From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens adjusting to the smartphone ban
104 comments
·September 11, 2025trentnix
RyanOD
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.
Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.
Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
softwaredoug
Phones might be as much a symptom as a cause
The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc
And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives
Aurornis
> but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
What fun things ban minors? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t see that around here.
lizknope
When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.
Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
softwaredoug
Malls, movie theaters, arcades all require a parental escort. Not to mention the general problem society has with free-range kids.
So I am empathetic when the kids want Minecraft to be that space since society doesn't give it to them.
soupfordummies
There's also the symptom that almost our entire society is addicted to staring at their phones for at least 4 hours a day. Go literally ANYWHERE and just look at the people around you if you don't think so.
bsghirt
Why is the exact device the problem?
20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
softwaredoug
The counter to phone is dog.
My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
WalterBright
Yesterday I had a meeting with a friend and wound up having to wait 20 minutes for him. Instead of being bored out of my mind, I doom scrolled.
rkomorn
Yeah. As someone who spends way too much time on their phone... I'm pretty sure that I have access to all kinds of alternatives, and that I have the agency necessary to getting off my phone.
I'm pretty sure there's an awful lot more to it.
cjbgkagh
It’s a tight feedback loop, use of phones is a symptom caused by problems caused by use of phones. To break it you have to stop using the phone. This is far simpler and more broadly applicable than figuring out who has dopamine disregulation and putting them on meds.
My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access.
For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect.
I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
duxup
One of the nicest things about the ban (not total ban) at my kids school is no more parent email "Talk to your kids about their phone" type emails.
The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing.
Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting.
Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.
Rebelgecko
Don't have the link handy, but there was a blog post I saw on HN by a teacher who asked students to spend an hour on their phones in class and record the source of notifications. IIRC texts from parents was one of the top sources of disruption.
onionisafruit
Funny to see a school administrator talking positively about a loud lunch room. We used to constantly get reprimanded for being too loud.
foobarian
First you teach them to talk and walk, and then you tell them to shut up and sit down.
- old 90s joke
fkyoureadthedoc
We did too, but not as a rule and not always, just as a preference of whatever petty tyrant was standing in the lunch room that day
mynameisash
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.
estearum
I don't think you can expect schools to stand up to hordes of smartphone-addicted parents demanding no action on this.
State-level regulation provides IMO very necessary cover.
elzbardico
Jesus! those folks need to leave their kids alone! they are at school!
averygarten
hello, i’m usually a lurker on this website, but i decided to make an account and comment since this is somewhat relevant to me.
i’m a senior in high school in one of those states with new laws about cell phones and electronics. i’m not particularly in favor of these new laws since i’m affected by them firsthand, but i can understand why they were implemented.
a few of my habits have had to change because of these new rules: - i now write my to-do lists on sticky notes instead of on my phone. - i write notes in a small a6 size notebook instead of using a notes app. - i now carry a book and my ipod nano to lunch.
because of these new rules, i do spend more time on my school-provided ipad, however. the school blocks a lot of the websites i typically visit. there are bypasses though — i can easily find instances of redlib if i want to scroll reddit, use a “cookie free youtube watcher” and paste a youtube link if i want to watch a video, and github isn’t blocked, but github pages are. most llm websites are blocked (claude, deepseek, mistral, gemini), but chatgpt isn’t for some reason.
if i want to look at a blocked website that isn’t one of those above, i can use startpage.com’s anonymous view.
i think the days feel longer now without my phone.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
It has always been a cat and mouse game. To an extent, some expect the net to not be 100% proof ( though I will admit that the holes you pointed out are a little odd -- buddy is an IT admin at a school so while there is obviously a lot of variation, I would think most are pretty locked down ). Anyway, first rule of bypass is not to mention it:D
spcebar
Nature is healing. Glad to see this. I was in high school when smart phones really became widespread, and was personally still on a flip phone most of the way through. I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection. 24/7 social media seems like a very destructive portal to isolation, and having a reprieve from that, if only a few hours a day, seems like a great thing.
moduspol
Not just socialization and introspection, and not just among kids!
I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here on HN, but the amount of social woes we are currently experiencing that are indirectly the result of a dramatic increase in social media consumption is a lot higher than I think most people expect.
