Secondary school teacher Telmo Lazkano managed to get 19 of the 23 students he taught at a San Sebastián institute to give him their mobile phones for a week. He kept the phones under lock and key in the center’s office and asked his students, aged 15 and 16, to write a small diary during those days. The results were amazing. The project, dubbed the No Phone Challenge, confirmed much of the disturbing information that Lazkano, an English and Social Sciences professor, had pondered for years about the consequences of compulsive cell phone use. The initiative is now expanding to other educational centers in order to promote a more conscious use of mobile phones, while its promoter is preparing a book on adolescent mental health.
Where does your concern about the influence of screens on children and adolescents come from?
He spent several years reading a good part of the literature that is published in relation to this issue and the data that the different investigations produced seemed alarming to me. At the same time, as a high school teacher, he had in front of me that reality that research shows.
And he decided to act.
I started by asking my 4th ESO students how many hours a day they spend in front of their mobile phone screens. They taught it to me directly, and the average was between five and six hours a day. In some cases, on weekends they reached seven or eight hours a day. Also, we broached the issue and it became apparent that they didn’t know anything about how social media works.
In what sense?
When we have to pay for something, for some shoes or for a bicycle, we tend to mistrust and we value whether the price is in line with the product, if the material is good or if the origin is ethical. When something is free, on the other hand, that distrust disappears. It should be the other way around. We should ask ourselves why multi-billion dollar corporations invest so much money in apps like these and offer them to us for free. It is evident that the product is us, and that reflection did not exist among the students.
Based on this reflection, he invites them to participate in the experiment…
Actually, at first they did not know that they were going to participate in this project. We started by watching the documentary The Dilemma of Social Networks. I posed some questions and a discussion ensued. They became the protagonists of their learning and realized that it was something that went beyond academics. Their motivation around such a daily issue for them was very great, and we managed, in this first part, to generate knowledge. Later, in a second phase, we continue to address the issue, reflecting on topics such as beauty filters or the aspirational perspective of networks. We got that knowledge to be taken to a critical perspective. Finally, we come to the third phase.
He got twenty 15 and 16-year-olds to give him their cell phones…
If I came to consider it without that previous job, they would not have agreed. Of a total of 23 students, 19 decided to participate and leave their phones. He was totally voluntary. We locked up the cell phones at the address and began to write a diary.
What did they write down? What were the consequences?
During the first three days, exactly what the studies said happened: a very clear picture of dependency. They lived with nervousness, they could not sleep, they ate more than normal, they suffered from intrusive thoughts, they did not know how to deal with boredom, they got angry easily… They were left on a Thursday and it caught our attention that from the fourth day, after the weekend , a turning point occurred. They began to express that they felt happier and, above all, much freer. That they had removed a stone from above. They said that they went outside as if it were something exciting and that they could dedicate those five hours to healthy habits like reading, visiting grandma, going to the mountains or watching a sunset without recording it.
Did they count the days to recover the mobiles?
One day before the challenge ended, some students told me that they did not want to take it back or that they were afraid of falling into the same dynamics. The day came to recover them and there was everything. Some wanted to see how many comments they had and others not so much. The goal was to make them more aware of their relationship with mobile phones and networks, and to establish healthier habits from there. In addition, when we returned to the subject after a few months, some students showed that they had halved their daily consumption.
How is the compulsive use of mobile phones and networks affecting minors?
Companies are fighting for our attention in what is called the attention economy. They fight to keep us in front of the screen to get as much information as possible and then sell it. As our time is finite and there is great competition, they implement different strategies to keep us in front of the screen. And the consequences of these techniques are those that later affect their self-esteem, their mental health or their attention span. I would highlight two types of consequences in minors. In the first place, there are those derived from mere premature and uncontrolled consumption.
Which are?
Adolescents are accessing content that directly goes against the values ​​that they want to instill in their families and through the educational system. At a time when they are creating their identity, building their self-esteem and in which they should strengthen some values, they are finding an alternative that confronts those values ​​that we want to transmit to them. An artificial brain, the digital sphere, is bringing them closer to a series of macho values ​​or the trivialization of violence that they would not know otherwise. In parallel, there is a certain risk of reproducing them. Self-esteem in adolescents goes through social acceptance, and that acceptance is today marked, measured and exposed through social networks, through likes. Young people see that certain attitudes have a greater reward, and they reproduce them.
Secondly, there are the consequences derived from what is stopped being done because of being in the networks.
Young people are putting aside other activities that would help them consolidate positive mental health, a strong self-identity and strong self-esteem. We are talking about free play, without supervision, which leads to empathy, cooperation or coordination. We are talking about physical activity, since if we spend five hours a day with our mobile we barely have time to practice it. They are also stopping reading, relating to nature and, most worryingly, having a human relationship with people. They are stopping facing situations that lead to learning what frustration, suffering or discipline is, not only due to the influence of the networks, but also due to family education, the educational system or due to the trends in society themselves.
