The teen-screen panic: Déjà vu all over again

The latest culture-war crusade to ban teens from smartphones and social media is just another chapter in America’s dismal, destructive save-the-children! history

California schools, inflamed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and state school chief Tony Thurmond, are rampaging to ban teenagers’ smartphones. Principals glow with self-praise, proudly declaring that phone-bereft teens now socialize with each other and play soccer instead of staring at screens. Teachers see the wondrous change in their schools. Politicians and experts break arms patting their own backs. The press is worshipful.

The short memories are comical. A generation ago, those same entities panicked over teenagers socializing with each other, which they just knew meant palming drugs and guns, plotting evil adolescent physicalities from pregnancy to gangbanging. 1990s school personnel would have loved teens harmlessly phone-texting.

No matter what teenagers do, grownups hate it. School officials, politicians, professionals, and fawning media reporters hail each crackdown on teens as Western Civilization’s ultimate savior.

School uniforms!

From Long Beach schools to Bill Clinton’s White House, education’s salvation is here! Principals, presidents, and loving reporters warbled over identically-uniformed teenagers’ new self-discipline, businesslike attitudes, rising grades, greater self-confidence –anyone could see the improvements with their own eyes!

Oh, wait. Massive studies of thousands of students in hundreds of schools and research reviews summarized by Virginia Tech sociology professor David Brunsma found: "School uniform policies do not significantly affect students' educational outcomes … have no significant impact on measures of self-esteem in middle or high schools… have no effect on psychological coping…  do not help us understand behavioral problems at school,” and “may be more harmful than previously thought. "

Uniforms didn’t help schools, reviewers shrugged. They just made grownups feel better.

Drug-test students!

The drug-war’s get-tough remedy to stop addiction before it begins! Politicians and educators forced middle-schoolers to pee in front of adult monitors (yes, that’s creepy), then announced amazing victories: pleasant drug-free students, sober classes, peaceful hallways!

Oh, wait. Evaluations by University of Michigan surveyors of tens of thousands of students found, “drug testing of students in schools does not deter drug use” and has predictably negative effects. Tests revealed no big student drug problem, anywhere. Suddenly, advocates who claimed forced testing would prove a huge school drug crisis changed their tone: they had headed the crisis off!

Redondo Beach Union High school officials vowed to shut down what they dubbed a major teenage drug problem. Los Angeles Sheriff deputies waved $20 bills at hundreds of students for weeks on end and finally arrested 17 who finally took the cash (including eighth graders and special-ed students) in a splashy, press-alerted, cameras-rolling public bust. The sheriff, principal, and press were giddy with self-congratulating delight.

Oh, wait. They didn’t find actual drugs, just a few kids out of hundreds who said, fine, I’ll take your $20. Charges were quietly dropped.

No real school drug problem after all, deputies admitted. Never mind.

Zero tolerance!

Clinton and authorities loved loved loved schools and communities cracking down on brats and their drugs, drinking, crime, truancy, defiance… we need order!

Oh, wait. Zero tolerance polices accomplish nothing and promote “more misbehavior,” the conservative Forbes magazine admitted from multiple-study reviews.

Teen driving laws!

Expert after expert, cop after cop, politician after politician promised legislators that sweeping new restrictions on teenaged drivers would save lives and bring new discipline to reckless youth.

Oh, wait. Studies found California’s 1998 teen driving law was followed by dozens’ MORE teen highway deaths as families and working teens evaded the cumbersome crackdown or delayed learning to drive until more hazardous older ages. Studies by CalTrans and safety researchers found California’s under-20 traffic toll, plummeting for 10 years through 1997 to record-low levels, abruptly reversed and rocketed upward as the law took effect.

In 2008 legislative hearings, major interests backing the law like the California Highway Patrol admitted it had bad effects. But who cares if more teens die or have to drive illegally to jobs to support their families? Never admit error.

Criminalize teen smoking!

California’s loudly-hyped 2016 ban on under-21 tobacco use was trumpeted by the state’s powerful health establishment as godlike, guaranteed to end youthful smoking and vaping!  

Oh, wait. UCLA’s Health Interview surveys later showed that while teens previously had cut the habit by 60% on their own from the 1990s through 2015, the new teen tobacco ban was followed by the first survey in 15 years to show no reduction – plus actual increases in vaping. Whoops again.

Teen curfews!

Surely, subjecting teenagers to mass house arrest is the perfect remedy for youth crime, truancy, and public safety! Just consider the miracle Monrovia, California’s, daytime curfew on teens wrought. Authorities, police, and mesmerized reporters clarioned crime was down dramatically, truancy gone, Monrovia a heaven on earth!

