Father asks son’s teachers to limit use of technology in assignments

Father asks son’s teachers to limit use of technology in assignments

  • Scott Kollins is a clinical psychologist who works with families and children.
  • His son was addicted to technology and needed limited access to computers.
  • Kollins said his son’s individualized education program has made it easier to adapt his use of technology.

This essay is based on a conversation with Scott Kollins, Chief Medical Officer at aura. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When my son was in seventh grade, he struggled with an addiction to technology. As a psychologist, I had questioned in the past whether phones and computers could really be addictive. But as I watched my son suffer withdrawal symptoms and lie to get more screen time, I realized this could be the case — and it was happening right in my home.

When I realized that my son was facing a serious challenge, my wife and I made a plan to limit his use of technology Lock up all devices in the house at night. But we faced another challenge: school.

At my son’s school, like most these days, all the students had laptops. There are many benefits to using it Technology in the classroombut for some children, like my son, having a computer is not an advantage.

We started with an open conversation with the school

I knew I wanted my son to have less access to it Technology in school. But I also realized that by removing the challenging thing (the computer), I created a whole new set of challenges. Since I’m not in the classroom, I probably didn’t even know what some of these unintended consequences were.

My wife and I didn’t know what the right answer was and didn’t claim to, so we asked to meet with the school. My son has Autism and ADHDTherefore, he has an Individualized Education Program (IEP). This gave us a big advantage because the school had to listen to our concerns. We also already had established ways to communicate with them and trusted my son’s educational team.

We realized we needed a fluid approach

At home, we could easily lock computers and phones when our son reached his Screen time limit. We knew it wouldn’t necessarily be that easy for school.

Instead, we came to his teachers with a statement: We want to limit his access to his computer as much as possible while supporting his learning. We asked what other systems we could implement within this framework. The details varied from class to class.

We returned to paper and pencil

Whenever possible, my son did his assignments with paper and pencil. This was fine for math problems or writing essays. But we soon realized that there were tasks that he simply couldn’t handle do without a computer – for example, watching a specific video and writing a response.

In such situations, my son was given access to his computer under surveillance. Most of the day his computer was in the resource teacher’s room and he only got it when he absolutely needed it.

The implementation was difficult, but it was worth it

I knew it wouldn’t be easy to reduce reliance on technology in school, but I was still surprised at how difficult it was. We had a big advantage: Because of my son’s IEP, we had an assistant teacher who we could reach at any time. Even so, Limiting computer time required a tremendous amount of communication with teachers as well as on-the-fly adaptation to the type of tasks my son had and how he was dealing with his technology addiction at any given time.

Today my son is doing much better with his recovery from technology addiction. He is now in ninth grade and has shown that he can be trusted to use computers responsibly. Because of this, we didn’t have to talk to his high school teachers about it limiting technology. However, we may need to do this in the future.

As a professional, it’s a little concerning to me how difficult it has been to reduce the use of technology in school. There are more and more children who are addicted to technology, like my son. At the same time, we are making these same devices a key part of learning. It is a very complex problem and it will take us some time as a society to figure out how to solve it. In the meantime, it’s up to parents and teachers to find the right answer for each child.