins to seem natural.

Have we learned so little in the last few decades? In the recent past, we were even arguing about fluoride in the water. Then we repealed the old nutritional guidelines for schools, as if whole milk might help us. (It might, but that’s another post.) Part of today’s confusion no doubt stems from the multicausal nature of the US academic slide. COVID lockdowns did do real damage, damage spread unevenly across the landscape. Districts that had 1:1 computing set up before 2020 made the transition to remote learning much more easily than less-fortunate, cash-strapped districts scrambling to buy backordered laptops. School funding, school staffing levels, available childcare and mental health care almost always favor the financially fortunate.

Eduhonesty: So many small details, so easy to get lost… It’s no wonder we get stuck falling down into rabbit holes. Them we stare up toward the small pocket of light above us wondering what went wrong. Testing is on our list of possibly problematic activities, but it gets lost in the noise of federal policy shifts, overall academic learning loss, falling literacy, rising innumeracy, critical staffing shortages, funding inequities, etc.

In my view, annual levels of state standardized testing represent nothing short of unethical human experimentation. Standardized testing wallops kids year after year now, while the emphasis put on scores makes poor and even average performers repeatedly feel like losers and failures. We are losing instructional weeks and even months to testing when test prep is thrown into the larger testing picture. Kids can easily see how much adults now appear to care about these test results. They can also easily see when they have placed in the middle or lower groups within their grade.

How is this not unethical human experimentation? No one is asking those kids’ permission. For the most part, no one is asking their parents permission, either. In some states, parents are supposedly not “allowed” to let their children opt out of testing. Barriers have been put up to stop parents from removing students from standardized testing pools all over the country.

Yes, I took those tests as a kid in the sixties and seventies, but only for a few days in the spring. I wasn’t also taking multiple benchmark and practice standardized tests, and adults around me were not making a huge to-do out of that spring test. In “Stranger Things” terms, that test used to be a demigorgon flower, not a mindflayer.

Those numbers add up to one in five adolescents with diagnosed mental health issues. How many adolescents remain undiagnosed? How many are just toughing out their days until someone sees the cuts under their sleeves? How many are not receiving any mental health care because their cuts are still invisible, their facades still intact?

As control of state education returns to the states, I hope at least some U.S. states will attempt to answer my questions. Educational leaders have become enamored of numbers, often too many numbers that are being spewed out at too fast a rate to process. Those leaders need to remember the numbers in question are not just rolling mindlessly off some A.I. tongue. They are being provided by children, including the more than five million children referred to in the government’s own health brief.