Chapter 11 What Schools Can Do Now

Chapter 11

What Schools Can Do Now

In April 2023, The Washington Post ran a story with the headline “One School’s Solution to the Mental Health Crisis: Try Everything.” [1] It was about a K–12 school in rural Ohio whose leaders had brought in more therapists and purchased a new social-emotional learning curriculum offering formal instruction in “qualities like empathy and trust, and skills like relationship-building and decision-making.” The school encouraged children as young as kindergarten to sing about their emotions in music class. They brought in horses for children to pet and groom in after-school care, courtesy of an organization that promotes trauma-sensitive experiential learning.

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes it is better to do a big thing rather than many small things, and sometimes the big thing is unnoticed but right underfoot. To address the widespread anxiety in this generation, there are two whales—two big things that schools could do using mostly resources they already have. These are phone-free schools and more free play. If they are done together, I believe they would be more effective than all of the other measures schools are now taking, combined, to improve the mental health of their students.

Phone-Free Schools

Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado, went phone-free back in 2012, at the start of the mental health crisis. The county around the school had among the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado when Shane Voss took over as head of school. Students were suffering from rampant cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, and constant social comparison. [2]

Voss implemented a cell phone ban. For the entire school day, phones had to stay in backpacks, not in pockets or hands. There were clear policies and real consequences if phones were found out of the backpack during school hours. [3] The effects were transformative. Students no longer sat silently next to each other, scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talked to each other or the teacher. Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban, “It’s kind of like the zombie apocalypse, and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It’s just a very different vibe.”

The school’s academic performance improved, and after a few years it attained Colorado’s highest performance rating. An eighth grader named Henry explained the effect of the phone ban. He said that for the first half hour of the school day his phone is still in the back of his mind, “but once class starts, then it’s just kinda out the window and I’m not really thinking about it. So it’s not a big distraction for me during school.” In other words, the phone ban ameliorates three of the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood: attention fragmentation, social deprivation, and addiction. It reduces social comparison and the pull into the virtual world. It generates communion and community.

Naturally. Smartphones and their apps are such powerful attention magnets that half of all teens say they are online “almost constantly.” Can anyone doubt that a school full of students using or thinking about their phones almost all the time—texting each other, scrolling through social media, and playing mobile games during class and lunchtime—is going to be a school with less learning, more drama, and a weaker sense of community and belonging?

Most public schools in the United States say that they ban phones; 77% said so in a 2020 survey. [4] But that usually just means that the school forbids phone use during class time , so students must hide their phones in their laps or behind a book in order to use them. Even if such a ban were perfectly enforced by hypervigilant teachers patrolling each row of the classroom, it would mean that the moment class ended, most students would pull out their phones, check their texts and feeds, and ignore the students next to them. When students are allowed to keep their phones in their pockets, phone policing becomes a full-time job, and it is the last thing that teachers need added to their workload. Many of them eventually give up and tolerate open use. [5] As one middle school teacher wrote to me, “Give teachers a chance. Ban smartphones.”

A phone “ban” limited to class time is nearly useless. This is why schools should go phone-free for the entirety of the school day . When students arrive, they put their phone into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch. At the end of the day, they retrieve their phones from the locker, or they access a device that unlocks the pouch. (Some parents object that they need to be able to reach their children immediately in case of an emergency, such as a school shooting. As a parent I understand this desire. But a school in which most students are calling or texting their parents during an emergency is likely to be less safe than a school in which only the adults have phones and the students are listening to the adults and paying attention to their surroundings. [6] )

The evidence that phones in pockets interfere with learning is now so clear that in August 2023, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) issued a report that addressed the adverse effects that digital technologies, and phones in particular, are having on education around the world. [7] The report acknowledged benefits of the internet for online education and educating some hard-to-reach populations, but noted that there is surprisingly little evidence that digital technologies enhance learning in the typical classroom. The report also noted that mobile phone use was associated with reduced educational performance and increased classroom disruption. [8] So going phone-free is a crucial first step. Each school would still need to consider the effects of laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, and other devices through which students can text each other, access the internet, and be pulled away into digital distractions. The value of phone-free and even screen-free education can be seen in the choices that many tech executives make about the schools to which they send their own children, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where all digital devices—phones, laptops, tablets—are prohibited. This is in stark contrast with many public schools that are advancing 1:1 technology programs, trying to give every child their own device. [9] Waldorf is probably right.

