Take Away Their Cellphones

Increase in Entertainment Screen Use Accelerated During the Pandemic (Figure 2) At Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., students learn to use body language and positive nonverbal cues called “Habits of Attention” to support one another. The media was suddenly full of stories of discipline problems, chronic disruptions due to student distractibility, lack of interest, and misbehavior in the classroom, and historic levels of student absences. What has happened to our students isn’t just the impact of a protracted, once-in-a-generation adverse event, but the combined effects of several large-scale, ground-shifting trends that predate the pandemic and have reshaped the fabric of young people’s lives. [...]the data also show spikes in teenagers’ mental-health problems during the pandemic, when just 47 percent of students reported feeling connected to the adults and peers in their schools.