Faith Works: What years of summer camp can teach us about students' cellphone use

Word out of Los Angeles is that their giant school district is taking steps to ban or block student use of cellphones on campus. Still many details to come, I can tell.

When I’ve written about school staff talking about their concerns around student use and misuse of smartphones during the school day, I’ve quickly gotten pushback from parents about the core concern they have over being able to be in touch with their children, and the issues they raise are not just “to prevent them from having a bad day” or other easy retorts one could offer.

Health and medical issues, as well as problems with existing student care plans arising, are real and a problem. It’s not as simple as “Well, write the IEP (individualize education plan) to give them permission to have a cellphone on their person,” which is one reaction that comes up often. Having one in a hundred students with an authorized phone creates issues all its own, including pressure from peers to use their phone, etc. You can imagine how some of those scenarios would play out.

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Meanwhile, reputable scholars and educators, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt foremost among them, are mustering evidence that smartphones and social media should be held back from children until age 16 or thereabouts. And as I’ve said here before, local educators have said to me they believe the harm they see done between youth with this technology makes them want to treat smartphones like firearms: legal in society, perhaps, but completely banned on school property. I’ll admit, it seems drastic, but I got to grow up without these tools and didn’t have to learn how to manage them until I was, um, old. Older, anyhow. It was still fairly new when my child got to that age, and we simply didn’t have to deal with the question of a 9-year-old having an Instagram account or a 12-year-old with Snapchat.

What I recall each summer, now, is my work in the 1970s through the early 2000s as a director of summer camp programs, Scout camps and later church camps. There was an arc to the week that you got used to, starting with arrival and check-in on Sunday.

Sunday night to some degree, but more insistently on Mondays, you dealt with homesickness. I worked early on with mostly middle and high school youth, later on third through fifth graders. If you had a hundred kids at that particular week, you would have two or three “homesickers” to deal with. The cabin counselor would do what they could, but the most upset or fearful would end up referred to you, sobbing on a bench while the rest of the group went to the pool or had some other activity, or maybe even outside of the dining hall during meal time.

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I always had an ace in the hole, though. There was one, count ‘em, one phone in camp, usually in the kitchen. Maybe a second one in the camp office at the other end of the grounds. No kid got to a phone without the director’s say-so. Some camp directors used the “phone’s down; no idea when it will be working” trick. To each their own, but I never did that one. I just explained they couldn’t use the phone until I gave permission, and as the single path to calling home, they had to talk to me.

Let’s just say that is not an option any camp director has today. And that’s a huge loss of leverage. But the toothpaste is out of the tube.

How should people of faith think about and talk about social media? There’s more to consider here, and the summertime may be a good time to do that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he had a candy bar phone as long as he could. Tell him how you would like to see churches respond to this issue at [email protected], or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Student cellphone use, or lack thereof, at summer camp