Additional evidence that phones may be interfering with education in the United States can be found in the 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress (otherwise known as the nation’s report card), which showed substantial drops in test scores during the COVID era, erasing many years of gains. However, if you look closely at the data, it becomes clear that the decline in test scores began earlier. [10] Scores had been rising pretty consistently from the 1970s until 2012, and then they reversed. COVID restrictions and remote schooling added to the decline, especially in math, but the drop between 2012 and the beginning of COVID was substantial. The reversal coincided with the moment teens traded in their basic phones for smartphones, leading to a big increase in attention fragmentation throughout the school day. But it wasn’t Kurt Vonnegut’s egalitarian dystopia, where the top students had to wear an earpiece that disrupted their thoughts. Instead, it was the students in the lower quarter whose scores dropped the most between 2012 and 2020. These students are disproportionately from lower-income households, with Black and Latino students overrepresented.

Studies show that lower-income, Black, and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives, on average, than children from wealthy families and white families. (Across the board, children in single-parent households have more unsupervised screentime. [11] ) This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race. The “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.

But smartphones don’t just damage learning. They also damage social relationships. In chapter 1, I showed that students across the globe suddenly began to disagree more often, after 2012, with statements like “I feel like I belong at school.” Because adolescents today are starving for community and communion, phone-free schools are likely to bring about a rapid improvement in school socializing and mental health. [12]

Of course, the internet itself is a boon to education; just think about the profound global good done by a platform like Khan Academy. Look at how Khan Academy is now using AI to give every student their own personal tutor, and every teacher their own assistant. [13] Furthermore, students need the internet to do research, and teachers need the internet for many innovative lessons, demonstrations, and videos. Schools should help students learn to code and to use technology that expands their abilities, from statistical software through graphic design and even ChatGPT.

So I would never say that we need internet-free schools or students. It’s the personal devices that students carry with them throughout the school day that have the worst cost-benefit ratio. Students’ phones are loaded with apps designed to catch the attention of young people, pinging them with notifications calling them out of class and into their virtual worlds. That’s what is most disruptive to learning and relationships. Any school whose leaders say that they care about fostering belonging, community, or mental health, but that hasn’t gone phone-free, is standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

Play-Full Schools

Kevin Stinehart, a fourth-grade teacher at the Central Academy of the Arts, an elementary school in rural South Carolina, realized he was having the same conversation over and over with teachers and parents. Students were struggling, and many seemed to have little resilience, perseverance, or ability to work with others. The adults were all talking about the students’ fragility, but none had any idea what to do about it. Kevin was stumped too, until he attended a conference at nearby Clemson University on the benefits of something pretty basic: free play. With his school’s blessing and help from Let Grow, Kevin started to incorporate more free play into students’ lives by making three changes:

Longer recess with little adult intervention.

Opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts, to give students time to play before class.

Offering a “Play Club.” Anywhere from one to five days a week, a school stays open for mixed-age, “loose parts” free play (featuring things like balls, chalk, jump ropes), usually on the playground, or in the gym in bad weather. (But if the school can keep other rooms open, like an art room, great!) From 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.—your schedule may vary—instead of going home (often to a device or to an adult-led activity), children spend time together playing. It’s a no-phone zone! The kids are given nearly complete autonomy. There are only two rules: They can’t deliberately hurt anyone; and they can’t leave without telling the person in charge. This adult doesn’t organize any games or solve any spats. Like a lifeguard, adults intervene only in the case of an emergency. (Let Grow provides a free Play Club implementation guide on its website.)

In the very first semester he made these changes, Kevin started noticing a shift in his students:

Our students are happier, kinder, have fewer behavior problems, have made more friends, feel more in control of their day and their life in general, and in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals to no bullying behaviors and no office referrals. [14]

The next semester, he offered Play Club twice a week because “the benefits we were seeing were too huge to ignore.” How huge? Compared with the previous year, truancy cases went from a total of 54 down to 30, and school bus violation incidents dropped from 85 to 31. “In any given school year we used to have around 225 office referrals,” Kevin reported. “But now that we’ve added so much play we only have around 45.”

Kevin believes that the Play Club caused these changes for the following reasons:

Unstructured free play addresses—head-on—making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community—all while teaching them life’s most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.

