Pamela Paul has an interesting column today about the ways in which cell phones and social media are bad for kids. This is a topic I wrote about earlier this week. I won’t rehash all of again but there is increasing evidence that social media is not only bad for kids mental health but also for their ability to perform well in school. Simply put, phones are distraction devices and kids don’t learn math (or other subjects) as well when they are constantly being distracted.

What Paul has written about today is the racial aspect of this problem. Because it turns out that the problems with students and cell phones are not evenly distributed. Hispanic and black students spend significantly more time on average looking at their phones than white and Asian students and as already discussed this is bad news.

According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers. One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers. Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.

Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers; Black and Hispanic kids ages 8 to 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.

As I was reading this my immediate thought was where are the parents? The piece tries to address that:

Black and Latino kids use social media differently from white kids, Linda Charmaraman, director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley Centers for Women, told me. “It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”

Not as much “shame around it” is a strange way to put it because if the outcome of all this phone use is bad, then parents probably need to worry about it more. If you’re spending that much time on TikTok, you’re not doing a whole lot of other things like reading a book.

According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010. Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds. And these declines are tied to internet use. All this raises the possibility that disparities in internet use could in turn intensify overall declines and existing differences in reading across racial groups among adults. The average daily time spent reading per capita by ethnicity in 2022 was 0.29 hours for white adults, 0.12 for Black adults and 0.10 for Hispanics.

In other words, one danger is that social media not only reflects real-world disparities, it could also exacerbate them.

It sounds like phones are replacing reading time as kids get older. There is lots of evidence that literacy at home translates into success in reading and writing at school. So less reading at home probably translates into less success at school. And as mentioned above, additional phone and social media use also means a greater likelihood of mental health and learning problems.

What does all this add up to? Probably one more reason to ban phone use during school hours. On that point, here’s the top comment:

As a NYC public HS teacher, I’ve been saying this for years but why would anyone listen to me? Ban the phones from first period to lunch and then after lunch to the final period of the day. Easy fix. No guts from the administration.

But the racial aspect of this means some cultural awareness is also required. If the problems connected to phones and social media are worse in Hispanic and black homes then those are the places where change is needed. And on that note, here’s the 2nd most upvoted comment from “A” in Chicago.

This article is…interesting. I won’t speak to the author’s research, but what is missing is that often in these households, the parents truly don’t care. It’s not about shame (as mentioned in the article), it’s about truly not caring that their kids are wasting time on apps. We can talk about income inequality, but the issue is that parents aren’t invested.

Listen, I’m a first gen black woman in medical school. I have the whole sad story of growing up poor but being smart (aka gifted-a term I always found odd) and I was able to do very well and outpace even my more privileged peers and blah blah. So yes, I know firsthand the thought behind what these articles politely skirt around. Some parents just don’t care. Mine didn’t. I pushed myself to succeed, but had I spent all day playing on a phone, no one would’ve stopped me. And that’s the case with many of our youth of color today. The parents don’t push them to read, study, work or do anything remotely beneficial to their development and then when they go out into the world with no skills, it’s everyone else that has to accommodate and accept them.

We can do studies, but the reality is parents need to be involved. To not be is bad parenting. I’m sorry to be harsh, but being in the community mentioned in the article, I see the detriments of these behaviors. Unless things change, these issues will remain. And I understand there are difficulties and everyone’s situation is different, but we need the parents to step up.

That seems pretty harsh and over-broad but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t represent someone’s real experience. Here’s one more person’s experience.

In the USA, the greatest privilege of all is having parents who truly care. If your parents didn’t do their best, then it’s on you to make it better for your children.

I’m a Hispanic man who was raised in a very poor and disadvantaged community. My parents were “over-protective”, didn’t allow me to play with the other kids unsupervised. Understandably so, as I later learned that some older kids sexually abused a younger one. My dad was a blue-collar worker, always below the poverty line. My mother (a SAHM) sacrificed her college prospects when she became pregnant at 18 y/o and prioritized her children. Thanks to their invaluable sacrifices and help from the govt safety net, my siblings and I are engineers or accountants; their grandchildren will all grow up in privileged households, far away from where we grew up.

This is the parents job. Kids should not be on phones all day every day. Parents need to make sure other things, like school work, reading, sports, etc. are also part of a child’s daily routine. That said, it would help if schools would get serious about keeping phones out of classrooms. That’s the one part of this where parents could use some help.