Principal’s Post on Empowering Young Women

Principal’s Post on Empowering Young Women

Since 1935, Our Lady of Mercy Ctholic College has held a legacy of instilling the values of leadership, excellence and service, nurturing confident young women. We empower our girls tomake their mark on society with confidence and compassion.

Managing smartphone use: Can we prevent addiction and maintain device usefulness?

In today’s digital age, the pervasive presence of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wearable devices presents a double-edged sword. While these technologies can enhance productivity and provide easy access to information, they also pose significant risks to mental health and interpersonal relationships. This issue is particularly pressing for adolescents, who are most susceptible to smartphone addiction. Please read the recent report, which highlights the growing concerns among educators, psychologists, and parents about the negative impacts of excessive device use on young girls. As we navigate this digital landscape, it is crucial to support our students in developing healthy usage habits to ensure their well-being and academic success.

Issue 3/2024 March 20 ICGS e-Brief
As a recent article in Harvard Business Review observed, smartphones, tablets, laptops and wearable devices bring with them a double-edged sword (Meister & Dael, 2024). They can improve productivity, provide ready access to useful information and make work tasks easier to complete. Yet they can also have a negative effect on mental health, affect healthy relationships and take time away from other tasks yet to be completed. 

With adolescents being the group most prone to smart phone addition, these negative effects have for some time now been of growing concern not only to educators and psychologists but to parents, families and caregivers of the young girls attending our schools (Gutiérrez et al., 2016; Avci et al., 2023). Adolescent girls are known to report problems associated with technological device use, particularly social media and smartphones (Nagata et al., 2022). In fact, the Financial Review recently questioned if “smart phone addition [is] dooming a generation of girls” (Hare, 2024). Recent student test data from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that these concerns are certainly valid. The 2022 PISA results have revealed a decline in Australian students’ knowledge of maths, science and reading. 

Furthermore, when PISA data from adolescents today is analysed with comparable data from 2000, it is clear that current students are up to two years behind their millennial peers (Bita, 2023a). It has even been observed that globally, the overuse and distraction of digital devices has caused student grades to drop (OECD, 2022; OECD Media Office, 2023; Schleicher, 2023).

Digital devices certainly don’t come without their risks. As 2022 student testing shows, Australian students who “spend more than three hours a day using digital devices for ‘leisure’… performed in the maths test at a level nine months behind classmates who did not use smartphones or laptops for fun” (Bita, 2023b). And as the OECD report, the use of digital devices such as mobile phones for leisure purposes are generally “associated with poorer [academic] results” (Cormann, 2022). But in a world where digital devices and smartphones are not disappearing, we can support girls at school and home to develop responsible usage habits and avoid addiction risk, providing them with the strongest skill set to achieve their best at school and beyond.

The risks extend well beyond student academic performance. There can be a significant impact on adolescents’ general wellbeing in this space. Overuse of smartphones “brings the risk of dysfunctional behavior, dependency, and overuse, which can facilitate a wealth of detrimental downstream impacts on our health, relationships, and productivity” (Meister & Dael, 2024). As Meister & Dael (2024) suggest while writing for the Harvard Business Review in March this year, “[t]his is when mobile phone use can become problematic”. But addressing this challenge and supporting girls’ healthy development does not mean banning all devices and the potential ensuing daily arguments! Judicial, responsible use is key, and can be learned from an early age to support positive decision making in adolescence (Cheng & Cao, 2023; Gupta et al., 2023; Hartati et al., 2023).

Families and caregivers may find themselves asking if their adolescent daughters are facing a risk of addiction to smartphones, or even just negative effects of excessive device use. The first thing to consider is their relationship to their phones. Does the need to regularly check the phone result in a loss of control, with an uncontrollable urge to check the device (Meister & Dael, 2024)? The second is dependence. Is there any anxiety, stress or irritability in the absence of the device? Does your adolescent need it with them for all their daily activities (Meister & Dael, 2024)? The other areas of concern focus on coping mechanisms and emotional regulation.

It is well worth considering if girls are using their smartphone as a coping mechanism for “negative emotions such as boredom, frustration, or stress” (Meister & Dael, 2024). Temporary stress relief is one way many age groups make use of smartphones, but this becomes concerning “when it’s used as a habitual and primary coping mechanism” that prevents girls from developing healthy and more holistic methods of addressing their emotions (Meister & Dael, 2024). Other major red flags that can accompany these concerns surrounding smartphones are increased negative emotions as a result of spending time on the device (such as stress, anxiety or loneliness), a negative impact on performance and focus, becoming a distraction to “real-world” activities, and damage to social relationships when smartphones are prioritised over “real-world relationships” (Meister & Dael, 2024). 

