What The Atlantic Didn’t Say About How to Get Teens Off Their Phones

Why schools play a critical role in preparing kids for real-world challenges

By: Karyn Ewart | Head of School & Founder

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A recent article in the Atlantic, What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones, shared that today’s children crave unstructured free time outside. Most parents don’t allow their child to go outside unsupervised….period. Not even with a friend across the street or in their own yard. 

As parents, we mistakenly think that if we leave our child unsupervised on their iPad, phone, or computer, they’re safe, but don’t trust them to play outside on their own. 

The rub is that parents drastically overestimate the risk to their children when they’re outside unsupervised and don’t understand the benefits. Our children need opportunities to demonstrate competence, independence, and problem-solving skills. Unsupervised free play also improves mental health. 

The Atlantic article pointed out that today’s parents spend more time supervising their kids than they did in the 1960s. Parents have come to believe that structured activities are the key to success. Think soccer, ballet classes, martial arts, chorus, and girl scouts. 

However, what ends up happening is that our children are over-scheduled and micromanaged. We need to step back and let our children play, explore, and develop a sense of competence and independence. As our children’s sense of independence has lessened, anxiety and depression have spiked.

It’s bad for parents too. Intensive parenting is also stressing parents out. What’s happened is that parents are using technology to fill in the supervision gaps versus letting their kids go outside and/or do activities on their own in the community. 

The Atlantic article stated, ”Kids being raised on screens long for real freedom”. 

Fortunately, many communities are realizing this trend and taking steps to correct the oversight. They are creating opportunities for children to have unsupervised and unstructured play time – at parks, libraries, and community centers. It allows children to explore, navigate friendships, have conflicts, and get bored. These are all essential experiences to have in order to develop social skills, independence, and resilience. 

Right now, we’re doing too much for our children and we seem to be parenting from a place of fear. Fear that our children will miss out on opportunities, get hurt, or not excel. 

The irony is that if we don’t give our kids opportunities to explore, make mistakes, and fail, they never learn how to navigate both the positives and negatives of being independent – from problem solving and making decisions to managing adverse situations and emotions. What we teach them is learned helplessness. How many times has your child asked you how to do something versus just doing it themselves? They’re afraid to make a mistake. 

These concepts also hold true at school. Right now, most mainstream schools are very prescriptive. The ideal student is compliant: they follow directions, do as they are told, and don’t question authority. They successfully jump through all the hoops (e.g., achieve strong grades, take the right classes, assume leadership roles, and excel in extracurriculars), being promised that if they do so, they’ll get into the “best college”, which seems to be the golden ticket. 

However, we now have a generation of young adults who struggle to make their own decisions and successfully navigate adulthood. They are anxious, stressed, and afraid. They don’t know how to navigate mistakes or even failure and have difficulty thinking for themselves. They are lost, afraid, and unhappy. 

At The Sycamore School, our goal is to cultivate independent learners, thinkers, and doers. We aren’t college prep – we’re life prep. We focus on teaching our students how to think for themselves to solve problems that may not yet exist. Some of the skills we explicitly teach include effective communication, perspective taking, teamwork, critical thinking, time management, and resilience.

 

Instead of giving our students grades or tests, we give them feedback and students need to keep working on a paper, project, or speech until it meets the requirements. This is a life skill. However, some parents…and even students, are afraid. Will I get into a good college if I don’t have a GPA? What happens if I don’t take AP classes? 

Through our mastery transcript, we showcase our students’ strengths and skills. All colleges accept our transcript and several prefer it, saying that they love the snapshot they receive of our learners. Our students are accepted into the colleges of their choice and go to college equipped with the skills they need to be successful. Also…some of our students DON’T go directly to a four year college. Some choose to take a gap year. Others go into academies, apprenticeship programs, community colleges, or directly into the workforce. 

There is no one path to success and it’s almost never a straight line. We are shaped more by our struggles than our successes and our students learn how to be resilient and lean into challenges. My goal for our students is not to have 100% college acceptance but to have 100% college completion. Meaning, that if our students enter college, that they are ready for it and have the skills to complete it. If they aren’t ready for it, that’s okay. We can build out a plan to get there, if that’s what they want. 

We want each of our students to figure out what is the best next step after high school for them. We want them to find their path to adulthood and independence, knowing that they are lifelong learners. 

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