[BriggyDwiggs42]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I more or less completely agree with you about the harms. Regarding your weed comparison, I knew kids in middle school smoking tons of pot to get through the day; no doubt they were messing themselves up for life (at least a bit) with that habit. I hope social media isn’t quite so harmful, but I bet it’s not a ton better.

The weed example is a good comparison though. I view kids smoking lots of weed as a failure of a system. Knowing some of them, we’re usually talking about shitty family situations on top of a shitty school they’re made to attend for a solid amount of their waking life. The school should take their pot, of course it should, but it’s a marker far down a road that shouldn’t have been started along to begin with. There’s an enormously complicated set of social reasons that those kids’ schools, and their families, are messed up, but it’s as though there’s no will to tackle these issues. It’s much easier to attack the simple things you can see, the smoking and the phone use, with bandaid solutions that ignore the underlying causes. I almost see it as a distraction from really fixing anything. That’s where my frustration comes from, I really have no problem with the banning of the phones itself.