i-addicted

In 2017, 39,773 people were killed by guns. That same year, 15,341 drivers between the ages of 15–29 were killed due to “ distractions related to cell phone use.

I would never put a gun in my kids’ hands , but I do put phones in their hands.

I looked up this statistic just now after having interesting conversations with my first two classes today. I posited that much of this “stress” that we constantly hear about with our teens comes from a complete inability to manage time due largely to their phone addictions.To my surprise, they agreed. Every one of them said they are terrible at managing their time, and they attributed it to the fact that they are completely enamored and absorbed with their phones.

Who can blame them? We know their minds are undeveloped and yet so many of us put these miracle devices into their hands. We wouldn’t hand them car keys- but we let them have phones. We don’t let them use knives- but phones? No problem.

I believe that so many of the issues we see in young people today are due to phone addiction- from ADD to obesity and, to exacerbate that, the age at which kids HAVE phones keeps getting younger, so it will be more and more the norm.

I have an assignment just now in which I asked kids to pick a song of their liking and describe how they lyrics are existential. Within seconds, a kid said out loud, “ Go to this site and song lyrics are explained”. This compulsion with phones is even supplanting original thought and obfuscating the line between cheating and not cheating- the student seemed completely surprised when I reprimanded him.

So, phones killed almost half as many people within a small age demographic as guns did altogether in 2017. I would say phones are killing our youth in more ways than one.