Taking Back our Schools—and Childhood

YULA’s new policy, launched this past September, is simple: no devices on campus. Every student has a designated phone slot at the school entranceway. Photos courtesy of YULA, except where indicated otherwise.

How Day Schools are Doubling Down on Student Cell Phone Use

“Would you let your twelve-year-old participate in a party with forty people after midnight with no adult supervision? That’s what a WhatsApp chat is,” says Rabbi Yoni Fein, head of school at Brauser Maimonides Academy (BMA) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

BMA, which educates students from nursery through eighth grade, is but one of a growing number of  Modern Orthodox schools, across the country—from Hebrew Academy of Long Beach (HALB) on Long Island to Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles (YULA) on the West Coast—that are banning smartphones from schools or imposing restrictions like checking them into lockers or Yondr pouches (a device originally devised to lock a phone to prevent concert goers from filming concerts). “Smartphone use was once considered a religious issue,” says Rabbi Fein. “We didn’t want our children to be exposed to immorality and unholy things. Today, we are seeing the effects of smartphones on brain function and mental health in children globally.” 

When smartphones first appeared, conversation among parents and educators was all about avoiding exposure to inappropriate sites and getting the right filters. “Today, we are focused on human relationships, productivity, resilience and grit,” says Dr. Eli Shapiro, EdD, LCSW, founder of the Digital Citizenship Project, a school-based program to train parents and teachers to minimize the dangers of technology. 

Rabbi Fein claims that smartphones took over the market so quickly that no one had the time to think about whether or not they were a healthy thing. “Now we’re playing catchup as the rates of anxiety and depression soar,” he says. 

“This [policy] has nothing to do with religion; it’s about your child’s safety and mental health,” said Michelle Andron, the general studies principal of Emek Hebrew Academy/Teichman Family Torah Center, an elementary school in Los Angeles, during a Zoom with parents about a new policy to ban cell phones. “If you talk to our staff, you’ll hear that we are seeing a sharp increase in students dealing with diagnoses of anxiety, childhood depression, self-harm and eating disorders. We need to act now.”  

Consensus on the Dangers 

Prominent social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt, who authored The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has been at the forefront of sounding the alarm about the problems posed by smartphones. “By the year 2013, it was like someone turned on a switch,” he told The Daily Show in a segment shared with Emek parents. “We saw tremendous increases in anxiety, depression and self-harm.”  

In an Atlantic article entitled “Get Phones Out of Schools Now,” Dr. Haidt writes that teachers spoke to him about the “drama, conflict, bullying and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access.” When children go home, he laments, they no longer enjoy a “play-based childhood.”  

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades,” writes sociologist Dr. Jean Twenge in an Atlantic article entitled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones,” she asserts.  

Dr. Shapiro, who wrote his doctoral thesis on cyberbullying, notes that the harmful social and emotional impact of phone use is worse for girls, because while boys use smartphones largely for games and entertainment, girls use them for social connectivity. Transplanting their social lives into a virtual sphere means they have less direct engagement both with their friends and the world, and become immersed in constant, wide-scale social comparison and competition. 

Many kids who are otherwise good kids—just not yet mature—can get involved in awful phone decisions that include bullying and bad language, Rabbi Fein says. A hurtful comment made on the playground is said once and cannot be replayed, but a hurtful comment on a group chat never goes away.  

The most fascinating thing we learned is that parents wanted our involvement. Parents feel powerless against peer pressure. 

Before BMA adopted its “Wait Past 8” policy four years ago—asking parents to opt to sign a commitment to not give their children smartphones until they graduate eighth grade—Rabbi Fein would see children at bar and bat mitzvahs sitting off to the side, busily scrolling on cell phones. “It’s normal at that age to have social anxiety, but instead of dealing with it, they’d pick up their phones,” he says. “We are trying to encourage no-phone semachot.” Since his school began the no-phone policy, he has noticed a positive shift in student engagement and motivation. “They seem happier,” he says, emphasizing the importance of ingraining healthy habits early and creating happy experiences with unstructured time, time outdoors and social time in which people look each other in the eye and share. (Many other day schools have also adopted a no-phones-at-semachot policy.) 

“We were very tough on Snapchat [for our middle school],” says Rabbi Adam Englander, head of school at HALB Elementary School on Long Island. Snapchat has a “Snap Map,” so kids can constantly see where their friends are. “Imagine how anxiety provoking it is for a child to see her friends at another child’s house and she wasn’t included.”  

And then there was the cyberbullying—“We would regularly get screenshots from parents’ iPads or phones showing kids saying a nasty comment about their child,” says Rabbi Englander.  

What about the learning? 

In addition to the mental health component, smartphones and other devices have been shown to have a negative impact on learning and classroom attention. Test scores have plummeted since 2012. After speaking to teachers, Dr. Haidt reports in his article, “Keeping students off their devices during class was a constant struggle. Getting students’ attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible.” Students were using class time to text and even watch Netflix or gamble. Teachers uniformly told Dr. Haidt, “We hate the phones.”  

Smartphone use is unquestionably detrimental to attention spans. While adults are affected as well, children and teenagers, whose brains are still developing, are at even greater risk. Dr. Haidt notes that older people, with a fully mature frontal cortex have enough trouble maintaining focus. But a child with an undeveloped frontal cortex is as yet unequipped to resist distraction.  

Moreover, with smartphones and other devices at hand, students become accustomed to not having to work hard to access information. “In my day, if you wanted to find out the distance from the earth to the moon, you would walk a few blocks, maybe take a bus to the library, take out a book, and find your information,” Dr. Shapiro says. “Today the kids say, ‘Hey, Alexa!’ It’s instant gratification. The teacher’s role has become less about imparting information than it is to teach critical thinking. Fortunately, the double curriculum of day schools is better suited to imparting critical thinking and analytical skills.” 

As the evidence mounts about the negative effects of child cell phone use on mental health and learning, states like Florida and Indiana have now limited cell phone use in schools. As of this writing in January, Los Angeles just began banning cell phones in schools, and New York City, which has the nation’s largest school district with over a million students, is considering a smartphone ban where every student will be required to disconnect from their devices during school hours as well.  

Policies in Practice 

In his article, Dr. Haidt proposes four realistic norms for parents and schools to adopt to mitigate the adverse effects of cell phones: 1. not giving children smartphones before high school, 2. not allowing social media use before age sixteen, 3. making schools phone-free zones and 4. encouraging more independence, responsibility and free play during childhood. His thinking has deeply influenced parents and educators at Jewish day schools.

Caroline Bryk, the executive director of the Jewish Parents Forum at the Tikvah Fund, where parents can learn from leading thinkers and educators about the practical challenges facing Jewish parents, has spearheaded initiatives to unite parents and educators to create a healthier educational environment for children. “For the last couple of years, concerns about ‘screen-saturated’ childhoods and social media use have flowed through every parenting discussion,” she says. “Research shows the effects of cell phone use on intellectual, moral and spiritual development. It becomes an addiction; it causes children to lose sleep.” In December 2023, she began leading focus groups on Zoom with parents to discuss a partnership between parents and schools. She organized a conference at Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a presentation on The Anxious Generation by Dr. Haidt and live-streamed it to fifty Jewish day schools and more than 2,000 viewers. “It sparked a serious conversation,” Bryk says. “The heads of schools were eager for more—for ways to translate Dr. Haidt’s suggestions into action.”   

Photo: Dovid Mittel, Courtesy of HALB

At the event, Dr. Haidt asserted that a network of schools working together with similar values and policies can implement real change as a collective group and in doing so, assist thousands of families. The conference, says Rabbi Englander, “was a game changer” as “it concretized to every school that we need to do something.”  

“We should be banning phones as a community—all of the schools should be on the same page,” says Rabbi Mordechai Shifman, head of school at Emek. His school’s new policy—put in place this past September—is to expel any child who owns a smart phone. “[This policy] should become a norm, because this is what it takes to raise a socially and emotionally sound child.”  

Bryk next organized a first-of-its-kind summit at the end of March 2024, attended by school leadership and parents of fifty Jewish day schools and yeshivahs and 200 lay and school leaders for two days of intensive discussions about concerns surrounding smartphones and social media. As a result, many day schools, including some high schools, have changed their policies, incorporating changes such as asking girls to not use Snapchat or to take themselves off group chats by 9:00 pm. For the most part, she reports, parents are very supportive, even if each big change brings a flurry of emails and calls. “We misname the crisis,” says Bryk. “It’s not just about health, but the ability to carry out the mission of Jewish day schools and the continuation of Jewish communal life. The conversation begins with a tech policy, but it doesn’t end with it. We still have a lot to learn.”  

“It’s not just policing,” Dr. Shapiro agrees. “Banning phones is bad marketing and only one leg of the table. We prefer to promote the idea of giving the kids the best possible environment for their social and learning experience. It’s about finding an approach to manage tech use and creating an optimal environment for students.”  

I’ve gotten so many emails from parents . . . so many parents have come up to me on the carpool line and said, “this [program] has changed our home life.” 

What are day schools doing in practice? Emek asks parents to sign a consent form that their children will not have smartphones, and a smartphone for family use must be a kosher phone with no internet access and no social media. Parents are also asked to supervise home use of tablets, smart TVs and similar devices. Rabbi Shifman notes that innocent-sounding games like Roblox are not necessarily kid-friendly: “We had a case of a kid who was approached by a predator on Roblox,” he says. The school started the program five years ago (but implemented strict new penalties this year for violating the policy), and slowly rolled out a policy starting with third grade and moving up each year, one grade at a time. This past year, a few families did not comply and had to leave the school.   

Moriah in Englewood, New Jersey, was one of the first day schools to require Yondr pouches for students in grades five through eight; students below fifth grade are not allowed to have cell phones. “It’s easy to enforce,” says Rabbi Daniel Alter, Moriah’s head of school. “If we see a phone, the policy is that we take it away for a week. I only see cell phones out maybe three to five times a year, and often it’s just an oversight. Many kids find it a hassle to bring a phone to school, so they just leave it at home.” 

When Moriah launched this policy, it started with the fourth grade, reasoning that it was too late to change the rules for the current sixth grade. “We had to get the insiders, the grade’s parent opinion leaders, on board,” Rabbi Alter says. “We began calling them to say, ‘We’ve been thinking about a cell phone policy; what do you think?’ We generated a lot of interest. Once we had a core of people on board, we held a group Zoom to introduce the concept and asked people to sign on to agree to a policy of no smartphones before the beginning of eighth grade and no social media until the end of that year.” 

It was presented as a social contract that could be revisited. Grade by grade, the school is getting parents and students on board. “We can’t solve everything at once,” Rabbi Alter says, “but we are starting with smartphone limits.” 

In Florida, BMA decided to make the school phone-free four years ago, based on data that shows a cell phone has an impact on cognitive performance even if it is in the same building as a person, and even if it’s turned off. “The brain is still connected to the device,” Rabbi Fein says. “If parents really want their child to have a phone for security reasons, they can sign a form that allows the child to leave it in the office when he or she enters the school.” Grade by grade, the school is working on encouraging parents to adopt the “Wait Past 8” policy that many schools are now espousing. The staff are allowed to keep their phones in school but have been trained to model healthy cell phone use; they should not be using them in classrooms or hallways, or during lunch or recess—only in the teachers’ room, removed from the children.  

“We want to promote an intentional use of tech,” Rabbi Fein says. “People think the problem is the devices, but that’s like treating an emotional eating problem with pills. You have to change the mindset.” His school has created an initiative among parents called Hineni to get them on board to discuss healthy approaches to technology.  

As of this past September, HALB Elementary School launched the “Smart Tech 1-2-3” program, a policy that states children cannot own a smartphone until the conclusion of fifth grade. From sixth grade and up, parents are mandated to get together to decide the best path forward, with the goal of limiting the dangers of smartphones until an appropriate age. Additionally, no student in HALB Elementary School can have their own access to social media, and group chats were banned for younger grades.  

The HALB Elementary School administration conducted a number of parental surveys and are engaging in ongoing education for parents regarding the challenges of technology. HALB had a series of meetings introducing parents to the research of Dr. Haidt. 

While some would surmise parents might resist this kind of intrusion into home life, Rabbi Englander states that “approximately 90 percent of parents are begging for our help” with regard to technology and social media. “The most fascinating thing we learned is that parents wanted our involvement. Parents feel powerless against peer pressure,” he says.  

In fact, HALB parent Daniella Cohen, who has a sixth grader, a fourth grader and a kindergarten child in the elementary school as well as one in high school, played a big role in getting parents onboard. She was tired of seeing her daughters’ playdates “revolving around the phones, posting and ‘liking’ each other’s content,” she says. “The phones were becoming the focus of their lives; it was like an addiction among the girls. To me, their childhood was being replaced by phones, and it didn’t look healthy.”   

She realized the peer pressure had to stop. “When some of the girls have social media, everyone else has to have it.” No one wants to be excluded socially, so parents, she says, “felt trapped.” That’s why she welcomed the school stepping in.  Even on the high school level, policies are changing. “While I don’t believe that right now the majority of Modern Orthodox yeshivah high schools have a cell phone–free campus,” says Rabbi Arye Sufrin, head of school at YULA High School Boys’ Division, “from the conversations I’ve had with other heads of schools across the country, it certainly feels that that’s the direction everyone is moving toward in a way that best fits their school community.” 

For the past few years, YULA experimented with a “no cell phones in class” policy, which required students to deposit their phones in cubbies during class. It became clear over time that it was insufficient, says Rabbi Sufrin. “And from the research that we did as an institution, it was clear that cell phones were contributing to added anxiety and distracting students from being fully present.” 

“We realized that curbing phone use in schools not only leads to better academic performance but also to less anxiety and less cyberbullying and is healthy for our children,” he says. “The driving factor has to be what is best for our kids, not just in their learning but in their development as people,” says Rabbi Sufrin.  

YULA’s new policy, launched this past September, is simple: no devices on campus. The policy applies to all cell phones, including non-smartphones—like flip phones—as well as smart watches, iPods and iPads. Every student has a designated phone slot at the school entranceway. Staff members are assigned to take the phones and lock them away. At the end of the day, when the students leave, they can have their phones. Surprisingly, when YULA polled its students in an optional poll, “there were more students who were excited about the policy than we expected,” says Rabbi Sufrin. He also stresses that the school did not simply impose the new policy on students, but worked hard to poll them, get feedback and communicate with them. In this way, the students felt heard and validated.  

The Impact 

How have these no-phone policies impacted students?  

Parents have told me they are eating dinner together. And kids are actually socializing at bar and bat mitzvahs, says Rabbi Shifman.  

Rabbi Englander notes the very positive changes in the school. In the younger grades, where group chats are no longer permitted, “there’s been a big downturn in internet-based social problems.” In the past, younger kids, who often haven’t developed social graces yet, would invite one kid on a group chat, but not another, for a Shabbat playdate, things “we would never do as adults,” says Rabbi Englander. “Group chats were causing so much drama.” He’s glad his teachers are no longer busy dealing with those issues, and he sees that “behavior in school in general has improved.” 

At HALB, in addition to having students not own phones until at least the conclusion of fifth grade, the school introduced “screen-free time” during the week to encourage students to spend more time with family, doing homework, socializing and playing outdoors. Participating students are entered into a raffle and prizes are distributed each week. The program, says Rabbi Englander, is wildly successful, especially among the younger grades. Parents, he says, are thrilled. “They don’t have to fight with their children to put away their screens; their kids are doing it voluntarily.  I’ve gotten so many emails from parents, and so many parents have come up to me on the carpool line and said, “this [program] has changed our home life.”  

Cohen has seen improvements as well. She finds that without the social media, her children have “a healthier relationship with technology, and playdates don’t necessarily revolve around technology as much.” While she feels her twelve-year-old daughter’s grade was “on the cusp of it being almost too late” to introduce these changes since some of them already had smartphones and access to social media, “the biggest impact is going to be on the younger grades, where the goal is to delay purchasing smartphones entirely.” 

Since the school has banned social media through eighth grade, Cohen says there has been some pushback from seventh and eighth graders who already had it. But, she says, as those grades enter high school, it’s going to be easier for the first through eighth graders because none of the students will have had social media to begin with.   

Other schools have noticed positive developments as well. “We’ve seen some really beautiful things happening,” says Rabbi Sufrin. “There are more impromptu kumzitzes that students are just initiating during their free time.  

“The school generally has kumzitzes,” he adds, “but usually when a kumzitz is over, everyone walks out and jumps on their phones. Now when a recent kumzitz was over, the students walked out and they brought out a speaker and started dancing. And that led to a new tradition at the girls school, which we now call ‘Freilich Friday.’  

“What’s new is that when we have assemblies, the students are more focused on the program. What’s new is that the transition time in and out of class is more efficient and easier because they’re not distracted by their phones. What’s new is that they are just much more present and engaged,” says Rabbi Sufrin. 

“While it’s still too early to see academic improvement, we are already seeing more meaningful friendships and relationships between peers, less anxiety, and more meaningful connections between staff and students. I’d venture to say,” Rabbi Sufrin concludes, “that over time we’re going to see more religious growth, because suddenly, when you’re in shiur or in a Chumash class, you’re more engaged and present in that experience. Hopefully the learning won’t just penetrate to ensure that students get a good grade in their Gemara shiur, but they will internalize their learning and . . . experience transformational growth. And that will elevate the entire institution, school environment and the entire community. If our teens are experiencing more spiritual and social-emotional growth, the impact will also be felt in our homes. I can’t imagine a world where we ever go back to allowing cell phones in schools.” 

Barbara Bensoussan is a writer in Brooklyn and a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.