timeforkids homework debate

Is Homework a Waste of Time? Teachers Weigh In

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The debate over homework rages on.

In response to an Opinion essay by a teacher titled “ What Do You Mean My Kid Doesn’t Have Homework? ”, many Facebook users took to the comments section to voice their perspectives on whether assigning homework is outdated and unnecessary—especially during a pandemic—or whether it’s a critical step to cultivating learning.

The benefits of homework have long been disputed, especially at the elementary school level. In 2018, Marva Hinton wrote about how homework was assigned at early grades and the potential effects on these young students. Some schools embraced homework, like Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., where kindergartners were expected to complete a minimum of 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday. But some teachers such as Cathy Vatterott, a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework worried that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could sour young students on school.

But what about the benefits for older students? In a 2019 article , Education Week Assistant Editor Stephen Sawchuk unpacked the results of a Center for American Progress analysis, which found that while much of the homework assigned to the students in the study aligned with the Common Core State Standards, it did not contribute to building more difficult skills called for in the standards, like analyzing or extending their knowledge to new problems.

Beyond considering the efficacy of homework, the debate over how much time students should spend daily on take-home assignments dates back to the early 1900s. The public furor even led some state lawmakers to ban homework entirely at one point. Multiple studies over the years have examined different angles of the homework debate, including just how much homework students were assigned. In 2003, a pair of national studies found that most American students spent less than an hour daily on homework, and the workload was no bigger than it was 50 years prior.

“There is this view in the popular media that there has been this terrible burden of homework on children, and that the homework is increasing,” said Tom Loveless, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution to Education Week’s Debra Viadero in a 2003 article . “That is not the case.”

Fast-forward to the present, teachers and students alike might find themselves at another crossroads in the homework debate. The pandemic brought with it the advent of strategies like “flipped learning” , which relies heavily on homework as an integral component of the lesson. While this might work for some, many students grew weary of the reliance on homework during remote and hybrid learning. This is on top of the potential equity issues arising from lack of internet access affecting students’ ability to complete the steady stream of homework being assigned, and the uptick in mental health issues in students .

So what do teachers really think about homework? Here’s what they had to say in response to the recently resurfaced essay by Samantha Hulsman.

A Disconnect Between Parents and Educators

“i teach 1st grade. i had parents ask for homework. i explained that i don’t give homework. home time is family time. time to play, cook, explore and spend time together. i do send books home, but there is no requirement or checklist for reading them. read them, enjoy them, and return them when your child is ready for more. i explained that as a parent myself, i know they are busy—and what a waste of energy it is to sit and force their kids to do work at home—when they could use that time to form relationships and build a loving home. something kids need more than a few math problems a week.”.

- Colleen S.

“I tried the ‘no homework’ policy one year and received so much pushback from my parents that I began sending home a weekly packet. I pass it out on Monday and it is due on Friday. Parents [are] happy, I’m happy, and life goes on. I say pick your battles. Now, I refuse to give packets over school breaks (winter/spring). If a parent asks, I simply tell them to have them work on any app that we use in class.”

“i literally only assign homework because some parents always make a huge deal of it if i don’t.”, “parents are the driving force behind homework ... they demand it and will complain about not receiving it even after explaining your philosophy of education and providing them with pedagogy that refutes the ‘benefits’ of it.”, homework can be useful for certain subjects or grades, “as a teacher of nearly 40 years, i believe homework has its place. especially in math math needs to be practiced to learn it. i don’t believe in giving homework just because. i think it should be purposeful.”.

- Sandra S.

“For those leading the charge against homework, please think about the expectation for students beyond your classroom. If you teach elementary school, will they be asked to do homework in middle school, high school, and beyond? If so, organization, time management, and study skills are not so easily learned at a later age, when the expectation has never been present. I can’t imagine being a student, who enters college, having never had the expectation of nightly HW.”

- Bobbie M.

Is Homework Actually Helpful for Learning?

Some agree that at its core, homework is practice, which is a needed element to achieving learning.

“Homework is practice. Practice the skills we learned about in class so we can review and add to them. My instrumental students are required to practice every day. When they don’t it’s evident.”