There are just so many aspects of life that one only really gets nudged into doing at least partially out of boredom, despite ultimately fulfilling so much more. When you can stave off boredom instantly and indefinitely, there are all kinds of experiences that will be substituted.
HPsquared
Hundreds of millions of people are totally oblivious and uncaring of their situation and surroundings, so long as they have access to enough digital distraction. It's the new opiate of the masses.
rTX5CMRXIfFG
I would not have learned to play the guitar if I had a smartphone then, or if the internet was any faster than a dial-up. Now I have an outlet to make something beautiful out of my loneliness whenever it strikes.
flir
Internet ruined me for anything long-form. I'm old enough to remember the Before Times, but a lot of people aren't.
rickydroll
I suspect this counts as phone addiction, but I'm reading many books on Kindle with the All You Can Eat Kindle subscription. One thing I've become addicted to is the never-ending series of science fiction stories, for example, such as Backyard Starship, No Stress, Space Express, The Worst Ship in the Fleet, Homeworld Lost, and Frontlines (Martin Kloos, worth paying for). Then there are the numerous series by Alma T. C. Boykin. She's able to spin a story out of everyday life, drawing on history and mythology, while adding enough fantasy to hold my interest.
Some of them are good, while others are cheesy. There are also series I will not admit to having started and given up on when I realized how bad they were. You can thank me later when you realize how much of your life I've just wasted.
mike50
The rapid decline in writing quality caused by CNN and the death of print journalism and the quality book writers that used to come from that space has destroyed long form writing.
ghaff
I used to read books voraciously and, while I do still read books, it's a pretty small number compared to what I used to do. I've been trying to pare my bookshelves of books I'm never realistically going to reread or read.
balfirevic
On the other hand, I would not have learned to play the guitar without the high-speed internet.
JohnFen
> I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe
I recently heard the comedian Jimmy Carr make an excellent comment about how we as a society think of boredom as a negative, when it's actually a positive: "Boredom is just unacknowledged serenity."
naasking
> I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection.
This. People these days talk about boredom like it's the worst thing ever.
MisterTea
Excellent news.
Though what bothers me is all the high schools mentioned are the top prestigious ones you had to apply to, not zoned. Brooklyn Tech, Gramercy Arts, Bronx Science, I'm surprised no comments from Stuyvesant students.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes.
Ha! When I was in NYC high school in the 90s we were not allowed to have playing cards or dominoes. The staff would confiscate them because it was believed to encourage gambling. Quite amusing that now they are the saving a generation of kids from mindless scrolling.
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HPsquared
They still could encourage gambling, but someone somewhere judged it's the lesser of two evils.
InitialLastName
Among other things, lots of those kids are probably using their phones to gamble way more money than they'll ever lose playing poker with their friends.
Playing poker with friends is at worst zero-sum with limited downside; your friends will probably cut you off when you run out of money and the money stays in your little pool. Betting sports against a faceless profit-maximizing corporation is negative-sum and if it turns into a problem for they're happy to raise your minimum and encourage dumber bets.
stronglikedan
Anything could encourage gambling to a person who has a penchant for gambling. Cards and dominoes are no different than anything else that can be bet on, which is pretty much everything.
HPsquared
Yeah indeed, phones have many games of chance also.
pilingual
One interesting aspect of technology is that there is little if any structure.
I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
I'm optimistic that there will be balance in the future. If Thomson is right that smartphones weren't really the beginning of detachment from society but instead it started more around the television era, it requires us to think how to handle all modern technology to optimize overall well being.
astrobe_
Playing cards during breaks, reading a lot, interacting with others, listening to radio a lot, that was the student me when I went no tv, no computer (cause I was already addicted to programming, Internet wasn't yet everywhere) to force myself to socialize more. I hope these kids will have nostalgic memories of that time as well.
teekert
Our school started this year: Heard one kid says: "What am I supposed to do in the breaks!!" OMG. But, the kids are playing games, talking to each other. Learning viral skills for the workplace all while relaxing. Winwinwin.
duxup
There's no good description of the actual ban here?
At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
I'm ok with that.
Some of the more universal bans I don't get, we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road.
Aurornis
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
> At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
All of these articles are so confusing to me because they act like banning smartphones in class is something new. Is this actually new? Were there schools where students weren’t getting in trouble for using phones during class?