The teachers themselves saw such a big change that 13 ended up volunteering to supervise the Play Club. So did the principal and assistant principal.

Note how free play achieves many of the social-emotional learning goals sought by the Ohio school that had “tried everything.” At the Ohio school, social emotional learning is taught by adults as yet one more structured curriculum. Free play at the Central Academy of the Arts, in contrast, brought rapid learning because it is nature’s way of teaching these same skills as a side effect of kids doing what they most want to do: Play with each other.

Those are the two whales: going phone-free and giving a lot more unstructured free play. A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention. It is reducing overprotection in the real world, which helps kids to cultivate antifragility. At the same time, it is loosening the grip of the virtual world, thereby fostering better learning and relationships in the real world. A school that does neither is likely to struggle with high levels of student anxiety, and will need to spend large amounts of money to treat students’ growing distress.

I’ll offer just a few additional actions schools can take that would complement going phone-free and becoming play-full. [15]

The Let Grow Project

Many American children, even in middle school, have never been allowed to walk beyond their block or drift a few aisles away from their parents in a large store. Lenore has met seventh graders—kids 12 and 13—who have never been allowed to cut their own meat because sharp knives are dangerous.

That’s why, in addition to starting a Play Club, lengthening recess, and opening the playground before school starts, Lenore and I recommend that schools assign the Let Grow Project. [16] It is a homework assignment that tells students from kindergarten through middle school, “Go home and do something you’ve never done on your own before. Walk the dog. Make a meal. Run an errand.” Students confer with their parents, and both generations agree on what the project will be.

When the child succeeds—which they almost always do, eventually—relationships and identities begin to change. The parents see their children as more competent, and so do the kids themselves. By gently pushing parents to give their kids a little more independence (and thus, responsibility), the project addresses a specific problem. Many parents have no idea when they can start letting kids do things on their own, so they just don’t. In earlier eras, kids as young as 5 were walking to school. Their crossing guards were 10-year-olds with all the traffic-stopping power of an orange sash. But those independence milestones gradually disappeared under a mountain of media-fueled fear.

We shouldn’t blame parents for “helicoptering.” We should blame—and change—a culture that tells parents that they must helicopter. Some schools won’t let kids get off the school bus unless there’s an adult waiting there to walk them home. [17] Some libraries won’t allow kids under age 10 to wander beyond their parents’ sight lines. [18] And some parents have been arrested simply for letting their kids play outside or walk to the store. When parents can’t take their eyes off their kids, and kids can’t do a single thing on their own, the result is a double helix of anxiety and doubt. Many kids are afraid to try something new, and their parents don’t have confidence that they can do something new, all of which leads to more overprotection, which leads to more anxiety.

That’s what Lenore heard when she visited a seventh-grade health class in Suffolk County, New York. Veteran teacher Jodi Maurici told her, “Their parents have just made them so scared of everything.” The students in this class were sweet and open but feared that anything they might try on their own could end up a disaster. Many said they’d been afraid to cook because they didn’t want to burn the food (or house). A few said they’d been afraid to walk the dog because what if it ran into the street? Some of the kids had been afraid to talk to a waitress because they might “mess up”—a phrase they used over and over. Everyday life was a minefield of potential failure and humiliation. (Kind of like social media.) That’s why Jodi assigned the Let Grow Project.

In fact, Jodi was so worried about her students’ anxiety levels she had each of them do 20 Let Grow Projects over the course of the year. She gave them a long list of things to choose from: Walk to town, do the laundry, ride a bus... and of course they could add their own. As the year was drawing to a close, Jodi had seen such a drop in her students’ anxiety levels that she invited Lenore to spend an afternoon talking to the kids about their projects.

One girl told Lenore she went to the park with friends for the first time without a parent. “It was so much fun !” A boy who cooked a four-course dinner, including baking a pie, felt incredibly accomplished. A girl who’d never done any sports tried out for the swim team and made it. Kids were going out for pizza, biking to the store, babysitting, and feeling something completely new. It wasn’t just a new sense of confidence. It was a new sense of who they were, which one girl explained without realizing it. Her favorite project, out of the 20 done that year, was the time she was allowed to stay home one morning without her parents and get her 5-year-old sister ready for school.

