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Distinctively CHA
Next-door Neighbors
September 30, 2024
CHA is fortunate to be in close proximity to the Del City Fire and Police Departments. Under the leadership of Mr. J. Bullard, we have actively fostered a trusted relationship with these agencies. Our gym is often used by the fire department for basketball games, and the police department makes regular visits to our campus to ensure safety and provide a reassuring presence.
Last week, our pre-kindergartners took a field trip to the fire station to learn more about fire safety. From learning about hoses and trucks to the role of a firefighter, our young Crusaders were taught the importance of this role in our city.
I am so thankful to our elementary teachers, who work diligently to plan engaging field trips for our students. Each grade has time-honored trips that allow our students to learn about our community and world and look forward to the next grade’s excursions with anticipation.
Challenges in the Task of Training Children — Part 6
September 13, 2024
Young people and their parents are stuck in one or more of four collective-action traps. Each is a challenge to escape, but escape would be made much easier if families in a school worked together. If the following four actions could become community norms at CHA, I believe we would see significant benefits for students in a very short period of time.
Norm #1: No smartphones before high school
The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone, or even if only half of a class had a smartphone, then parents would feel more comfortable providing a “dumb” phone (more on “dumb phone” options in future blogs) or no phone at all. If delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade became a school norm, then students would be more protected during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty.
Norm #2: No social media before 16
The trap here is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that is where many of their peers are posting and gossiping. If the majority of students were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and students could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. This is not to say that students could never watch YouTube videos or make a social media post —only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences (which can be damaging or, even, dangerous).
Norm #3: Phone‐free schools
We are already making strides in this pursuit at CHA. Comments from the article: “The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.” Our experience at CHA in 2023-24 concurs with these findings.
Norm #4: More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world
Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. (More on this in a future blog.)
“It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.”
A “phone-based childhood” greatly reduces the amount of real-life experiences that a child can have. Put succinctly, “smartphones are experience blockers.” We should strive to give our children a childhood and adolescence that God designed them to have, to experience His creation and to develop relationships so that they can be anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.
Challenges in the Task of Training Children — Part 5
August 19, 2024
Social media usage puts students in what is known as a collective-action problem. It is what happens when everyone in the group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but every member of the group is discouraged from taking that action because, unless others take the same action, the costs outweigh the benefits.
Social media companies such as Snap, TikTok, and Meta offer products that are harmful and addicting. They are often compared to tobacco companies, but there is a significant difference. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use in 1997, nearly two thirds of high school students did not smoke. A teen could be in a group in which some smoked and some did not, and those who chose not to smoke did not incur any harm from within the group. That is not true regarding the use of social media. Consider the following explanation:
“Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.”
A recent study at the University of Chicago captured the dynamics of the social-media trap.
“The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.”
“Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.”
Next time. . . four norms that, if adopted in a community, could help students break out of four collective-action traps.