Others aren’t as convinced it’s actually a good tool for assessing comprehension.

“As a teacher, if the kids were assigned homework, guess when the papers were graded ... After discovering a Mom had been doing the homework and was making failing grades ... I gave it up ... taught 25 years without it and my students did much better ...”

- Martha H.

Heightens Equity Issues

“no homework ever it is unnecessary it is so elitist and ableist and teaches kids that it is expected to take work home after hours of a job. nope never”, “homework just further separates the students. those who have parents home who understand the work, or can afford a tutor will do so. families already struggling financially tend not to have parents home to help and cannot afford tutors.”.

- Rebecca J.

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The TIME for Kids Guide to Talking About Tough Topics

At TIME for Kids , one of our goals is to help equip children with the skills they need to navigate the news. We also want to make sure educators and families feel supported in this mission. Below, you’ll find two interviews that ran in TFK. The first talks to children about how to handle their feelings if the news is upsetting. The other looks at how kids can help stop cycles of anger and misunderstanding. There is also a set of resources to help you talk about tough stories in the news with the children in your life.

Gun violence is an all-too-frequent reality in our country. One way to create change is to build a community in which our children feel safe and validated. Let’s work together to achieve this goal.

—Stacy Bien, Curriculum Director, TIME for Kids

Share Your Feelings

If something in the news makes you feel worried or upset, what should you do? TFK asked an expert, Dr. Harold Koplewicz, president of the Child Mind Institute. Here, he offers some advice.

I hear people talking about the news. How do I know whom to trust and what to believe?

Turn to the trusted adults in your life—parents, teachers, and coaches—to speak about topics that concern you. If a friend shares information, make sure the source isn’t just someone’s opinion passed along through social media. Seek information from reliable sources, such as newspapers. Your school librarian can help you assess a news source’s trustworthiness if you are unsure.

I saw a TV report that upsets me. What can I do?

Sometimes, when you go on the Internet or you watch news on TV, it’s not completely accurate. The news on TV is fast-paced. When sad news affects our nation, all of us need time to understand it and process it. The best people to help you do that are your parents, teachers, and other adults you trust.

The news made me feel sad. What should I do?

Sadness is a normal emotion. Even someone strong and powerful weeps when he or she is very sad. It’s part of being human that sad events make us personally feel sad. That doesn’t mean we need to fall apart. We just have to acknowledge that we’re sad and move forward.

The news made me feel worried. What should I do?

When we have upsetting news, people respond in different ways. There are certain kids who are very private and don’t want anyone to see how they feel. Other kids share their worries. If you feel worried, talk to your parents and teachers. Getting information can make you feel more comfortable.

I spoke to my parents and teachers, but I still feel worried. What else can I do?

If you’re still very nervous, another way to feel better is to take part in activities that help others. Go with your parents to a soup kitchen, or think of ways that you or your class can help other kids. Also, make sure to keep your normal routine. Go to sleep at the right time, play with your friends, and go to the movies. It’s okay to feel sad, but it’s not good to stop doing the things you usually do.

Show Respect, Model Kindness

Understanding and inclusion start with you. TFK talked with Caryl M. Stern, president and CEO of UNICEF U.S.A. and coauthor of a book called Hate Hurts . Here’s her advice on how to handle hurtful comments and find common ground.

Be a part of creating the world you want. That means thinking and planning ahead. Do not wait until hate happens to talk about hate.

There’s no time limit for responding to a hurtful comment. You don’t have to respond right in the moment. Sometimes, you are so angry or hurt or shocked that you can’t respond. Or sometimes, it would be such a public response that you would humiliate the offender. That might not be the best way to get them to hear what you have to say. Make a plan as to when you are going to respond, and follow through with it.

Open the ears of the listener. Start by pointing out why you’re bothered and how you feel. Make sure the person knows that they matter enough for you to talk to them.

Use I statements, not you statements. Explain to the offender that you are not talking about what they said. Explain that you are talking about how what they said made you feel. You are not trying to get them to defend what they said. You are trying to explain to them why it was hurtful. You can’t necessarily change a person in one conversation. And you can’t ask someone to change who they are. But you can ask them to change the way they act around you.