Enthralled President Clinton visited and lavished praise on Monrovia. His Justice Department issued a quip-stuffed report pushing daytime and nighttime banishments so harsh that teens would be allowed in public only a few hours on a few days of the year.

Oh, wait. Analysis of Monrovia’s police statistics found crime dropped during non-curfew hours while rising during curfew hours. Truancy studies showed no effect on Monrovia school attendance.

No matter. San Diego leaders were next to wildly champion arresting thousands of youths (three-fourths Black and Latinx) for curfew, 40% of California’s total. We’re saving kids! Protecting the city!

Oh, wait. Analyses showed San Diego had no better trends in youth crime and worse trends in public safety than other big cities that didn’t handcuff and jail youth for the crime of being outdoors.

Proof: from its 2009 peak through 2023, San Diego youth curfew arrests plunged from 4,107 a year to zero. An astounding shocker followed. San Diego juvenile crime didn’t rise. It fell by 81%, including a 56% drop in violent crime.

Hundreds of studies and reviews over the last half-century consistently found, “juvenile curfews are not effective in reducing crime and victimization.”

Just ban ‘em!

City officials like Davis’s smugly boasted to sycophant reporters that blaring classical music was driving unwanted teenagers from downtowns. Beyond driving downtown residents nuts, guess what that accomplished.

Scared Straight!

The ecstatic marvelings local papers and principals are gushing over the wonders of phone-free schools are nothing compared to the eruption of huzzahs that greeted documentaries of gleefully screaming prison lifers getting in teenagers’ faces to threaten them with rape, knifings, and beatings. Juvenile delinquency was solved! The Academy Award-, Emmy-, and George Polk-winning Scared Straight! (narrated by Peter Falk) announced. None of the terrified delinquents reoffended! it said. Reporters and politicians went wild.

Understand: adults felt in their bones that Scared Straight! was the miracle remedy. They knew it! The program quickly spread to other states and countries, led by the United Kingdom and Norway.

Oh, wait. Investigations revealed the “documentary” mixed hype and hoax, including non-delinquent youth recruited locally, staged scenes, and thoroughly undocumented claims. Rutgers University, Department of Justice, the UK College of Policing, and a host of academic researchers unanimously found Scared Straight! participants went on to perpetrate HIGHER crime rates than similar delinquents who were not threatened with lifer mayhem. Conclusions from “ineffective” to “potentially harmful” rained down. Washington state analysts concluded each dollar spent on Scared Straight! generated over $200 in additional state delinquency costs.

Yet, as researchers puzzle, Scared Straight!’s popularity persists. The brainless sadism toward youth among many in power cannot be discounted.

Mindless repression is the point

Strangely, legislators, officials, professionals, and reporters who eagerly crusade to slap more restrictions to save teens’ sanity, health, and precious lives – the children! the children! – showed no concern when their pet restrictions proved worthless or actually forced more risks and deaths on teens.

Yet another example: officials’ huge, decade-long 1980s enthusiasm for raising the national drinking age from 18 to 21, which short-term, limited studies alleged would reduce drunken highway crashes and “save lives” by the thousands.

Oh, wait – yet, again, Better, long-term follow-up studies found raising the drinking age (causing millions’ more “underaged” arrests along with mass exclusions of teens from vital entry-level employment and culture) only “postpones fatalities,” down some for ages 18-20, up even more for ages 21-24. Worse, states that raised their drinking ages to 21 suffered significant increases in homicide rates among ages 18-20, possibly because of reduced entry-level employment.

In short, later, powerful research found, the 21 drinking age didn’t “save lives.” It may have cost teen lives. Suddenly young people’s lives and health weren’t so precious.

Here we go again

America’s panacea establishment – slapping more and more bans and restrictions on teenagers while leaving adult rights alone (which Haidt finds just fine) will solve everything – has a long record of wild initial ballyhoos followed by later, research-based revelations of their futility and damage. Unfortunately, scientific debunkings never seem to catch up to emotional hypings.

That’s why teen-control cure-alls are dangerous distractions, major factors in why America remains an appallingly high-risk country unable to solve, or even address, critical social problems other countries that don’t scapegoat adolescents much better address.

In this case, restricting and banning teens from smartphones and social media, the long-term debunking studies are already here. As my upcoming review of more sophisticated recent research – as opposed to the primitive, outdated, weak-design studies Newsom, Thurmond, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and other panaceasts cite – will show, the teen-phone-social-media bans are just another destructive culture-war distraction with no scientific basis. Social media is good for the large majority of teens; those teens and adults who have problems are better addressed individually.

More to come.