Parents concerned about effect on friendships, mental health
Maplewood parent and businesswoman Dana Siomkos faced a “ticking time bomb” decision over purchasing a smartphone for her then 5th grader in 2024. She felt the pressure, but she was also aware of the challenges it could bring at that age.
“When I started opening up to fellow 5th grade parents, I was surprised to find I wasn’t alone in my indecision,” Siomkos says. “My child kept telling me, ‘Everyone is getting an iPhone for middle school.’ So I just assumed all the parents were feeling confident and certain about their decision to do the same, but they weren’t.”
Siomkos is one of the founders of Team Unscreen. The group largely started with parent volunteers from Tuscan Elementary but now has representation at all district elementary schools and has plans to be more visible in 2025.
“Team Unscreen exists to support adolescents leading lives filled with strong friendships, creativity, physical activity and hobbies,” Siomkos states. “Deferring the use of smartphones and social media through middle school is crucial to this outcome, as studies show a huge dip in kids’ interest and involvement in these activities once they get a smartphone.”
Team Unscreen promotes the national Wait Until 8th pledge, in which parents and students agree to wait until the end of 8th grade to get a smartphone. Siomkos says the group’s goal is to have half the 3rd to 5th grade families in the district sign the pledge by this spring. The intention is to lower the peer pressure in middle school to have a smartphone.
It all comes at an important time. Last year Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, captured the attention of parents, educators and medical professionals for its chief argument that “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
Although screens offer a variety of educational and entertainment opportunities, some research looks at how excessive screen time can pose significant dangers to children’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
Cyberbullying, social competition and social exclusion are the harmful effects of social media. By being online, people can physically isolate themselves and grapple with loneliness and depression. It can create the impression that one’s life is much bleaker than the perceived online lives being followed. Online experiences stand to get murkier, as mis- and disinformation rise with the increase in artificial intelligence.
In May 2024 Team Unscreen brought in Social Awakening founder and CEO Max Stossel to talk to a Tuscan Elementary student assembly and then to a group of parents in the evening. Stossel has run social media for brands and now works with the nonprofit The Center for Humane Technology, led by technology ethicist Tristan Harris, who was featured in Netflix’s The Social Dilemma.
Stossel has firsthand experience designing social media notifications meant to distract people. He explained the rise of gamification, which uses techniques such as points, badges, leaderboards and rewards to encourage user engagement through things such as quizzes, tagging, polls and reaction emojis. Stossel says technology has many benefits. A smartphone provides unlimited access to the internet, good and bad. And sometimes, the very bad.
Stossel’s message resonated with South Orange resident Vanessa Pollock of Pollock Properties Group and mother of three, ages 14 to 21. When she allowed her eldest to have a smartphone to walk to elementary school years ago, parents did not realize the potential risks associated with it.
“We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Pollock says. She has since become aware of how she and her family use technology and social media. “The good news is that there are now devices that will honor what I think most parents are craving, which is the ability to call their child and text their child … but not have all the other apps and things,” Pollock says.
Smartphone alternatives such as Gabb, Pinwheel and Bark phones are some of the devices (along with watches and articles) available as resources on the Team Unscreen website, teamunscreen.com.
Peer pressure and screen omnipresence are what fuel youth usage. A recent Pew Research Center survey conducted this fall found nearly 50 percent of children ages 13 to 17 say they’re online almost constantly. This follows the same group’s research in 2022 that showed 95 percent of young people in the same age group report using social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook. That same study showed that nearly 40 percent of children ages 8-12 use social media, although 13 is the minimum age touted as allowed by most social media platforms in the United States.
Australia recently banned social media for anyone under 16 years of age. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murphy called for a warning label on social media platforms altogether, saying we are living through a “youth mental health crisis.”
In November, the South Orange-Maplewood School District funded a program at Maplewood Middle School that partners with Yondr, a company that promotes phone-free spaces. The Board of Education’s Director of Communications, Eshaya Draper, says students secure their phones and smartwatches in pouches during the school day, with access during their conference or 8th periods at 2:45 p.m. Students maintain possession of their devices and can quickly access them for emergencies or when heading home.
Superintendent of Schools Jason Bing says, “We will continue to examine options and evaluate what other districts are implementing as well.”
The school district joined hundreds of school districts in 32 states suing social media companies such as TikTok, Meta, and YouTube over a growing mental health crisis among youth. The Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution to join litigation in late December.
District board member Elizabeth Callahan is a Tuscan parent, founding member of Team Unscreen, and a school behavioral consultant for schools statewide. She says the Stossel talk was particularly impactful for her 10-year-old son. Speaking for herself as a parent, she said it opened the door to meaningful conversations on topics such as digital hygiene and good technology habits.
Her family signed the Wait Until 8th pledge. She also said parental modeling can go a long way, such as phone-free dinners, to which Pollock says her family also adheres.
Maplewood resident, longtime educator, former journalist, and author Stephen Chiger says there is hope for anxious parents. He points out that in 2023, New Jersey became the first U.S. state to pass legislation establishing the requirement of K-12 instruction on information literacy. Chiger wrote a book called Gram and Gran Save the Summer, which is geared toward younger students. He says media literacy is important in teaching children how to develop habits of mind, such as healthy skepticism and the ability to corroborate and understand the sourcing of information being sent to them.
“The good news is that the internet and all the wonders of it are always going to be waiting out there for [kids]. I don’t think sticking your head in the sand and not going to touch any of it is good for our kids” but we need to “try to wade our kids in carefully and thoughtfully,” Chiger says.
Pollock says, “We are a village. It is an aggressively passionate village, but we are raising our kids together in these schools. While we’ll never agree on everything, if we can stay well informed and educated through it, I think it helps people in their decision making.”
Allison Weiss is a communications executive in NYC, Washington DC and Albany and former executive producer for Bloomberg Technology. She and her family reside in Maplewood.
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