The Darkest Reason Why Parents Are Against Phone Bans Seems Irrational—but Is It?

Earlier this year, when the Kansas House Education Committee introduced a bill that would require all school districts in the state to prohibit the use of cellphones during school hours, Kim Whitman, a mother of two and co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, reached out to her state representative to get a sense of whether she planned to support it. Much to the contrary, the legislator “kind of lost it,” Whitman told me, emotionally denouncing any bill that wouldn’t allow her to maintain contact with her children throughout the school day. Floating the possibility that her kids could still keep phones in their lockers did little to appease her, “because then she wouldn’t know which specific classroom they were in, in case there was an active shooter,” Whitman said. “So that’s what we’re dealing with.”

The legislator’s response shocked Whitman, but it didn’t surprise her. Having spent the past few years advocating for schools to tighten their loose cellphone restrictions, Whitman knows the idea is unpopular among parents—according to one survey, just one-third of public school parents say they’d support such a measure. “The No. 1 reason we hear from administrators that haven’t implemented a policy is they’re afraid of parent pushback,” Whitman told me. And shootings top the list of parental objections, Sabine Polak, a fellow co-founder of the movement, told me. When Daniel Oppenheimer, an Austin-based parent of two, tried and failed to build parental support for more restrictive phone policies at his kids’ school last year, the issue of guns came up multiple times, “maybe more than any other reason.” Polak suspects guns are the reason that the U.S. has been slower than other countries to crack down on school phone use.

Many of those keeping tabs on the mounting evidence of the social, mental, and emotional harms of heavy smartphone use among teens find the shooting argument somewhat befuddling. School shootings are exceedingly rare, even in the U.S. Very few of the children who fall victim to gun violence each year are shot at school. The vast majority of those who are do not die in the sort of deliberate, indiscriminate attacks that get extensive media coverage. And the idea that having a phone in a shooting would meaningfully impact a child’s survival is (people who advocate for stricter phone policies like to argue) tenuous at best. In fact, phones have the potential to hinder student safety by distracting kids from emergency response directions, overwhelming communications systems, or producing lights and sounds that may give away a student’s location, Shawna White, director of school safety for the education nonprofit WestEd’s Justice and Prevention Research Center, told me. And parents flocking to the school in response to their kids’ panicked calls could swamp traffic routes needed for first responders.

To Oppenheimer, the fact that so many parents are convinced that a phone’s hypothetical utility during such an exceptional scenario would outweigh the damage it causes the rest of the time seems to reflect some combination of denial and magical thinking. Whitman suspects that the phones mostly operate as an “emotional safety blanket” for parents more than anything else. “They feel like, Well, if I can contact my child, maybe somehow I can control the situation, which is, you know, of course, false,” Whitman said.

In conversation with such parents, I was surprised by how readily most admitted to all this: the harms of smartphones, the relatively low risk of a school shooting, and the limits of their ability to protect their child from one over a phone line. Their hesitation to part with whatever sense of security the phones seem to offer them seems to lie deeper than anything a broad statistical analysis can counter. For while the educational and social harms of phones at school are obvious to most, they do not affect all kids equally. While shootings are rare, the methods America has chosen to protect children from them make them difficult to put out of mind. There’s a clash of realities here. Proponents of stronger phone bans think opponents are clinging to an illusion of control. What those parents opposing bans would argue is that schools, with their bulletproof doors and active shooter drills, are guilty of the very same wishful thinking.

The ongoing collapse of teen mental health across the developed world is making it harder to dismiss concerns about the negative impacts of smartphones and social media as prudish grumbling. Even those who aren’t sold on the idea that smartphones are driving teens to suicide must concede that they are highly disruptive in school; a robust body of research suggests that having a phone on you in class or while studying, even if it’s in your pocket or in the hands of a peer, hinders academic performance. The Program for International Student Assessment goes so far as to blame digital distraction for the decadelong decline in test scores across OECD countries. And then there’s all the social weirdness of attending a smartphone-saturated school: the loss of face-to-face conversation when students spend every spare moment scrolling, the looming anxiety of having your blunders captured and posted to social media. School administrators report spending huge amounts of time dealing with fights, threats, and other drama instigated by social media, Whitman told me.

