Indiana said no to phones in school. Now parents have to say it at home.

By RAJA RAMASWAMY
Guest Columnist

As the new school year starts, Indiana students will spend their school day without the constant pull of smartphones. Governor Mike Braun and the Indiana General Assembly deserve credit for recognizing what teachers have known for years: children cannot learn when every lesson competes with a notification. In an era when nearly every issue becomes political, this one should not.

Indiana’s new bell-to-bell cellphone law is one of the most meaningful child wellness policies our state has adopted in recent years. The average American teenager spends more than seven hours a day on screens outside of school, more time than most of them sleep, and among heavy users, roughly one in four reports symptoms of anxiety or depression. Teen depression doubled between 2011 and 2021, a period that tracks almost exactly with the rise of smartphones as constant companions. The law sends a clear message that schools exist to educate children, not to compete with social media companies for their attention.

As a physician, I applaud that decision. As a father, I know it is not enough. I remember a night not long ago when my daughter was telling me about her day while I nodded along, phone in hand, half-reading an email I had already read twice. She stopped talking. Not because she was angry. Not because she was hurt. She simply learned, somewhere along the way, that she was competing with something she could not beat. That moment has stayed with me far longer than the email ever did.

If a physician who spends his career studying health behavior still struggles with these habits, I can only imagine how difficult they are to overcome after a long shift or a day that left nothing in reserve. We are raising children in a world deliberately designed to distract all of us. For years, we have asked schools to solve a problem we created at home.

The biggest obstacle to this law’s success is not sitting in a classroom. It is sitting around our dinner tables. It is resting in our pockets. Our children are watching us far more than they are listening to us. We tell them to put their phones away in class, then they watch us answer texts during dinner. We tell them to pay attention, then they watch us interrupt conversations because our watch vibrated. We tell them relationships matter, then they watch us choose a screen over the people sitting beside us. Children learn far more from what we model than from what we say.

Parents sometimes talk about smartphones as though they simply appeared in childhood. They did not. Children do not buy smartphones. They do not pay wireless bills. They do not decide whether phones belong at the dinner table, in bedrooms, or on family vacations. Those decisions belong to us and that reality is uncomfortable precisely because it places responsibility exactly where it belongs.

These platforms are not designed to help our children put them down. They are designed to keep them scrolling. Every notification is engineered to capture one thing: attention. Adults struggle to resist that same pull, and we should not be surprised that children do too. Schools can set boundaries during the day, but only parents can shape habits for life.

That does not require an elaborate family technology plan. It begins with a few quiet decisions. Phones stay off the dinner table. They charge in the kitchen instead of the bedroom. When your child wants to tell you about their day, your phone stays in your pocket. Not because they need another lecture about screen time, but because they need your undivided attention, and they will remember whether you gave it to them.

Perhaps the defining parenting mistake of the past decade has been confusing presence with availability. We have made ourselves available to everyone through our phones while becoming less present for the people sitting right in front of us. Those are not the same thing, and children understand the difference even if they cannot explain it. We cannot ask schools to teach attention while we model distraction.

The state has acted. In signing this law, Governor Braun did something rare in American politics: he prioritized the long-term health of children over short-term convenience. Now it is time for parents to do the same. Years from now, our children probably will not remember whether we answered one more email or responded to one more text. They will remember whether we looked up.

Dr. Raja Ramaswamy is Vice President and Physician Director of Health and Wellness at IU Health and author of “YOU Are the New Prescription.”