Before I dive into this week’s blog, I wanted to take a moment to ask a favor of you. If you’ve been enjoying The Screenagers Podcast, it would mean so much to me if you’d tell just one person about the show. We want to reach as many people as possible, and your sharing would make such a difference. Thank you so much!

Just yesterday, we released the episode titled “How Smartwatches Are Subverting School No-Phone Policies.” 

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Many of you are aware of the campaign we started in 2017 called Away For The Day — all about giving resources to parents, teachers, community leaders, and concerned individuals to help create schools where phones are put away. It's been wonderful watching schools successfully reduce distractions in their classrooms.

While the focus has been on decreasing the presence of phones during school for many years, things have started to change…

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The rise of smartwatches in schools

We are talking about the Gizmo watch, the Apple watch, the Troomi watch, the Gabb watch, and many others. Research and anecdotes from educators suggest that smartwatch adoption among kids is growing fast, similar to how we saw with smartphones a decade ago. 

The watches allow a range of applications, from texting and location tracking to gaming, YouTube, and more. As you can imagine, this has led to a host of issues in schools. 

For a while now, Lisa, my co-filmmaker, and I have been visiting elementary school classes and asking students to raise their hands if they're wearing a smartwatch. On average, about 50% of them do.

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This has become such a big issue that our most recent documentary, Screenagers: Elementary School Edition, tackles it. In the film, Jonathan Haidt, PhD, and fantastic teachers speak about the issue. 

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You won’t be surprised that the solution offered in the film is to have schools adopt Away For The Day policies that include smartwatches. Off wrists and securely put away for the whole school day

But how does a school do this? 

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For my recent podcast epiosde on this subject, I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with the school counselor Tammy Fisher, PhD, to discuss this issue. Her school had been really struggling with smartwatches last year. 

Here is Tammy explaining one teacher’s experience:  

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“ I remember last year, I had this hilarious time where my fifth-grade teacher had like seven watches on her wrist. I walked by her classroom one time, and I'm like, what do you got on there, Christy? She's like, well, it's been one of those days, Tammy.”

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This year, in response to these challenges, Dr. Fisher’s school implemented Away For The Day, not just for phones but also smartwatches. And it is going really well! 

One thing Tammy talks about is how the school enforces the rules in a way that builds resilience in their students. She shares an example of this when she tells the story of encountering a young girl in class who, in the middle of a lesson, started texting her father from her watch. 

When Tammy took the watch away, the student was understandably upset – it was her father, after all! 

But Tammy says the real power of Away For The Day is helping students like this work through these difficult emotions. 

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“The first thing I think is like, you can handle this. Right? Really helping our kids understand that you can handle boundaries. It can make you uncomfortable, but our job as adults who work with kids, parents, and adults is to get our kids comfortable with being uncomfortable. I knew I wouldn't do her any favors if I just said, Okay, just finish this message and don't do it again. Because then that message is she can't handle it. And I wanted her to understand, you survived this! It was uncomfortable, but now you know how the rules work. There's no penalty. You're not going to the principal's office. It's just simply, it's sitting over here. You can get it at the end of the day.”

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What a powerful and empowering lesson that is! All while helping remove distractions from the classroom. 

The whole episode is filled with pieces of wisdom, clear guidance, and a lot of Dr. Fisher’s wonderful humor and insight. I can’t wait for you to listen.

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Questions to get the conversation started with your group or family:

1. How often do you see students on smartwatches?
2. What about non smartwatches? Given how hard it is to know which are connected to the internet vs. not, might it make sense to have all watches off-limits?
3. How important do you think it is for parents and children to be able to communicate with each other during school hours? What other solutions besides phones and smartwatches can you come up with?  

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This week on YouTube

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