Today, it is rare to find teenagers who are not a part of some social media platform. 

However, experts today are warning users that too much screen time, especially on social media, is causing emotional, psychological, and physical damage. Teens are becoming more addicted to their phones, and the damage may be irreversible if they don’t change their habits.

Social media opens the possibility of teens bullying other teens. This bullying causes many teens to become depressed and isolated.

Consequently, parents have banned phones from their children in hopes to allow their children to develop healthy habits, like playing outside, visiting with family and friends, and improving their mental and physical well-being.

Some parents know of these warnings, and they restrict screen time on their children’s phone, so the children can do something else rather than being on their phones. While these restrictions may work at home, schools have had to implement their own plan of action to remedy the use of phones and their negative effects.

This year, Chanute High School, for the first time, has had to enforce a school-wide cellphone ban. Students cannot have their phones when the first bell rings at 8 a.m. to the end of the school day at 3 p.m. Their phones must be in their lockers and not anywhere else.

If a student gets caught having their phone, they get a discipline referral. If they get two discipline referrals, they have a detention.

While students don’t love this policy, the ban has forced students to be social with each other and disconnected from their phones.

Other students think it is a positive ban in school.

“It makes me focus better because I don’t have the distraction of having a phone sitting there staring at me,” freshman Rainy Carter said.

Before this year, for example, when you would walk into the cafeteria, no one would be talking to each other and they would be looking down at their phones. Now, you might notice all the loud and chaotic noise; however, that is the noise of a positive atmosphere of teens interacting with each other without the use of phones.