Once she got the little girl dressed and fed and put her on the bus, the seventh grader said, “I felt so grown-up!” But it wasn’t just that. “It seems small. But in the moment, when I saw her get on the bus and it drove away, I felt really important to her, important to someone.” That’s what was so new to her. At last, instead of feeling needy, she was needed.

When we give trust to kids, they soar. Trusting our kids to start venturing out into the world may be the most transformative thing adults can do. But it is difficult for most parents to do this on their own. If your daughter goes to the park and there are no other kids there, she’ll come right home. If your son is the only 8-year-old anyone in your town ever sees walking without a chaperone, someone might call the police.

Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. When an entire class, school, or school district encourages parents to loosen the reins, the culture in that town or county shifts. Parents don’t feel guilty or weird about letting go. Hey, it’s homework, and all the other parents are doing it too. Pretty soon, you’ve got kids trick-or-treating on their own again, and going to the store, and getting themselves to school.

Our kids can do so much more than we let them. Our culture of fear has kept this truth from us. They are like racehorses stuck in the stable. It’s time to let them out.

Better Recess and Playgrounds

There are three big ways to improve recess: Give kids more of it, on better playgrounds, with fewer rules.

We should all be aghast that the average American elementary school student gets only 27 minutes of recess a day. [19] In maximum-security federal prisons in the United States, inmates are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time per day. When a filmmaker asked some prisoners how they’d feel if their yard time was reduced to one hour, they were very negative. “I think that’s going to build more anger,” said one. “That would be torture,” said another. When they were informed that most children around the world get less than an hour a day of outdoor playtime, they were shocked. [20]

Recess in America—and children’s unstructured time outside school—has been shrinking ever since the publication of a landmark 1983 report titled A Nation at Risk . The report warned that American kids were falling behind those of other nations in test scores and academic proficiency. [21] It recommended increasing rigor by spending more time on academic subjects and considerably lengthening the school year. Schools responded. Time allotted for recess, gym, art, and music classes all decreased, to make way for more math, science, and English.

While the Nation at Risk report did not call for a single-minded focus on test scores, in practice that is what happened. Raising test scores quickly became a national obsession as new reform efforts penalized or rewarded schools based on test performance. The pressure on schools to deliver rising scores increased again after the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act was passed, and more recently the Common Core State Standards. [22] (The pressure was so intense that some school districts met their targets by simply falsifying their students’ test scores. [23] ) Children’s playtime was the easiest activity to sacrifice to make room for more drills and test prep. School years lengthened (cutting into summer vacation), homework levels increased (and got pushed down to lower grades), and recess got shortened or cut entirely.

As a professor, I’m certainly in favor of reforms that increase academic performance, but the preoccupation with test scores caused the educational system to violate much of what we know about child development, the benefits of free play, and the value of time outdoors. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report in 2013 titled “The Crucial Role of Recess in School.” After describing the many benefits of free play for social and cognitive development, it said, “Ironically, minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement, as a growing body of evidence suggests that recess promotes not only physical health and social development but also cognitive performance.” [24] These benefits may be particularly large for boys, [25] which suggests one more reason why boys have increasingly disengaged from school since the 1970s.

The first thing schools can do to improve recess is to give students more of it. Generous recess should extend through middle school, and some recess should be given even in high school (according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control [26] ). The American Academy of Pediatrics also recommends that schools not use revoking recess as a punishment for bad behavior, in part because it is precisely the kids with behavioral problems who need recess most. Its report also recommends giving recess before lunch, rather than the common practice of combining lunch and recess as a single short period in which students wolf down their food in order to maximize their few precious minutes of free play.

The second way to improve recess is to improve the playground. A typical playground in the United States, especially in cities, is just asphalt with a few metal or plastic play structures that were designed for durability and safety. Often there is also a grassy area for sports. But Europeans have led the world in designing what are known as adventure playgrounds , which are designed for imaginative play. One type is called a junk playground because it is filled with miscellaneous things—building materials, ropes, and other “loose parts,” often along with tools, which attract children like magnets.

New York City is blessed with one such playground on Governors Island, the best playground my children have ever experienced. [27] Signs encircling the playground (see figure 11.1) tell parents to refrain from interfering. As a parent, I know that is hard. When anyone sees a kid struggling, they want to jump in to help. It’s normal. It’s the natural outcome of being present and seeing a child who’s frustrated or taking a small risk or behaving badly. That is why it is so important that we carve out some time when kids are not with a parent, teacher, or coach. That’s pretty much the only time they will be forced to function on their own and realize how much they are capable of.