Of the several parents I interviewed for this piece, not one contested the idea that phones are causing real problems in schools, for students and teachers alike. “Kids should have less access to phones and social media generally,” Sarah Gavin, a mother of four who lives in a Seattle suburb, told me. “And having a phone sitting at your desk that you’re able to take a look at anytime that you’re supposed to be learning is bad. 1,000 percent.” In an ideal world, Gavin and others agreed, schools would ban phones. But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in America, where kids are sometimes shot to death at school. And a child’s life is far more precious to a parent than their GPA. “I recognize all the educational arguments and psychological arguments,” David Davalos, a father of one teenage daughter, told me. “But it beats a dead child every time.”

That said, few of these parents reported serious phone-related worries about their own children. Nam Le, a father of two who lives in Denver, got his children smartphones at a pretty young age, which he admits he did largely because he couldn’t keep his own phone away from them. But he has few regrets about doing so. His children, now teens, are both straight-A students and seem well adjusted. Le and others expressed some skepticism that smartphones bear all the blame for modern kids’ woes. “A lot of what we’re talking about is also parenting,” Davalos told me. “We have raised our kid to be responsible with phone use … I’m not prepared to surrender my ability to contact her directly because some other kid can’t handle using the phone properly.”

Compared to what they perceive as the largely diffuse and abstract concerns about phones, attention, and socialization, the threat of a school shooting seemed to weigh far more heavily on these parents’ minds. Here, it was impossible to ignore the ways that the steady stream of high-profile mass shootings had shaped their thinking. Multiple parents noted that they were in high school when Columbine happened, and remembered how immediately it shattered their sense of safety. Most credited what happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in 2022—the utter timidity of the police response, the bravery of the mother who rescued her own children from the school, the tragedy of the student begging a 911 dispatcher for help—for cementing their conviction that their children would not go to school without a phone on them.

But the sense of vulnerability to gun violence parents expressed went beyond mere media sensationalism. Le, who lives just a few miles from Columbine High School, noted that other schools in his area have had school shootings in recent years. Davalos lives in Boulder, which made national news a few years ago when a gunman opened fire at a King Soopers grocery store. The fact that such incidents are statistically rare is of little comfort when you know people who have fallen victim to them. “It’s also extremely rare to be killed while you’re shopping for groceries. But we know people who were,” Davalos said. Even smaller tragedies seemed to contribute to a pervasive sense that guns are not something any American parent has the luxury of forgetting. Ryan Mayo, a father from Southern California whose son is starting school in the fall, recalled a childhood friend who accidentally shot himself to death soon after his high school graduation. Mayo’s concerns seemed to stem not from the scourge of school shootings in particular but the free flow of guns throughout the country that makes it so easy for a misguided or angry teen to get one.

None of the parents I spoke to had children who’d been through a school shooting, but most of them had experienced gun-related lockdowns, which is hardly surprising. “Shots were fired on [an American K–12] campus more than 300 times last year, but that really pales in comparison to all the other times that schools are locked down for threats or reports of weapons, or swatting or other things,” David Riedman, a data scientist who runs the K–12 School Shooting Database, told me. According to Pew data, nearly 1 in 4 school teachers said their school had an unplanned gun-related lockdown last year.

