Durham Academy Magazine 

Talking Tech

Families and Educators Discuss Technology’s Impact on Adolescents

By Melody Guyton Butts  |  Photography by Kate Auger

How to help the baby to sleep through the night? Which remedies actually work to soothe an upset tummy? What’s the best way to defuse a tantrum?

For … well … forever, parents have been able to turn to those who came before them for child-rearing advice. Dad is delighted to pass along the baby-swaddling technique he perfected 30 years ago. Abuela has seen enough children and grandchildren eventually sleep soundly that she can confidently assure that these sleepless nights, too, shall pass. The next-door neighbor is a wealth of wisdom on all things toddler.

And while that traditional advice structure still serves parents well — especially for the decisions and anxieties of the first several years of parenthood — many parents have found that, in these modern times, the advice well runs dry when their kids reach adolescence and thorny issues around technology arise. How do I decide whether or when to give into pleas for a smartphone? … Would a smartwatch or a “dumbphone” be a wise compromise? … Will forbidding social media use lead to fragmented friendships for my child? … Where should we draw the line for video games? … How can I help my child prepare for a world being transformed by generative AI?

As a parent, it’s not hard to feel overwhelmed and under-equipped. In Durham Academy’s 2023–2024 end-of-year family survey, the second-highest area of concern voiced by parents and caregivers was technology management. In previous years’ surveys, tech barely made a blip.

Around the world, the parenting zeitgeist is abuzz with concerns about the impact of technology on adolescents. It’s been five years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic kept young people stuck at home and interacting with the world via screens — and screen time remains elevated from pre-pandemic levels. Many parents and educators were alarmed and inspired to act after reading Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation, which explores the mental health impact of a “phone-based childhood.” The 2025 Netflix miniseries Adolescence — the platform’s third most popular English-language series ever, as of May — imagines a horrific consequence of cyberbullying and the consumption of misogynistic social media content.

In response to the requests for help from families, faculty and staff, Durham Academy offered opportunities this school year for community members to explore research around technology usage, to hear from experts, and to share stories, worries and suggestions with one another. Administrators and teachers have also re-examined and, in some cases, revised school policies for technology on campus.

But, in the rapidly evolving realms of technology and social media, and given the uniqueness of each child and family, there’s rarely a clear right approach. It’s complicated, and it’s personal. So on the pages that follow, you might not find all of the answers, but — if you are wrestling with these questions in an effort to do what’s best for the young people in your life — you may find that you are not alone.

Starting the Conversation

In March, Durham Academy Family Association hosted “Tech Talk” — an opportunity for parents and caregivers to engage in conversations about parenting around technology. Each of the seven roundtable discussions was moderated by one to two DA parents, among them Dr. Jill Moore, who is the association’s 2024–2025 president and mother of three children ranging from a sixth grader to a first-year college student.

“I will be at the scandalous ‘Giving Your Child a Phone’ table,” Moore says with a knowing smile, eliciting laughter from the 50 or so parents and caregivers who have delayed their usual weekday routines to gather on this Thursday morning. 

When attendees divide among the tables — there are two sessions, so they’ll have the chance to participate in two different discussions over the course of the morning — Moore finds herself sitting alone. She’d predicted as much. After all, many of the folks in attendance came in hopes of finding alternatives to smartphones. And, in this cultural moment, it wouldn’t be surprising if parents are wary of being perceived as too permissive — or too restrictive. 

Across the room, another table is being moderated by Landy Elliott, mother of a second grader and sixth grader. She introduces herself to the dozen or so parents crowded around the table and acknowledges that such conversations can be “a little bit fraught.” 

“I love Jill’s comment, ‘the scandalous table for giving a phone,’ because it’s really different for each family, right?”

After reading The Anxious Generation cover to cover last year, Elliott was eager to discuss the book’s research and suggestions with fellow parents. So she reached out to a handful of close friends to share a summary of the book.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know if you’ve read this yet. It’s all over the media. I’m dying to talk about it. Does anybody want to get together and talk about how we’re managing this?’” 

