A community study on adolescents, screens and mental health

Big Sky School District’s media educator launches the Big Sky Community Book Club

By Leslie Kilgore EBS CONTRIBUTOR

Ashley Jenks has worked in the Big Sky School District for the past 12 years of her 15-year career as a Kindergarten through 12^th grade licensed educator. During her tenure with school-aged children at every age and stage of development, she has seen a lot of changes – particularly when it comes to the use of screens and phones in and out of the classroom.

Last school year, when she was teaching history at Ophir Middle School, she read Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” which has been the subject of many online discussions, book groups, podcasts and parent-teacher organizations across the country since its release last March.

“The distraction of phones in the classroom and all school spaces is a plight that my colleagues and I battled daily,” Jenks said. “I was witnessing the harm that smartphones brought to the educational setting as well as the heartbreaking social and emotional angst experienced by my students. The subtitle of Haidt’s book gave promise to addressing a struggle that my teaching peers and I were encountering, and it also implied that our little corner of Montana is not alone in this strife.”

As Jenks continued to see the plummeting effects of phones in the educational environment, and after Montana Gov., Greg Gianforte made a public call in August for Montana schools to adopt phone-free policies, followed by the positive results that many piloting states and schools documented after having gone phone-free, she decided to launch the Big Sky Community Book Club.

Her goal with the book club is to encourage local families, educators and other leaders in the community to further explore the outcomes that school districts across the country have experienced after employing phone-free policies during the school day. Research continues to show that phone bans have increased academic performance and improved mental health issues among students in grades K-12.  

Along with the Big Sky-based organization Wellness in Action, which supports Jenks’ efforts to bring this topic to the forefront of the community, Jenks has planned two events in November at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center as an opportunity to create more dialogue about Haidt’s book and research.

“Our launch at WMPAC will be an opportunity to gather and discuss the purpose of the group, engage in dialogue about the latest research on modern childhood and mental health, and learn the scope and communication channels for the book group. As well as enjoy some information from WIA on our local health services,” Jenks said.

A major concept addressed by Haidt is the need for all families to align and unite on this topic. He writes that supporting one another and building safety and guidance around access to digital content cannot be practiced by only a few. To be successful, it must be a group shift. 

“To be clear, technology and learning are a revolutionary advantage that humans are experiencing. Technology allows us new means of communication and efficiency that are beneficially life-changing” Jenks said. “However, Haidt’s book highlights the nature of a developing adolescent brain and its limitations. Just as we protect our children from other addictive substances, there is now a wave of irrefutable research that deems social media a detriment to adolescent growth and development.”

Jenks mentioned that she has read other books on this topic and one of the most significant issues with anything published about the consequences of a “screen-based childhood” is that there have not been long-standing or large-scale studies documenting the impacts of a digital lifestyle in adults or adolescents.

“The rapid momentum of social media as well as digital advancements has largely happened inside the last two decades,” Jenks said. “That’s not very much time for research to demonstrate clear benefit and harm analyses. Haidt’s book appears to be one of the first titles to compile scientific evidence that outlines the causation between digital childhoods and a struggling generation of kids.”

As an educator and now a media specialist at the Big Sky Community Library and the Ophir Elementary library, Jenks sees the rapidly increasing distractions that smartphones cause in a learning environment. She also witnesses the effects on appropriate developmental and social growth. However, as a parent herself, she wants to be clear that the objective of the book club is not to be a platform for parent and teacher complaints or biases.

“This is a discussion for all community members to learn, communicate and respond,” Jenks said. “I hope the Big Sky community will gain a sense of unity and collaboration on this topic and others in the future. My goal is to encourage dialogue and facilitate further discussions among parent groups in Big Sky.”