Rather than banning or reducing screentime, Meister and Dael (2024) suggest we should reframe our approach as one of creating healthy boundaries and making intentional decisions in this space. So how do we do this? Being able to identify the signs of “problematic use” is essential, as is making a commitment to change. Experiments or policies involving the removal of phones can be eye opening. From 2024 in Australia, all state schools and many private schools have banned the use of phones and other wearable technology during school time (The Educator, 2023). Engaging with girls’ schools who have implemented this change, Loren Bridge, Regional Executive Director, ICGS, observed that girls reported feeling less pressured, stressed and anxious about needing to constantly check their phones once the devices were no longer available throughout the day. This raises some interesting thoughts about the removal of constant exposure to smartphones for adolescent girls.

Having dedicated strategies to developing this intentional approach is crucial. Establishing healthy boundaries is one of the most common. This can include having locations where phones are unavailable, such as beside the bed at night, or having phone-free times such as family meals. Other strategies include switching off or reducing notifications and setting particular times of day to engage with leisure activities such as social media. Families can also encourage girls to develop alternative “emotion and stress-regulation strategies… [such as] physical exercise, meditation, hobbies, building human relationships, or spending time in nature” (Meister & Dael, 2024). This can help provide a replacement for the void girls may feel when they use their smartphones less often as well as a healthy alternative for emotional regulation. Lastly, professional help is available for severe addiction. However, if we can support girls to responsibly use these devices from an early age, and support them during this critical period of adolescence, we can give them the space to develop healthy relationships with the technology that is continually becoming further embedded and essential in the world.

References:
Avci, D., Gündoğdu, N. A., Dönmez, R. H., & Avci, F. e. (2023). Students as teachers: effect of the peer education model on reducing smartphone addiction in adolescents. Health Education Research, 38(2), 107-118. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyac042.
Bita, N. (2023a, December 6). Smartphone obsessions are dumbing down Australian kids, OECD testing reveals. The Australian. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/smartphone-obsessions-are-dumbing-down-australian-kids-oecd-testing-reveals/news-story/68f10420f5cb482a2b3175e829d4ebbc.
Bita, N. (2023b, December 9). Bored out of their brains: Our schooling model has left digital natives behind. The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/pisa-testing-shows-screen-time-and-distraction-have-dumbed-down-australian-kids/news-story/283fe6027ae27cf3c5d3442c02c680f8.
Cheng, L., & Cao, J. (2023). Factors influencing smart device addiction among preschool children: An extended protection-risk model perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffpsyg.2023.1017772.
Cormann, M. (2022). PISA 2022 results (volume I): The state of learning and equity in education: Preface. OECDiLibrary. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a15d14d6-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/a15d14d6-en.
Gupta, V., Gupta, A., Valjiyani, A., Uppal, S., Gautam, S., & Vishwas, G. (2023). Physical, psychological and social effects of mobile phone use in children: A prospective cohort study. Journal of Biomedical Research & Environmental Sciences, 2766, 1207-1232. I: https://dx.doi.org/10.37871/jbres1788.
Gutiérrez, J. D., de Fonseca, F. R., & Rubio, G. (2016). Cell-phone addiction: A review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 7, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00175.
Hare, J. (2024, March 1). Is smartphone addiction dooming a generation of girls? Financial Review. Retrieved April 2, 2024, https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/health-and-wellness/is-smartphone-addiction-dooming-a-generation-of-girls-20240115-p5exbo.
Hartati, S., Rachmawaty, M., Rachmat, I. F., & Maryani, I. (2023). The effect of smartphone addiction in early childhood towards emotional development: A correlational study. Asia-Pacific Journal of Research in Early Childhood Education, 17(1), 49-66. http://dx.doi.org/10.17206/apjrece.2023.17.1.49.
Meister, A., & Dael, N. (2024, February 12). Do you have a phone addiction? Harvard Business Review. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://hbr.org/2024/02/do-you-have-a-phone-addiction.
Nagata, J. M., Singh, G., Sajjad, O. M., Ganson, K. T., Testa, A., Jackson, D. B., Assari, D., Murray, S. B., Bibbins-Domingo, K., & Baker, F. C. (2022). Social epidemiology of early adolescent problematic screen use in the United States. Pediatric Research, 92, 1443-1449. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-022-02311-5.
OECD. (2022). PISA 2022 results. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/.
Schleicher, A. (2023). Programme for International Student Assessment: PISA 2022: Insights and Interpretation. OECD. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations.pdf.
The Educator. (2023, July 10). Mobile phones, smartwatches to be banned in QLD schools. Retrieved March 28, 2024, https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/mobile-phones-smartwatches-to-be-banned-in-qld-schools/282807.