There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc.

Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.

I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).

The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."

We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.

So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.

No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.

We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.

People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.

We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.