What Precisely Are Teens Doing b/w 6pm and Midnight?
We study the heck out of 8am to 3pm, yet mostly guess what's on the other side of teen bedroom doors
Over at Thomas Fordham Institute this morning, Sean and I write:
For decades, field biologists tried to understand animals by observing them during the day. They’d sit in a jeep, holding a notebook, maybe wearing a funny hat. They observed what lions, elephants, or jaguars did under the sun.
In the late 1990s, though, camera traps caught on. These were motion-activated, infrared cameras. Little memory cards meant you could leave it there for weeks. So the field exploded with new insights. Some ideas were simple: Lions weren’t lazy, they hunted at night! Some were complex: When you watched coyotes creep into farms, you’d better understand components of the “human-animal conflict zones” (as the conservationists call it).
Education is in a trap. Our field studies daylight behavior—8 a.m. to 3 p.m.—in great detail. Classes are observed, schools are visited, test scores are released. We can describe five different math curricula and how they differ.
But we’re missing what happens after dark: the TikTok binge, the fight over putting the phone away, the slow collapse of homework, the late-night texting and gaming that leads to five hours of sleep, the kid whose executive function is so shot he couldn’t get his homework done if he were in an empty jail cell.
Yes, we have the outlines of the story, but not the details. It’s not sufficient to just say “Yeah, phones.” If we had our own version of camera traps for the 6 p.m.-to-midnight hours—qualitative research, family interviews, ethnographic study—we’d finally see the real factors shaping student success or struggle—and how it’s different in 2025 than in 2015, not across a kid here or there, but across enough of them to draw patterns.
And
Now let’s turn to Jonathan Haidt. You all know The Anxious Generation—his thesis is that smartphones have harmed children. What has Haidt changed his mind about in the past year? He just told Ezra Klein, “I think I grossly underestimated the harm that’s happening. Because I focused on mental illness, but the bigger damage, I think, is the destruction of human attention in possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world.”
Read the whole thing here.
Not everyone agrees with Haidt. Here’s Matt Allio:
Here’s what I’ve found in my consulting work on the campus of Tianjin Guanghua Foreign Language School (1st through 12th Grade, 900 students), as simply as I can frame it:
Technology use is ubiquitous in China. Still, the vast majority of children I observe can pay attention for exceedingly long periods of time in school. There does not appear to be a destruction of human attention.
I have a very strong rationale on why I believe children in China can pay attention in school for long periods of time. It’s conspicuous to me. It’s complex. I’ll leave it at that.
Sean and I have seen something different, but just glimpses.
We hypothesize that the issue is less 8am to 3pm concentration lapses (can be overcome by teacher) and more with 6pm to midnight, behind closed doors.
See this graphic from the Financial Times last month:
Better data is hard to assemble. There is homework completion data (on Canvas, Google Classroom, and the like) but that includes ton of cheating (both AI and original recipe). We lack good “Field Notes” and that’s what I’d love to read more of (and contribute).
It’s important we get teens off their screens and return them to their native habitat outside gas stations.
There's an argument out there that smartphones have fried young peoples' brains. They just can't focus, read full books, etc. That oversimplifies, in my opinion, a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, and also frames it in a way where we should maybe just give up. The brains are fried, nothing to do but lower standards and keep it moving.
Here are a bunch of different reasons students have trouble focusing today:
Phones are an "immediate distraction." Kid tries to focus, phone buzzes, focus gone.
Kids are staying up late playing video games. I've taught a bunch of students in this boat. Didn't exist in the same way 20 years ago.
Phones have created a social media world that is absolutely brutal for many kids. They are thinking about what Jenny said, or what Jimmy posted -- even if the phones are out of classrooms, that trickles in.
Screens in general are bad for focus because of habits. Students are in the habit of playing games, instant gratification, etc, and screens bring in all those habits.
The focus on standardized testing has focused on excerpts and short chunks of reading over sustained attention to long-form books.
Some of these are things schools can control, some are tougher.
But my big theme is that attention and focus are context-dependent. I don't think focus has become impossible for kids, I think these are tractable problems that we can work on and not just say "their brains are fried, I give up."
What other things are pulling at student focus from your perspective?
"But my big theme is that attention and focus are context-dependent." Generally agree. That's why Sean and I want to go deep - study precisely that context.
What else pulls at student focus? I'd speculate: Less exercise. Less in-person socialization. Both these things increase generalized anxiety, which saps executive function.