And mental health problems are multiplying…
Since the use of social networks became widespread, starting in 2009, cases of self-harm among youth ages 10 to 14 have increased 189% in the United States and suicides 151% (data from the Center of Disease Control and Prevention ). In Gipuzkoa, in the service where I currently work, educational home care, in 2009 between 20% and 30% of the young people we attended received this service for mental health problems, before the pandemic they were already the 62.5% and today they are 70%. There is a very close correlation, but the causation of these data is much more complex and multifactorial. We raise our little ones in an emotional bubble where nothing bad happens. We protect and control them, so they won’t know how to deal with frustration, discipline and limits. On reaching adolescence, however, they collide with a reality that has become more complicated as a result of the networks and everything they generate.
Has this stage become more conflictive?
That is. A time like adolescence that is already complicated has become more difficult and, in addition, we have much more fragile people dealing with those problems. All this accompanied by a very great feeling of loneliness favored, among other things, by the compulsive use of social networks, which become asocial networks. We also see a clear lack of motivation, there is a very clear amotivational syndrome.
Added to this is the problem of attention-level difficulties mentioned by all the teachers.
Teenagers are training their brains to a very short stimulus, such as TikTok videos. The gratification is immediate. And that training occurs on a daily basis, for many hours a day. The consequence is that when we subject the brain to a stimulus that needs more attention to obtain a gratification, be it an exam, a class or even a movie, it does not respond.
Is it possible for teenagers to have a healthy relationship with mobile phones?
First of all, I want to make it clear that I am not against the use of mobile phones, but I believe that we must encourage conscious and responsible use. In any case, if we talk about age, I think that before the age of 16 it is difficult to have a healthy relationship with the mobile without training. Considering neurobiological issues, we know that the stage of development of the limbic system of the nervous system, an almost fully developed cerebral accumbens and a developing amygdala and prefrontal cortex make adolescents much more impulsive and much more prone to to the immediate gratification that networks provide. Also to seek social acceptance. Also, the chances of malpractice are much higher because they are not experienced enough. They are not so capable of measuring the consequences, legal or emotional, of sending a certain photo or of doing cyberbullying. On the other hand, the ability to manage as a victim of this harassment is much more limited than in the case of an adult, with the risks involved in this stage of building self-esteem, identity and values.
And what is the solution?
Educate. The best measure to curb the harmful effects of cell phones is adequate training, gradual contact, accompanying them in the process, and an age appropriate to the tool they are going to use, waiting at least until the legal age. In the case of many applications, legally we should wait until the age of 14 to use them, but the experts do not allow their children to use mobile phones until they are 16 years old. When I talk about the experts, I mean the managers of the big technology companies, the same ones who take their children to study at the Waldorf School of Peninsula, a private school in Silicon Valley where they don’t touch the screens until high school and where, precisely , encourage contact with nature.
Why do families give in before that age?
In the talks around social networks, families usually mention two types of factors. On the one hand, there is a great fear that we will not be able to call them if something happens to them. They seek that security. On the other, there is that reading of ‘let’s see if my little one is going to be the only one who does not have a mobile’. So it is vital that we do not wage war on our own. There will be a thousand things that differentiate us, but the well-being of adolescents unites us. We have a lot to gain if families get together, hand in hand with institutions and schools, and manage to delay the age a bit to get closer not to what the experts say, but to what they do.
In his opinion, therefore, the responsibility is essentially that of fathers and mothers.
As I said, in many applications the minimum legal age is 14 years. If a minor is using it at the age of 10, we are facing an illegal action and the first responsible are the parents. Secondly, they are legally responsible for everything that happens with that mobile phone, be it cyberbullying, sextortion or any other issue. Furthermore, beyond the legal level, we have a moral responsibility. If we are giving such a powerful tool to a child, what less than trying to make it use it healthily, something that, as I said, is very complicated with less than 16 years of age. Just as we do not give a car to a minor, we cannot give them a mobile phone without setting clear parameters for them to have a healthy relationship.
And the institutions? Shouldn’t they limit the field to big technology?
Someone may think that in the case of vehicles, for example, we do not blame the manufacturing companies for accidents, but we do ask them for safer cars. The problem with technology companies is that they have market reasons for not giving up on this desire to keep us glued to the networks, and there they do have responsibility. When someone lowers the piston a bit, the competition goes up another gear. Instagram removes the option to display ‘likes’ and TikTok inflates it, attracting the entire mass of teenagers. That is where the institutions come in, which have their hands very tight.
Because?
The criterion today is that users are responsible for the content of the platforms, who wash their hands of it. In any case, steps are being taken. Utah is going to impose a digital curfew that will prevent minors from accessing the networks between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. unless an adult allows them to. Here in Europe, the European Commission is evaluating the implementation of a ‘digital ID’ to limit access to social networks or pornography for minors, an area, by the way, in which the starting age has been lowered. Everything remains to be done, but there are movements to narrow the field for big technology companies.
And what about the adults? Are we setting an example?
Indeed, to understand the excessive use of mobile phones, one must also look at a factor beyond the addictive design of these social networks. Sometimes they are not the cause, but the consequence. What example do we adults set? What are you looking for there that you don’t have in reality? Do you know how to deal with your emotions or do you need your mobile to anesthetize them? Does the same thing happen to me?
