Teens and Daily Phone Use

A couple of months ago I was back in the classroom for a week, teaching a course to college students which had us together for over eight hours a day. Upon returning home, a notification told me that over the course of the prior week, I had used my phone for a significantly less amount of time than usual. Knowing just how tethered I can be to my phone, I counted that notification as a win! All of us risk becoming too dependent on and attached to our phones. Recent research from Common Sense Media found that our teens appear to be increasingly distracted by their phones. Their study of kids ages eleven to seventeen found that kids aged thirteen and older picked up their phone, on average, over one hundred times a day. More than half of the study’s participants received at least two hundred and thirty seven notifications a day, with twenty three percent of those coming during school hours. We need to help our kids shut down in order to, as the apostle Paul says, Make the most of your time.