The Power of the Village

Parent peer pressure, a letter on tech norms that schools should send to parents, and what parents can do when they don't have the support of their school.

Sep 12, 2023

Hello Bar-setters!

As parents, you’ve undoubtedly felt the tension between what you think is best for your child and what is normal. This is most apparent in regards to smartphones.

Despite the fact that Bill Gates, Chris Anderson, and nearly every tech insider refuses to give their children smartphones until they are in high school—despite the fact that psychologists like Dr. Jean Twenge and Dr. Haidt recommend the same—despite the overwhelming evidence that early smartphone exposure has lasting mental health effects…

…despite all of this, most parents get their child a smartphone at around age 10.

Many parents try to resist as long as possible but are slowly worn down by a sense of guilt and uncertainty. They wonder if they are hurting their kids more by giving them a phone or by depriving them of the medium that all their friends use to socialize.

What if You Had Support?

Imagine how powerful it would be if a school consistently asked parents to wait until high school to get their kids a smartphone and directed them to get a flip phone or light phone until then—if they set this as the expectation. Imagine if they consistently pointed parents to data that explained this stance and consistently supported them with resources for how to understand and control technology.

At this school, parents wouldn’t have to worry about whether they were depriving their children of the device their friends were on. These parents would be empowered to do what they thought was best.

Most schools do very little to empower parents with critical information and to recommended practices that might help. Likewise, most schools do very little to inform parents about the trajectory of mainstream health norms…

Don’t teach me about health. Create an environment that makes healthy choices the default choices. More than what is taught, this is the greatest superpower a school has: to warn parents about common pitfalls and rally a community towards more fruitful norms.

The largest failure of most schools today is that they don’t recognize their responsibility to shape the norms of their families and their village.

How I Would Do This

If I opened a school, I would send the following to every family:

There has never been a more confusing time to parent. Our job at The Trotter Academy of Awesomeness (or something like that) is to be the developmental experts that you can depend upon to clarify research-based practices and to create a school environment that promotes learning and thriving.

We want to make it easier for you to make informed decisions about what is best for your children and to follow through on what you believe is right. You are free to parent how you wish, but we have a duty to help you make informed decisions. We have a duty to set healthy norms so that you can work with your village rather than against it.

As such, we will maintain a few counter-cultural norms:

Students will not have access to phones or smartwatches throughout the school day. Likewise, our teachers will not be on their phone. We have a telephone line specifically for unexpected pick-ups, emergencies, etc.
We ask that students do not bring soda, Gatorade, Capri-sun, or any beverage other than water. Each student will need a water bottle.
We ask that students pack their own lunches, but that parents do not allow them to pack desserts, chip bags, Pop-Tarts, Lunchables, or other highly processed foods. We recommend fruit, vegetables like baby carrots and snap peas, nuts and seeds, whole-wheat, sourdough, or Ezekiel bread sandwiches, or any of the school lunch from the Harvard School of Public Health linked here.
We ask that students wear comfortable shoes that they can be active in. Please no crocs, slides, flip-flops, or shoes that are not enclosed around the heel.
In addition to limiting their activity in school, we recommend avoiding or limiting the use of these shoes, because persistent use of these shoes will lead to dysfunctional movement.
We ask that students email their teachers for themselves and that they are responsible for keeping track of their own schedule.
The goal of all these policies is to support you by making healthy norms normal in your children’s lives.

In addition to these, we want to help support you and your child in your efforts to create healthy technology habits. This is and will continue to be the challenge of our time. With that in mind, please consider the following suggestions:

We recommend waiting to get your son or daughter a smartphone until at least high school. This is the most powerful thing we can do as a community to help our children thrive. If you want to get your son or daughter a phone before high school, we recommend a Light Phone or a selection from these Safewise recommendations.
By uniting in this effort, we can limit the pressure that students and families feel to give their children smartphones too early.

I’d go on to list more suggestions and I’d send a weekly newsletter with support for other suggestions like keeping screens out of the bedroom.

For more like this, see my resources page.

A Letter to Parents

Erin and Ben Napier have started Osprey Kids based on a similar intuition about the need for community solidarity. They are not educators, but they’re working around the educational system by going directly to parents. Below is a message they recently sent out for other parents to use:

School has begun, so we have a great opportunity to connect with likeminded families to build ‘nests,’ but how do we begin? This week, I logged into our daughter’s school portal and found the parent directory for her class. I emailed them all and we’ve added 3 more friends to her low-tech circle. Below I’m sharing the words I used. Feel free to take whatever is useful, adapt it, or discard what isn’t. I hope it helps you feel confident as you begin laying the foundation of a social life for your kids outside of social media.
Hi!
Our son/daughter, Name, is in grade with your child at School Name, and I wanted to tell you about Osprey (Old School Parents Raising Engaged Youth). Osprey is a grassroots initiative where elementary age kids and their families foster building social lives without social media through high school graduation by building 'nests' of families who band together and make decisions about tech for our kids together, so no one has to say "I'm the only one who is different."
Recent research tells us that kids who grow up with low-tech childhoods are more engaged, better communicators, and have a better sense of self-assurance. Experts in psychology and medicine, all the way up to the surgeon general are telling us about the dangers of social media for teenagers and are encouraging delaying use as long as possible. So what does this have to do with elementary age kids? As psychiatrist Dr. Adriana Stacey, an adolescent screen addictions expert, says: it's a lot easier to prevent an addiction than to cure one. If we band together while they're little, they'll create community in the real world instead of through screens. If you are interested in keeping your kids' childhoods low-tech and old school, ospreykids.com has tons of information and resources.
If you'd like to join our 'nest,' reply to this email and I'll create a group so we can stay in touch and link arms when tech use decisions get harder as our kids get older. Thanks!

“…it's a lot easier to prevent an addiction than to cure one.”

Great point!

Full disclosure, I haven’t yet sent out a letter like this. Should I?

I want to know, do you think this sort of letter is helpful? Do you think an organization like Osprey can be effective? Please feel free to comment or email with critiques of my perspective or theirs. I want to better understand how to help with this “re-norming” issue.

Also, I’ll link some related articles for those that are interested in better understanding the power of environment and the power of community to influence behavior change: