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School districts and elected leaders across the US have been working to restrict phones in classrooms. Melissa Henson, the VP of Parents Television and Media Council (PTC), joins us to discuss state legislative efforts receiving bipartisan support. What is the biggest pushback? What can parents do?
School districts and elected leaders across the US have been working to restrict phones in classrooms. Melissa Henson, the VP of Parents Television and Media Council (PTC), joins us to discuss state legislative efforts receiving bipartisan support. What is the biggest pushback? What can parents do?
Smartphones in the Classroom: What States are Doing to Confront These Digital Distractions
72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom
Phone Ban: NY To Become Largest State With Bell-To-Bell Restrictions On Student Smartphones
Melissa Henson is a noted expert on entertainment industry trends and the impact of entertainment media on children and American culture at large. As the Parents Television and Media Council’s Vice President of Programs, she directs the organization’s educational programs, research, and advocacy for a safe media environment for children and families. The PTC is a non-partisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment.
During her 25-year tenure at the PTC, Ms. Henson has championed the protection of children from harmful media that Hollywood markets to them. From leading the PTC’s Advertiser Accountability Program, she has urged corporate accountability from sponsors of entertainment media. Ms. Henson has mobilized grassroots members of the PTC to urge enforcement of the broadcast indecency law. She has tackled issues of child sexual exploitation in the media, and urged Hollywood to present more positive, empowering images of girls in the media through the PTC’s “4 Every Girl” Campaign.
Ms. Henson produced a number of groundbreaking PTC studies documenting graphic sex, violence and profanity on television and in streaming media, including: Over-the-Top or a Race to the Bottom: A Parent’s Guide to Streaming Video; The Ratings Sham I & II; Dying to Entertain; Faith in a Box; The Sour Family Hour; The Blue Tube; and TV Bloodbath.
Ms. Henson contributed her expertise to a national discussion on media violence at a 2018 White House roundtable discussion with President Trump, Congressional leaders, and representatives of the entertainment industry. She represented the PTC’s “4 Every Girl” Campaign in a United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women panel discussion to address the sexualization of girls that was hosted by AXIOS-Mision Mujer, a Mexican NGO, and the American Psychological Association (APA).
She began her career with the PTC in 1997 as an entertainment analyst, documenting instances of inappropriate content on television.
Ms. Henson is a sought-after entertainment expert and has appeared on a variety of TV programs on the Fox News Channel, CNN, CBNC, and MSNBC. She is a frequent guest on radio talk shows across the country and has been quoted extensively in news sources such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, New York Daily News, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg.
Ms. Henson is a graduate of the University of Virginia where she received a BA in Government. She resides in Falls Church, Va., with her husband and their son.
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Next Talk podcast. We are a nonprofit passionate about keeping kids safe online. We’re learning together how to navigate tech, culture and faith with our kids. I am joined today by Melissa Henson and I want her to tell you about her organization and who she is, and the work that they are doing to help kids.
Speaker 2:
Hi, thanks so much for letting me join you today. Just to give you a little bit of background about the Parents Television Media Council. We’ve been around for more than 20 years now. We started out as the Parents Television Council back in the day when most kids were watching primetime television between the hours of 8 and 10 pm, and so we were concerned about the quality of the content that was available to families and to children during those hours. But of course, the media landscape has changed pretty substantially in the last 20-so years much more rapidly in the last 5 to 10 years and kids really aren’t watching television anymore. They’re not on TV, you know, between the hours of eight and 10, more often than not they’re on their phones and they’re on social media or they’re playing video games. And so we’ve changed the mission of the organization to reflect the changing trends and media consumption patterns, and so what we focus now on is creating a safe media culture for kids and families more broadly, and what that means is you know, what kinds of content are kids able to access on their phones? What are the dangers that they’re being exposed to online? What can we do to advocate for phone-free schools? What can we do to advocate for better parental controls on a multitude of digital devices and so forth. So that’s where we’re at right now I come at this issue.
Speaker 2:
I have a 16-year-old son, but I had a real heart for this issue even before becoming a mother, because I worked with young children when I was in college. I’d’d babysit and sometimes I’d work in the aftercare programs at local schools to take care of kids until their parents could pick them up. And you know I was shocked from time to time with you know, what I would hear out of the mouths of these first and second grade kids, what they were seeing, what they were allowed to watch at home, what they were watching unsupervised, and sometimes what they were even watching with their parents present alarmed me. You know that parents weren’t really thinking through what kinds of influences they were allowing their kids to be exposed to in the media that they were consuming, and so I had a real heart for this issue, as I say, even before I became a mom.
Speaker 1:
Well, and that was more than 16 years ago and we know times have changed, so what they’re seeing is way even more risque now, I would say, than it was back then. And I think you’re right. I think we’ve all been so desensitized to everything that we watch because we’re intaking it so much that we don’t even realize when our kids are sitting next to us and we’ve got some graphic stuff going on on the TV. We kind of need to pause and take note.
Speaker 2:
Well, and more than that. I think maybe there’s a little element of pride, a pridefulness, involved there. You know it’s a problem for the kid down the street because you know mom’s a hot mess, but I’m such a good mom it’s not going to be a problem for my kid. So I think we just need a little bit of a reality check and say it’s not good for kids generally. No matter how great you are as a parent, if you’re allowing these influences, if you’re allowing these messages to get inside your child’s heart, inside your child’s mind, it’s not going to end well, it’s not going to result in fruitful life. It’s going to do more harm than good in the long run, allowing your kids to have these exposures to adult content.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, we have a saying at Next Talk. It’s protect your heart and mind. And we have a duty to protect their heart and mind, and then we have a duty to teach them, to be an advocate for themselves, to protect their heart and mind. And that does fall on us and we’ve all missed it at some point or another, and I think you’re absolutely right. That pride is we also say look in the mirror. Often here at Next Talk, like what are we doing wrong? Why are we shutting down communication or maybe not creating enough boundaries for them? And so I think that is just such good points for us all to take note and kind of check our own heart and our own pride.
Speaker 1:
I wanted to have you on today because oftentimes I get contacted by parents and they say how can we ban phones in the classroom? Like I just don’t think it’s productive. I would love to see phones being banned and I’m like, okay, I’m for it, but that is not really like we don’t have the staffing to get behind that initiative and lead that. But you guys are kind of in, you’re in this space, and so now I can point parents to you as a resource. But will you tell me what’s happening in this space, because, it’s my understanding, I don’t know that there’s a federal law, but a lot is being done at the state level. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you’re right, there is no federal law at this point and I’m not sure at this point that that would be the right way to go.
Speaker 2:
Anyhow, it seems like this is an issue that is working its way through school districts.
Speaker 2:
It’s working its way through state level legislation and I think you know you probably learned, like I did, in civics class that the states are the laboratories of democracy be a pretty good system for figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, and other states can see what’s been attempted, what’s failed, what’s been successful and sort of adopt best practices. So that does seem to me to be a good strategy. It’s letting the states handle it and figure out for themselves what makes sense for families in our state. But most states seem to be gravitating toward a plan or a program that looks like something like using a yonder pouch or some sort of lockable pouch. Kids deposit their phones in these pouches when they arrive at school beginning of the day and they’re not able to access them until they go home at the end of the day. Some schools allow them to get their phones during breaks between classes, some schools are allowing them during lunch, but the ones that seem to be experiencing the highest success seem to be the ones that require the phones to be locked away all school day.
Speaker 1:
Well, just from a personal, like walking through it with my kid I think one of the most detrimental things is when we say we don’t have phones, we don’t allow phones in school, but we actually allow. It’s like it’s like classroom by classroom, and I think that just needs to be communicated we have it’s a classroom by classroom conversation, but you can’t say we’re a phone free school when you’re not a phone free school, because then I, what I have found as a parent, is that then when I have boundaries in place at home, they become blurry too, because it’s like, well, it doesn’t matter at school, so yeah, okay, but your phone is not allowed in your, in your room at night, like that’s just a boundary for us, you know, at home. And so I think it takes all of us working together to mean what we say, and say what we mean and follow what we’re actually saying to kids, like I think that’s really an important message here.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely, absolutely, and I definitely think this is going to be, it’s going to have to be a collaborative and cooperative effort, and parents and teachers and administrators all need to get on the same page, because what we have seen is that schools that often say you know, we’re a phone-free school, but they’re not. The administration isn’t enforcing it. That puts a burden on the teachers to enforce it, and then it becomes a, you know, a battle of wills between the teacher and the students, and that’s not fair for the teachers and it’s disruptive to the learning environment. So they need to, teachers need to have the backing of the administration. But more importantly again, it often comes back to the parents, because what we are seeing is that resistance to prohibiting phones in the classroom is often not coming from the students. The resistance is coming from the parents, who you know.
Speaker 2:
Maybe this was exacerbated during COVID, but they have this expectation of being able to communicate with their child throughout the day. And you know there are legitimate safety concerns. There are legitimate concerns about, you know, what happens if there’s a school shooter situation. How do I get in touch with my child? And I don’t want to diminish those concerns at all, but there are procedures in place. There are, you know, safety protocols.
Speaker 2:
There are ways that the schools are they have systems in place to deal with these emergency situations increase the danger for the child, because if the child’s trying to calm mom down on the phone rather than listening to the first responders that are right there on the ground saying here’s where you need to go to be safe, and that’s going to create complexity and and possibly make a bad situation worse. So I I want to be sensitive to those concerns, of course, um, but also as parents, we also need to learn to let go a little bit. And you know, if we’re going to trust our kids to be in a public school or in a private school, we also need to trust the schools and the administrators to do what they need to do.
Speaker 1:
I think that’s a good point. I think you know parents too. One thing that I tell parents when I present is I think one thing that we could do right now every parent in every home that would help teachers is if we would just not allow phones in bedrooms, because I think a lot of what’s happening with the disruption too I mean, yes, there are disruption within the classroom for sure, because kids are recording each other, they’re recording their teacher. You know bullying has happened because of that. We we know that there are many issues with that.
Speaker 1:
One of the problems, too, is that kids are up scrolling all night long, they’re not getting enough sleep and then they’re falling asleep in class. There’s major behavior problems, and so, again it is. It is schools and parents working together on this issue. I hate that we’ve come to like pointing fingers and everybody’s like saying it’s the other person’s fault. This has taken us all by. I mean, we’ve all been blindsided by the digital issues with kids, and so I think if we could just come together and like parents do their part, teachers do their part, schools do their part, man, we could create such an amazing educational space for our kids to really get back to what’s important in learning and growing their mind and their creativity.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and you know, I would also say, in addition to being on the same page with the teachers and administrators, I think it’s also important for us to be on the same page with other parents as well.
Speaker 2:
So you know, it’s easier to say no to giving your child a smartphone if their friend’s parents are also saying no to giving their child a smartphone.
Speaker 2:
But when all their friends have smartphones, you don’t want your kid to feel like odd man out. You know they don’t want to feel excluded, and so oftentimes that’s what causes parents to cave to the pressure to give their kids smartphones, even when their best judgment tells them no. This is the wrong thing to do. So, you know, if you have can communicate with the parents of your kids’ closest friends and say look, we have made a decision as a family that we are going to hold off on getting a smartphone for our child until they’re 13, 14, 15, 16, whatever you decide, I would really appreciate it, you know, if you would consider delaying getting your child a smartphone too. I think it’s in your child’s best interest. We believe it’s in our child’s best interest. It’ll be easier for them to resist that peer pressure if they’re in it together and if you can get several parents on the same page with that, that’s going to make it a lot easier for your child to not feel excluded, to not feel like they’re the oddball because they’re not on a smartphone.
Speaker 1:
Well, and I do think the tide is shifting a little bit. You know, you’ve got Jonathan Hyatt coming out with his Ancients Generation. It has gotten a lot of publicity, which is amazing, and I think, too, kids are starting to understand the effects of it, like they’re getting educated Like I don’t want this in my life right now, and I think that’s amazing. When we can educate our kids on the dangers of what’s happening online and the mental health, like we’re seeing depression more than doubled since Instagram came on the scene major depression in kids and so if we can educate our kids about that, then they will make even smart choices for themselves, and then it’s not just parent and child butting heads saying no, no, no, you can’t have this. It’s literally like getting educated together and making a better family decision on delaying the phone, and you know we advocate that. It’s a skill that we need to teach. It’s just like driving a car, but we definitely need to delay until our kids are ready for the responsibility.
Speaker 2:
Right, right, absolutely, absolutely correct. And that’s a great way to phrase it, because what we know is that you know that that prefrontal cortex of your brain that’s responsible for judgment and impulse control, that isn’t fully developed until you’re in your early 20s sort of provoked by somebody online, they’re not using that prefrontal cortex and saying you know what? I don’t need to respond to this taunt. Or if I respond to this, it might escalate. Or if they’re getting solicitous emails from what appears to be an attractive female saying, hey, send me some private pictures of yourself. That prefrontal cortex is lacking and they’re not going to have the judgment to say what could potentially happen down the road if I do this thing. So that’s that. You’re absolutely right that we need to delay. We need to educate and train along the way too, because kids are not thinking about the future. They’re, they’re, they’re living in the present moment and they’re reacting in the present moment.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah for sure. So if we want to know what our state is doing to ban cell phones, where would be a good place to get educated about that? What’s happening in our specific state with this initiative?
Speaker 2:
released last summer. It’s in the parent resources section of the website and it’s available as a PDF. It’s called Smartphones in the Classroom what States Are Doing to Confront these Digital Distractions. And we’ve got there a resource that shows, state by state, what’s been happening legislatively which states have implemented bans, which ones are considering bans. That map has probably even changed in the last several months because we know, for example, that New York is looking at considering a statewide ban. I believe New York City schools have already implemented a ban. I think California is looking closely at a statewide ban as well. So that map has probably changed since we released the report.
Speaker 2:
But we do go through state by state what’s been happening and in some states where there haven’t been statewide bans, sometimes the largest school districts within the states have already implemented bans.