Parents noted that the communication from schools during these incidents is typically limited and slow, and that they relied on their kids to fill in the gaps. Both of the lockdowns Davalos’ daughter underwent turned out to be false alarms, but he said it was a solid 30 minutes after word of the emergency initially reached parents that the school followed up to reassure them there was no threat. “That’s a long half hour for a parent, when I can hear from her in five minutes,” Davalos said. Sometimes, these parents said, there is no follow-up. In one recent episode, Le said he received a text message from the school about a weapons-related incident, as he does a few times every year. The school didn’t carry out a lockdown, and only the following day did he learn—from his children—that a student had brought a gun to school. He found it baffling that such a situation didn’t warrant so much as an email, but it came as no surprise to Riedman. “It’s really rare for the schools to provide that information, because they’re not legally mandated to. And it looks bad for a school official to release information that says a gun was found on the campus,” Riedman said.

The frequency of such lockdowns are, to some extent, a byproduct of how we’ve chosen to deal with the threat of school shootings as a country—not by reining in easy access to guns, but by fortifying schools. The lockdowns at Davalos’ daughter’s school were triggered after someone used the wrong entrance. The schools Gavin’s teens attend have been locked down a few times over the years because there was a shooter somewhere in the broader neighborhood of the school. Le’s son went through a lockdown a few years ago when the school’s active shooter alarm went off by accident. (According to Le, when the alarm went off, his son’s teacher immediately called his family to say goodbye.) Such false alarms have become increasingly common as schools have added an array of new technologies to help prevent or manage shootings, Riedman told me. A Texas high school went into lockdown last fall when the school’s new A.I. gun-detection system mistook some shadows and brush for a rifle. In Riedman’s view, kids being equipped with phones during such false alarms could prevent parents from unnecessarily swarming a school.

Parents were largely grateful for these hypervigilant systems. “I’d rather they err on the side of caution,” Davalos told me. But while extensive safety protocols may reassure parents that schools are taking the threat of a shooting seriously, they also heighten the sense that shootings are a serious threat. In addition to trigger-happy lockdown protocols, schools have staffed up with school resource officers and security guards, erected bulletproof entrance vestibules and metal detectors, and adopted rigid drop-off and pick-up protocols and regular active shooter drills. “There’s a sort of tangible sense of fear around, or just awareness around, the possibility of violence,” Oppenheimer said.

Beyond reassurance and speedy information, parents felt that phones offered them, if not control, at least the opportunity to do something. Mayo heard from a friend that the best method for surviving a shooting is to get as far away from the building as possible, as quickly as possible, which is exactly what he intends to instruct his child to do—regardless of what the school tells him. Gavin wants her children to be able to communicate with their peers, many of whom have group chats set up for the specific purpose of coordinating in the event of a school shooting. “This is something that our kids have to think about day in and day out. And they see their phone as a way to protect themselves,” Gavin told me. And if their children didn’t end up making it out alive, parents wanted an opportunity to say goodbye. “If we can’t save her, then we at least want to be with her, you know, to the extent that we can,” Davalos said.

Parents admitted that the odds of their phone making or breaking their child’s survival was slim, but they refused to believe it was nonexistent. Again, everyone seemed to feel that Uvalde offered proof that parents can make a difference, and that a child with a phone could be a resource to responders. And they largely scoffed at the idea that a phone might make their child less safe. Le doubted there was any proof of that being the case. Mayo thought it seemed sort of ridiculous that kids would not have their phones silenced, as his always is.
Gavin found the implication that kids would be on TikTok during an emergency insulting. “I think teachers and kids are smarter than to be distracted when they’re in a life-and-death situation,” Gavin said.

When I ran these points by school safety experts, they admitted there’s quite a bit of gray area. They weren’t aware of any specific research on whether phones help or hinder safety during a shooting. And they couldn’t discount that there are scenarios where phones have proven helpful. “There are few absolutes and many, many factors and judgment calls at play,” White conceded. Nevertheless, she told me, “I generally still feel that cellphones have more potential for harm than good.”

That’s a sensible response, but I found myself doubting that it would mean much to the parents I consulted. For parents to believe that their kids are better off without a phone during a school shooting, they’d first need to believe that American schools know how to reliably protect students from guns. And that is one strand of magical thinking that parents seemed wholly unwilling to entertain.