The closest thing I’ve seen to an actual ban is a rule that phones must be kept in lockers during the entire school day, including between classes and during lunch. I could see this requiring adjustment for kids.
However I’m baffled by the articles that imply smartphones were not banned from use during class. Was this really ever a thing?
xp84
Most schools don't have lockers anymore.
But in most schools where there aren't really strong bans, what happens is of course you're not supposed to be texting and playing games during class, but the teachers at worst would ask you to put it down. They daren't actually take the phone for myriad reasons:
• Could start a physical altercation
• Parents are going to harangue the teacher about how they "need it" to stay in touch with their kids "for safety" or some long story about some supposed responsibility the kid needs to be reachable for
• Risk of liability (what if another kid steals it while it's in custody)
• End of the day one way or another it'll just be given back, so why waste your effort and risk all of the above for basically nothing.
I think the newer bans may be more about actual school administration support intended to assure teachers and other staff that there will be effective consequences of continual phone abuse, so that it's not pointless to try to enforce no-phone rules.
duxup
My kid's middle school made national news for their ban for several weeks.
Really it wasn't a new thing at all, just enforced appropriately. Teacher sees electronics (of any kind) and it's taken and you pick it up at the office. Multiple violations and parents get to meet with the staff to talk about it (that's the real kicker).
Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement.
Aurornis
> Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement
This is confirming some of my suspicion.
Smartphone ban articles are trending, so journalists feel pressured to write something about it. They all around to schools and learn about their smartphone policy, then write that as a new-ish thing so they can jump on the trend.
null
JumpCrisscross
> we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road
Even if this is all it’s doing, that’s a win.
Most adults haven’t figured out responsible usage. Down the road, their brains will be more developed. And down the road, the average among them won’t need to learn at the rate we need them to now.
duxup
I feel like your description conflicts.
If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference.
I feel like experience builds good choices and total bans are like just putting blinders on.
My oldest had supervised access to a phone / tablet for a while, when he downloads a game now he takes the game to gauge how much it relies on micro-transactions and so on and passes on it immediately if he thinks it is bad. That only comes form experience, and probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money.
JumpCrisscross
> If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference
Adults today can’t manage. That’s a function of the people and context. Adults tomorrow might. Perhaps because we regulate it. Perhaps because they’re exposed to it more carefully.
> probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money
None of this requires he have a smartphone at school.
cooperadymas
> There's no good description of the actual ban here?
The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
Later in the article it summarizes how it is enforced.
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
Johnny555
>The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
That article gives little information that's not in the original one, even clicking through to the article linked in that linked article gives scant details.
Here's the NYC public school district policy:
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/policies/cell-phone-and...
This is what's covered under the ban:
A personal internet-enabled device is any electronic device not issued by a school or NYCPS program that can connect to the internet, allowing the user to access content online. Examples of these personal devices include:
* Communication Devices, such as cell phones, smartphones, and smartwatches.
* Computing Devices, such as laptops, tablets, and iPads.
* Portable music and entertainment systems, such as MP3 players and game consoles.CTOSian
Smart kids then could use retro PDAs like Palm :)
spcebar
They describe the ban in the article. Kids put their phone in pouches at the start of school and get them back at the end of the day. They say they're magnetic, I assume that describes some kind of lock or means to prevent use.
rovr138
Maybe like the magnetic tags they use at stores.
majorchord
Apparently even suggesting that the post title needs a location in it gets you downvoted.
immibis
Unless that location is Israel, in which case it gets dead. (This post has nothing to do with Israel, dear reader who didn't click on it)
softwaredoug
When our kids learned about substance abuse, they talk about teenage brains being in a critical period. If they get addicted to a substance, while their brain is developing, the addiction runs deeper than if they were an adult. It's a much bigger challenge to break free of the addiction.
rickydroll
Somebody should introduce these kids to Meshtastic. The Lily T-Deck series features a built-in keyboard and screen, eliminating the need for a phone. I'm sure someone bright could put a repeater up in a place administrators would never find to cover the entire school.
orionsbelt
Sounds delightful. Now do it for adults.
- an adult phone addict
wmeredith
iPhone dumbphone https://stopa.io/post/297
unglaublich
Lovely news.
Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”
There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.