Speaker 2:
But this does seem to be a trend that is gaining momentum and more and more states, I think, are going to be adopting these policies because it makes sense. The teachers want to see this happen, administrators want to see this happen, social science wants to see this happen. More and more parents are wanting to see this happen because I think they’re seeing the negative outcomes in the lives of their own children. So I think support for this is gaining momentum and I think we’ll see more and more states adopting policies. But if your state has not taken any steps to implement a statewide ban, we also have a policy guide at the end of that report steps that you can take to get a school faux man implemented. You know this is an area where it’s going to require being involved in PTA and going to talk to school board meetings and really putting some pressure on the administrator and school at the district level the school administrators to get these policies implemented.
Speaker 1:
Well, I know in my own life I have seen some amazing teachers retire and walk away from the teaching profession because, I mean, it’s just kids are out of control, and that breaks my heart, because we have these people who have dedicated their lives to teaching our kids and they’re saying there’s a problem here, something’s wrong, and so I don’t know the whole solution, but I know we have to fix it and I think we need to take little steps and as much as what we can do to work towards the goal of figuring this out together.
Speaker 2:
I think that’s extremely important and I think you know the work begins at home. It really does. You know we can’t have, you know, no holds barred when it comes to kids and screens when they’re at home and then expect them to abide by restrictions when they go to school. So we need to be accountable ourselves as parents. We need to hold the line. We need to set down some ground rules and enforce them, and then we need to work within our communities and try to get other parents to cooperate and be on the same page, and then school level and so on. I think there is cause for hope in that.
Speaker 2:
I have seen articles saying that Gen Z, for example, have already declared that they’re not going to get tablets for their kids because they see these little three-year-old zombies that are scrolling on iPads all the time, and they’ve seen how phone addiction is affecting older siblings or their parents. I’ve seen some heartbreaking statistics about kids who feel ignored or neglected by their parents because their parents are constantly scrolling. So we need to look at ourselves first, look at what we can fix within our own home and our own families, and then we start to look outward.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. I love that you say that, because you know some people are just like pointing their finger at school districts and it really is a home issue, Like we’ve got to start it in the home. And you’re speaking my language here because this is, this is next talk. You know, um dealing with this at home and and I would just say out there, my daughter is the same way. She’s like my kid’s never going to have a phone. You know, like um, and and you gave me a phone too fast and we talk about that sometimes. But I would say to parents like me who has an older kid our generation of kids really were an experiment and we need to learn from it.
Speaker 1:
And if you have a teenager, still engage in the conversation, because I think it’s so important that you say I just didn’t know, I didn’t know the effects, and now I’m concerned about you because you are always on your phone or whatever. You don’t have to just come out swinging and screaming at your kid. You’re addicted to your phone. Get off your phone. That’s not what this is about. This is about having a heart to heart and what you said at the very beginning of this podcast, like put aside your pride, admit where we went wrong and have a conversation with your kid. You know, I didn’t talk to you about pornography. I didn’t talk to you about violence. That you would see. I didn’t talk to you about all of this stuff and that is on me.
Speaker 1:
I am so sorry. Can we talk about it now? Because I see the desensitization that is happening, and so I would just encourage you. It’s like never too late. You know, hopefully the next generation, they’re going to do better than we did, they’re going to know more than we did, but it’s never too late to start talking to your kid and having a heart to heart and creating this conversation at home. Absolutely Well put, Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing here and thank you for putting this information together so we can see what’s happening state by state and providing a policy packet. If we feel like this is the line of work that we want to do and we’re passionate about it, Parents, I encourage you to do it. I think we’re all been called in different ways to step up and voice our concerns here, so I wanted to give you a place that you could go and an organization that is helping in this space, and, Melissa, I just thank you for all the work you’re doing.
Speaker 2:
Well, thank you, and thank you for helping to amplify this message and get the word out, and hopefully we’ll see good things happening all across this country.
Speaker 1:
Is there anything else you want to tell our listeners? We’re mostly parents, so you can just I think you’ve spoken a lot to us I’m walking away saying, okay, I need some gut checks, I need to make sure that my pride is in check, and I’m looking in the mirror and doing all these things. But is there anything else you would like to say to parents?
Speaker 2:
Yeah Well, yeah, parents often get beat up on too over this thing, and I think we also need to give ourselves a little bit of grace, because we are up against a multi-billion dollar industry here. It’s manipulated us all into believing that we need to. For our kids to be successful in the world, they need to be on these devices at an early age so that they can be familiar with technology. So give ourselves a little bit of grace too.
Speaker 1:
I think that’s such a word, and it’s a good ending. Thank you so much, melissa, for being here. Thank you.
Speaker 3:
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