After that first small-group chat, Elliott wanted to broaden the conversation, and she invited parents of her daughter’s friends and acquaintances — even those whom she didn’t know well — to come over for snacks and conversation. “Everyone really wanted to do it,” she recalls, with about 20 parents in attendance.

They talked about when they might allow their children to have smartphones, about “dumbphone” options, about strategies for helping their children to use the technology responsibly when the time comes. 

“Some parents with older kids had been through it, and they were saying what they had done with their older child. They were like, ‘I have huge regrets. I wish I had done this, or this, or this.’”

In the months since that in-person meeting, the conversation has continued online as parents bounce ideas off one another via a shared Google Doc. When Elliott was considering offering her daughter a smartwatch, fellow parents were ready with recommendations. “I was really relieved to be able to have other people to muddle through it with,” she says.

Guidance in “muddling through it together” is just what Durham Academy Family Association, and the school as an institution, have aimed to offer via recent family education opportunities. In January, DA hosted a parent event featuring Dr. Mitch Prinstein, who serves as chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. Also co-director of the Winston Center for Technology and the Developing Mind at UNC-Chapel Hill, he is one of the nation’s preeminent researchers on technology and the developing brain. After Prinstein’s visit, it was clear that parents and caregivers wanted to continue the conversation, particularly about managing devices at home and having healthy family discussions about technology and social media.

“We don’t have a manual for how to do this, and we’re all learning in real time,” says Victoria Muradi — DA’s director of strategic initiatives and a parent of students in fourth and fifth grades — at the start of the Tech Talk event. “But these are some folks that we have leading these conversations who might be a little bit ahead of you in terms of their parenting journey, or they’ve explored it a little bit more than we may have.”
 

To Phone, or Not to Phone?

For many, the most consequential technology-related decision of adolescence is when to allow children to have their own smartphone. 

As Hem Desai, parent of a 10th grader and third grader, sees it, the phone decision is one of the few factors that parents truly have control of when it comes to technology. If a parent were to provide their child with a phone but forbid social media apps, he says, it’s all too easy for the child to bypass that rule by accessing social platforms via the phone’s internet browser. “We have to assume, once a phone is given, it’s a given.”

Desai is part of the “Wait Until 8th” Tech Talk roundtable discussion moderated by Elliott. Wait Until 8th is a national movement that encourages parents to sign an online pledge to delay giving their children smartphones until at least the end of eighth grade. The theory is that if a critical mass of parents makes this commitment, there will be less social pressure for students to have their own smartphone. 

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt endorses this idea of delaying smartphone use until high school, as well as delaying social media access until age 16. He posits that smartphones — with nonstop notifications and easy social media access, conveniently sized to fit in one’s pocket — are more distracting and addicting than other electronic devices. Computers and tablets, he says, are more likely to be used as learning tools.

When Prinstein addressed Durham Academy families in January, he was also clear in his suggestion to hold off on smartphones: “Kids don’t need to have a phone as early as they want to have a phone. In fact, there’s no research that shows that kids who don’t get a device suffer any social or academic consequences at all.” 

It’s a talk Prinstein walks with his own family; along with parents of his kids’ friends, they’ve pledged to delay giving their children smartphones.

“The number one reason why parents nationally get a phone for their kids is they don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have a phone,” he said. “So we are all engaging in the process of trying to keep up with one another, while we’re all secretly wishing that no one was giving a phone to their kids. We can change that, just with communication.”

But not all parents feel that way. Some want to make sure that their children can reach them in the event of an emergency or for logistical reasons, or to be able to see their whereabouts. And sometimes, kids are a part of teams or organizations that primarily communicate online, so not having a phone can mean missing out. 

“There’s a spectrum of where parents are on this,” Muradi says. “We as a school are meeting people where they are.”

For some families, a middle ground between giving their children smartphones and forbidding mobile devices altogether has been to offer less-connected devices like smartwatches or “dumbphones,” which allow for little more than calling and basic text messaging. As evidenced by the many chairs pulled around the Tech Talk roundtables for dumbphones and phone alternatives, there is robust interest in such options.