At the adventure playground, children work together to build towers and forts, deeply engrossed in joint activities. On one visit, I saw a boy hit his thumb while hammering nails, but he didn’t run to an adult. He just shook his hand for a few second and returned to hammering. (There are adults on-site, monitoring for any serious safety risks.)

While schools need not turn their playgrounds into junkyards, they can add loose parts to the mix. Not necessarily hammers and saws, but things like tires, buckets, and loose boards. Rusty Keeler, author of Adventures in Risky Play , also recommends things like hay bales and sandbags. These are so big and heavy that dragging them around “sneaks in upper body strength,” he says. [28] And because one kid can’t move a bale alone, kids end up working together, seamlessly building social development and collaboration into recess. The key thing to understand about “loose parts” playgrounds is that kids have control over their environment. They have agency. Playgrounds with fixed structures can hold kids’ attention only so long. But loose parts keep kids’ attention for hours, allowing them to build not only forts and castles but also focus, compromise, teamwork, and creativity.

Figure 11.1 . The junkyard playground on Governors Island, New York City, designed and run by play:groundNYC. [29]

A second category of adventure playground is a nature playground, as in figure 11.2, which uses natural materials, especially wood, stone, and water, to create environments that activate the “biophilia” (that is, “love of life”) response that I described in chapter 8.

Figure 11.2. A state-of-the-art nature playground just before its opening in 2023 at Colene Hoose Elementary School in Normal, Illinois. [30]

Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games. Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children’s social, cognitive, and emotional development, [31] and these benefits matter even more as young people are increasingly ensconced in the virtual world and as their anxiety levels continue to rise. One review of studies on the effects of nature playgrounds concluded:

Providing young people with opportunities to connect with nature, particularly in educational settings, can be conducive to enhanced cognitive functioning. Schools are well placed to provide much needed “green” educational settings and experiences to assist with relieving cognitive overload and stress and to optimize wellbeing and learning. [32]

The third way to improve mental health by improving recess is to reduce rules and increase trust. Essentially, schools should do the opposite of the school in Berkeley, California, that I discussed in chapter 3. That’s the school that specified exactly how children should play tag, four square, and touch football, including the rule that students must not attempt to play touch football without an adult referee.

To see what the opposite of the Berkeley school looks like, consider the “No Rules Recess” at Swanson Primary School in New Zealand. [33] Before “No Rules Recess,” students had been forbidden to climb trees, ride bikes, or do anything with any risk. But then the school took part in a study in which researchers asked eight schools to reduce rules and increase opportunities for “risk and challenge” during recess, while eight other schools were asked to make no changes to their recess policies. Swanson was in the freedom group, and Principal Bruce McLachlan decided to go all the way: He scrapped all rules and let kids make their own.

The result? More chaos, more activity, more pushing and shoving on the playground, and also more happiness and more physical safety. Rates of injury, vandalism, and bullying all declined, [34] just as Mariana Brussoni and other play researchers had been saying would happen. [35] Kids will take on responsibility for their safety when they are actually responsible for their safety, rather than relying on the adult guardians hovering over them. [36]

Could elementary schools in the United States follow Swanson’s example? Right now, few could. At many schools, the threats of lawsuits and parental protests are too great. The fear that this will take away from test prep is too high. That’s why this is a collective action problem: Students would be healthier, happier, and smarter overall, with lower rates of injury and anxiety, if schools could loosen the reins and let children play in a more natural way. But we can’t get there unless schools, parents, and governments can find a way to work together.

Re-engage Boys

Boys’ and young men’s success has been declining, on some measures, since the 1970s. I suggested in chapter 7 that the decline was caused by their gradual disengagement from the real world (due to a variety of structural forces), while they were simultaneously enticed into the virtual world by ever-improving technologies that appeal to boys’ desires. As Richard Reeves has shown, boys are lagging behind in academic achievement, graduation rates, college degrees, and almost every measure of educational outcomes. Schools are just not working for a growing number of boys.

