Homeschooling — Curse of the Smartphone

One of the first things I taught Sean when we started our homeschooling journey was how to use his smartphone to scan his work and send it to his teachers.

After a few weeks, it became clear, that he needed a better phone to work independently. The quality of the pictures his old, very battered smartphone took was not good enough. Taking a readable scan often took several tries. Then the phone would freeze in the middle of the whole process and he'd have to start over.

I am all for eliminating unnecessary friction when it comes to stuff I have to deal with a lot so I upgraded his phone.

Sean quickly learned how to make good use of the new device. He uses it for his calendar, to check his e-mail, to check the learning platform and upload his work there, and to stay in contact with his classmates and teachers.

Where before the phone was optional, he now had a legitimate reason to have it practically glued to his had.

Pre-homeschooling, I had no qualms about taking the phone away when I noticed that it was keeping him from doing something. Now that he needs the phone to actually do the things he needs to do, taking it away is a lot harder.

Ah, the gift of technology.

But also the curse.

You see, the phone is not only Sean's biggest helper. It is also the biggest distraction, especially now that it is fully functional and not a super slow carrot of a device.

Every time he wanders off mentally and loses hours of time, the phone has something to do with it. He'll start by checking the learning platform, then "just quickly watch something on YouTube for five minutes" and then end three hours later with nothing done.

When I am at home, I notice this and can intervene. When I am out, though, he can pass a whole day and then feel very bad about himself at the end of it because the only thing he remembers is being sucked into YouTube.

One day last week, it got to a point where Sean felt terrible about how things were going, he wanted to study for a French test, around him everything was a mess, and he felt like he couldn't even get up from his bed to do something about it. He kept returning to his phone for just another five minutes.

He looked helpless and depressed.

I was worried sick. It’d been a long time since I’d seen that kind of hopeless “I am stuck and giving up” look on his face.

At this point, he had noticed himself that every time he had the phone, he would spiral into a big hole of distraction and then feel horrible. He knew this but felt unable to do anything about it by himself.

So, after some deliberation, we decided to remove the phone from his room.

It is now set up on a nice dish in the hallway where he can look at it any time he wants. He can check it as many times as he likes and even watch YouTube or play - as long as he is standing up while he does that.

Within hours he started to feel better and even tidied his room. ALL of it.

My intention in putting the phone elsewhere wasn't to be prohibitive about the phone and control access to it. The idea is to make accessing the phone just uncomfortable enough to insert a little bit of time between the autopilot that goes off in Sean and the action of opening an app on the phone that he then gets distracted with.

He still picks up the phone and watches things on YouTube when he really wants to, but he has a little space to think before he finds himself five videos down a rabbit hole.

It's still tricky when he needs the phone for something school-related, but he's starting to develop some awareness of when he starts to drift. A couple of times, he put the phone back on its dish without my telling him because he noticed that he was on YouTube while he should have been on maths.

We'll see how it goes - schools are closed again so we'll have plenty of time to practice.

Plenty of time to take back control of his attention.