At the Wait for 8th roundtable, Anne Costello — parent of three children ranging from first to fifth grades — says she’s been proactive in communicating her thoughts on technology: “The line I give my child is don’t even ask until eighth grade. Like, we’re not even talking about getting one until then. … It has kicked the can down the road. I’ll even hear him tell his friends, ‘Oh, no, my mom said I can’t even ask until eighth.’”

Social Media: The Good, the Bad, the Meh

By the time Asha Patel’s children reached eighth grade, smartphones had become a necessity. “They were both playing club sports outside of school, so I’d be dropping them off in Chapel Hill somewhere, and not having a way to communicate with them,” she recalls. “That was sort of the beginning. And then the social media requests come pretty quickly. The Band-Aid gets ripped off really quickly.”

Patel, who is co-moderating the Tech Talk “Navigating Social Media” roundtable with fellow parent Rasha Prakash, says she wasn’t too worried about Instagram, as she was already familiar with the platform and felt like she could keep an eye on their activity there. But she held off on granting their Snapchat requests until they were at the Upper School and had proven that they could balance their coursework and activities. 

“They’re living in this world, and to help them navigate this world, my husband and I have tried to give them the tools they need — having a lot of conversations about what you put out there stays out there, to always put your best foot forward, to be kind,” she says. “ … Perhaps people think it’s too lenient, but for us, it’s been introducing them to things along the way, building upon it and trusting that they’re making good decisions.”

For Prakash’s 11th grade son, the messaging app Discord has served as a way to connect with members of robotics teams at other schools. They share techniques and updates on their robots, and they sometimes set up in-person hangouts outside the competition arena.

That ability to open doors and foster belonging is one reason that Prinstein says social media is “not all bad.” And, he notes, “It’s not all good.” The key, he says, is engaging with social media with their eyes fully open. That means counteracting the “digital stress” of FOMO (fear of missing out) or worrying about the metrics of a post’s performance, and avoiding mindless scrolling. 

Lauren Powell, incoming DA Family Association president for 2025–2026 and a Lower and Middle School parent, tells the roundtable group how conflicted she feels about social media use in the preteen years. “I know it’s all about setting boundaries and limits, but part of me worries that middle schoolers just aren’t able to do that at this point in their developmental prefrontal cortex journey. I get that they’re communicating in these group chats, and I have no problem with the group chats. But beyond that, I don’t know.”

As part of his visit to DA in January, Prinstein spoke at an Upper School student assembly during which he explained that social media platforms have been very intentionally designed to keep young people glued to them for as long as possible. For TikTok, he says, the proof is in legal briefs from state attorneys general. Among the quotes attributed to TikTok employees and internal memos: “The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use.” And this one prompted gasps of disbelief in both the student assembly and later in the parent event: “Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience. … If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.”

Evan McCormick, parent of third and sixth graders, has heard similar comments from American social media executives on investor conference calls. “An important part of the conversation — and we started this with our kids pretty young — is having them understand what that company is trying to do to you. When you explain to your kid that they’re purposely taking advantage of you, I think there can be a defensive mechanism, like, I am not gonna let this company take advantage of me.”

While even mature adults can struggle with social media’s addictive quality and impact on self-esteem, young people are especially susceptible, Prinstein explains. Between the ages of 10 to 25, the brain’s prefrontal cortex — “the brakes” responsible for impulse control — is maturing. For heavy social media users, there is decreased activation of the prefrontal cortex, while the anterior cingulate cortex — an area of the brain that is hyper-sensitive to social feedback — becomes overdeveloped.

“Now, we can’t say that this means that their brains are ruined forever. We can’t say this means that they can never change,” Prinstein says. “We don’t even know if that’s a good or a bad thing. If we live in a world where you have to be on your device constantly, these kids might be really well prepared to live in that world. But if we live in a world where we also want kids to have some offline interaction, we know that this is probably a setup that leads to them craving more social media, and unable to stop themselves.”

Empowering Wise Choices

Prinstein’s research shows that more than 95% of adolescents report spending more time on social media than they want to, and about half of them report experiencing “withdrawal symptoms” when they’re unable to use social media. 