Reeves offers a number of policy reforms that would help reverse the trends for boys, including more vocational training and CTE, as I discussed in the previous chapter. In addition, Reeves urges schools to hire more male teachers. He notes that the male share of K–12 teachers in the United States is just 24%, down from 33% in the early 1980s. In elementary schools, just 11% of teachers are male. He notes two ways that this hastens the disengagement of boys. First, there is solid evidence that boys do better academically when they have a male teacher, especially in English classes. [37] This may be due to role model effects, because boys often have few male role models in school. As one progressive education analyst wrote, “Having both male and female teachers is likely good for students for many of the same reasons that they benefit from a racially and ethnically diverse teacher workforce.” [38] Without positive male role models in their lives, many boys turn online for guidance, where they are easily led down rabbit holes into online communities that may radicalize their thinking.

A second way that the gender imbalance in education harms boys is that it teaches them—most strongly in elementary school—that the education and caring professions are female. This makes boys less likely to have an interest in these professions. Yet as Reeves points out, it is precisely in these professions that job growth has been strong for decades, and will continue to grow, while the more male-coded jobs requiring physical strength will continue to decline in number. Reeves thinks that schools can and should steer boys into the “HEAL” professions, which stands for health, education, administration, and literacy. [39] But as long as boys see few men in front of the classroom or working as administrators in the school, they’re likely to have less interest in such jobs.

The Education Experiment We Most Need

In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in the suburbs of New York City. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, with increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental health problems were baked in when students arrived for ninth grade: Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phones.

Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at my old middle school. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even many of the students arriving for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, were already anxious and depressed. And some were already addicted to their phones. [40]

We need to start prevention early, in elementary and middle schools, before our children begin wilting. Phone-free and play-full schools are easy to implement in those grades, and they cost very little money, especially when compared with the standard approach of hiring more therapists and buying new curricula. [41]

Let’s test the two whales experimentally so that we learn whether these approaches work and which variations work best. And let’s do it using entire schools for the interventions so that we can examine changes in school culture, rather than using individual children or individual classes within a single school. [42]

Here’s how it might work: A school district superintendent, or a state-level education commissioner, or a governor—anyone who has influence with at least a few dozen elementary and middle schools—would recruit a pool of interested schools. Those schools would then be randomly assigned [43] into four experimental groups: (1) phone-free, (2) play-full (that is, Play Club plus extra recess), (3) phone-free plus play-full, and (4) the control condition, in which each school carries on with whatever it was doing before, but is asked not to change phone or recess policies. [44] In just two years, we’d find out whether these interventions work, whether one of them is stronger than the other, and whether there is an added benefit to combining them.

There are many variations of this basic experiment, adding or subtracting conditions or implementing policies in different ways. [45] The Let Grow Project could be included as part of the play-full school condition, because it draws on and amplifies the autonomy, risk-taking, and independence fostered by free play. Or a study could simply compare schools that do the Let Grow Project with those that don’t.

Anxious and depressed students have been flowing from middle schools into high schools since the early 2010s, and high schools are struggling to respond—as are universities. But we can stem the flow. If we can keep smartphones entirely out of elementary and middle schools while making more room for free play and student autonomy, then the students who enter high school in a few years will be healthier and happier. If schools take these steps, in concert with parents taking related steps at home and governments changing laws to support those efforts, then I believe we can reverse the surge of suffering that hit adolescents in the early 2010s.

In Sum

U.S. middle and high schools have seen an increase in mental illness and psychological suffering among their students since the early 2010s. Many are implementing a variety of policies in response.

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full.

Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that students must not use their phones during class. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them.

A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they should put their phones into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch.

The second whale is becoming a play-full school. The simple addition of a Let Grow Play Club—an afternoon option in K–8 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minimal adult supervision—may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educational program, because free play is nature’s way of accomplishing these goals.

Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways: Give more of it, on better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and “junk,” and/or more natural elements), with fewer rules.

The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to “do something they have never done before, on their own ,” after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children’s sense of competence while also increasing parents’ willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy.

When all the families in a neighborhood or town give their children more free play and independence, it solves the collective action problem: Parents are no longer afraid to give their children more unsupervised free play and independence, which children need to overcome normal childhood anxieties and develop into healthy young adults.

Schools can do more to reverse the growing disengagement of boys and their declining academic progress relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical training and hiring more male teachers would each serve to re-engage boys. (As would offering better recess in the earlier years.)

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If K–8 schools become phone-free and play-full, and if they add in the Let Grow Project, they will be applying many pounds of prevention, which will reduce the flow of depressed and anxious students entering high schools.