“At the end of the day, we found something more surprising,” Prinstein told parents. “The more they picked up their phone during the day, the more lonely they felt by the end of the day. This makes sense, because kids tell us, ‘Yeah, I’m on there a lot, but it’s not like a real interaction with a human, where I see all sides of them and I have emotional intimacy and we talk about what we’re really caring about.’”

So, taking these negatives along with the positives of social media, what’s a family to do? What’s a school to do? 

Prinstein suggests putting in structures that limit the time that smartphones are available for use. Along with putting them out of sight prior to bedtime, he recommends keeping them out of classrooms. Research is clear that students’ access to smartphones — and merely their presence nearby — during instructional time harms both their and their neighbors’ academic performance. But he says there is not yet research on the impact of smartphones during non-instructional times at school, and he suspects that there may be value in students being able to check in with friends or mentally reset by, say, solving the day’s Wordle between classes. 

That’s in line with a policy that DA Upper School adopted last fall. While students have never been permitted to use personal devices during class, instructional spaces are now “No Phone Zones” in which students deposit their smartphones in designated storage containers as they walk into class. Phone use is allowed during non-instructional times at the Upper School, while Middle Schoolers cannot use phones at all during the school day.

Dr. Lauren Garrett serves as academic leader of the Upper School English Department, which adopted a classroom phone ban in 2023–2024, a full year ahead of the No Phone Zone going into effect campuswide. “We were tired of beginning every class with ‘Put your phones away’ and feeling like we were competing unsuccessfully for our students’ attention,” she says. 

In those early weeks of the policy, at least a couple of students acknowledged feeling anxious when physically separating from their phones. For Garrett, that was “a sign that we were doing absolutely the right thing.”

“Now, it’s like clockwork for students. They walk in the classroom, put their phones in the caddy, and chat with their classmates about the reading or their weekend. It gives them a chance to get tuned into their environment and get in the right headspace for learning and engaging.”

In an ideal world, the entire school day would be phone-free, Garrett says, noting that many students pull out their phones the very second that class ends. “But overall I see less of it, and I feel good about the direction we’re heading.”

Colin Kelley ’28 sees the No Phone Zone as striking a balance between setting healthy boundaries and being overly restrictive — “which could make you want to break the rules” or overindulge in technology after school hours. 

Kelley, Jeremiah Gibbs ’28 and Sam Padgen ’28 teamed up last year for their eighth grade Durham Challenge project, which explored the impact of social media and technology on adolescents. They were surprised to find that 20% of Middle Schoolers were spending more than four hours a day on their phone on non-academic activity. That’s four hours after a full day of school, sports practices, homework and other activities — which inevitably cuts into family time and sleeping, Pagden says. “I know that if I’m spending four hours a day on my phone when I get home, that’s certainly going to impact how much I talk to other people during the day and at home.”

Gibbs, Kelley and Padgen also found that their classmates greatly underestimated their phone usage compared with usage data available on their phones. They presented their findings to fourth grade parents in spring 2024, with a recommendation that they join together in delaying smartphones for as long as practical. 

“It’s one thing if one parent decides to do it, and then the kid is just like, Oh, I don’t have a phone, but everybody else does, and they’re doing all this stuff on their phone,” Gibbs says. “We were trying to get the whole grade not to do it so no one’s left out.”

A year after the Durham Challenge presentation, parents at the Tech Talk event are still talking about the now-ninth graders’ advice, and about how they might get movement behind a parent-led Wait Until 8th pledge.

As Gibbs, Kelley and Padgen see it, a big part of making healthier choices around technology and social media is awareness: being conscious of the negative impacts of overuse and regularly checking in on phone usage data. Kelley knows it’s all too easy to find yourself using your device more than you intended. 

“Definitely during that time when I was doing the Durham Challenge and for a while afterward, I pulled back a lot. I was maybe one hour a day. And then after that, it got up a little bit higher,” Kelley says. “But I thought back to why we did this project. Why did I actually put the effort in? And I’ve lowered my screen time by a lot.”