Learn how to ask questions. I consider there to be two basic diversity skills. One is how to ask questions, the second is how to give answers. You want to be able to ask about things you don’t understand, but you need to know how to ask in the right way. Part of that comes from learning how to give answers and finding the right vocabulary.

Learn about cultures you know nothing about. As a class project, look at what’s happening in your community to find out what’s different from what you normally do. What festivals, concerts, or plays are happening? How many different houses of worship are there? See if each of you can get the adults in your life to take you to one of them.

Parent Resources

Our kids are exposed to so much more information than previous generations were. How do you explain to them the scary and difficult events that they no doubt hear about, without making them anxious or fearful? Our immediate instinct is to shield our children from such events. While this is perfectly natural, especially as parents are also having difficulty wrapping their heads around the events, it might not always be the best approach, according to experts.

Figuring out what your child has learned and answering his or her questions in understandable terms is usually the best approach, according to Harold Koplewicz, president of the Child Mind Institute: “By initiating this dialogue and allowing and encouraging your children to express their feelings, you can help them build healthy coping skills that will serve them well in the future.”

It’s important to stay calm as you talk through the events. Children pick up their cues from their parents, so if you act anxious, they will be anxious. Psychologist Paul Coleman, author of Finding Peace When Your Heart Is in Pieces , says parents should follow these SAFE steps.

S earch for hidden questions or fears. Ask what else is on their mind about what happened, what their friends say about it and what their biggest worry is right now.

A ct. Keep routines going—homework, bedtime rituals, and so on—because they’re reassuring and distracting. “It is a good time to have them do kind things for others,” says Coleman. Little things, like opening a door for a stranger, “remind them that there are kindnesses in this world.”

F eel feelings. “Let them know their feelings make sense,” says Coleman. Let them talk it out and show that you understand.

E ase Minds. After you’re sure they’ve talked through their fears, you can assure them of their safety.

Every week, TIME puts out a free parenting newsletter that quickly summarizes the latest interesting and important parenting stories of the week. It’s a compendium of new studies, different approaches, and a shared conversation about the joys and difficulties of parenting. I invite you to subscribe, at time.com/newsletters . In the meantime, rest assured that the key thing your child needs from you in difficult moments is your time. If you’re there, your child will sense that not much can go wrong. — Belinda Luscombe, TIME Editor at Large

Selected Additional Resources

Explaining the News to Our Kids

Tips for addressing disturbing news with children in different age groups

Table Talk: Gun Violence and Mass Shootings

Guidelines for families to understand and discuss violence with children

Talking to Children About Violence: Tips for Parents and Teachers (Available in 10 languages)

A guide for adults on creating a sense of security in response to a violent event

Helping Your Students Cope with a Violent World

Strategies to help children understand their emotions when they are exposed to hard news

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• Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
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• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Write to TIME for Kids at [email protected]

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The great homework debate

by: Christina Tynan-Wood | Updated: October 16, 2018

Print article

Your first grader is in the middle of a tea party with six of her stuffed animals. It seems to be going well, despite a recent argument between the stuffed giraffe and his zebra stepbrother. You are enjoying eavesdropping on the dialogue as you clean up the dinner dishes, but it’s time for homework. You dutifully get your child set up at her study spot and redirect her attention to a worksheet of math facts. “I hate homework!” she wails , after an hour of struggle and avoidance. Exhausted and frustrated, you are inclined to agree with her .

Your child is not the only one howling about this nightly ritual. The debate over homework has been going on for decades, with the pendulum swinging back and forth between more and less homework for American students. Adding new fuel to the debate is that today’s kids are getting more homework in earlier grades. “The amount of homework that younger kids – ages 6 to 9 – have to do has gone up astronomically since the late ’80s,” says Alfie Kohn, author of the 2006 book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing .

Homework detractors point to research that shows homework has no demonstrated benefits for students in the early elementary grades. They say younger students are not developmentally ready to learn the time management and work habits that nightly homework is assumed to teach, and that having grades depend on homework penalizes low-income students who may not have the resources at home to support nightly study sessions. On the pro-homework side are educators and parents who say that homework is necessary for reinforcing the lessons learned during the school day and that doing homework prepares kids for the work they’ll have in middle school, high school, and college.

Too young for nightly homework

Kohn falls solidly in the no-homework camp. He argues that homework in the elementary school years is more likely to drive students away from learning than to improve academic outcomes. What’s more, he says, time spent on homework is time not spent doing important activities like play, rest, and family time. He’s not alone in his view.

“The research clearly shows that there is no correlation between academic achievement and homework, especially in the lower grades,” says Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and the author of the 2015 book, Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy Successful Kids .

“Homework only really helps in high school,” agrees Heather Shumaker, author of It’s OK to Go Up the Slide . “In elementary school, there is no evidence that it has academic benefit. And yet, we are piling it on more and more, younger and younger.”

Some elementary schools have made headlines in recent years by announcing no-homework policies. Gaithersburg Elementary School in Maryland issued a ban on homework in 2012, asking students to read at home each evening instead. Last year, the principal of New York elementary school P.S. 116 sent home a letter to parents explaining why students would not be assigned any homework.

But it’s not clear how widespread the trend is. “We tried to study what school districts have homework policies. But there are thousands of school districts in the U.S. It is very difficult to know what schools are doing,” says Gerald Le Tendre, Head of Education Policy Studies at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of Promoting and Sustaining a Quality Teacher Workforce .

The pro-homework camp

Parents are among the most vocal detractors of banning or reducing homework in the elementary school grades. “Some teachers would like to not give homework,” says Shumaker. “But they are pressured to do it by either by administrators or parents. Parents want what is best for their kids. And many of them think having homework is it.”

Le Tendre agrees. “The amount of homework gets equated with some sort of academic rigor,” he explains. “Though I have seen nothing to support that idea.” But that doesn’t mean that all work done at home is bad. “If you have a highly motivated kid who loves mathematics and loves spending hours every night on Kahn Academy, they can get substantial benefit from doing homework,” says Le Tendre.

Studies show that homework has positive effects for certain students under certain conditions. For example, students with learning disabilities can benefit from homework if they have the support they need to complete it. Middle and high school students benefit from doing homework, though high school students get more benefit more than middle schoolers, and more homework definitely isn’t better — too much homework (more than about an hour and a half a night for middle schoolers and more than two and a half hours for high schoolers) has been shown to negatively affect academic performance.

And if the assigned homework is to spend time reading for pleasure, no one is likely to argue with that. “One thing we know does have a correlation with academic achievement is free reading time,” says Pope. “We know that that is something we want schools to encourage.”

In praise of purposeful homework

Points and counterpoints aside, elementary school homework is probably not going to disappear any time soon. But that doesn’t mean that your child should struggle with those worksheets beyond a reasonable amount of time. The National PTA’s research-based recommendation is ten to twenty minutes of homework a night in first grade and an additional ten minutes per grade level thereafter. If your child’s homework takes longer than that, tell their teacher. (The teacher can’t know that homework is a tear-filled, hours-long event that is making your child dread school if you don’t tell her.) Work with the teacher to make sure that the homework your child receives is appropriate for them. Homework should be challenging enough to be thought-provoking, rather than just busy work, and your child should be able to complete it independently and successfully most of the time.

Make sure you understand the teacher’s goal for assigning homework. Is the purpose of a particular assignment to review a concept covered in class? Get extra practice at a skill your child is working on mastering? Explore a topic further, according to your child’s interest? When homework is purposeful and assigned in an amount and at a difficulty level that is appropriate for your child, it will likely be easier to incorporate into your home life — and less likely to negatively affect your child’s attitude toward school.

And happily, if your child’s homework is to read for pleasure, you won’t have to ask her to put away her toys and sit down to a worksheet. Ask her to read a story to her friends while they have tea instead. Everyone will be happier.

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Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

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Poland's kids rejoice over new rules against homework. Teachers and parents aren't so sure

Warsaw, Poland — Ola Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland’s government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.

“I am happy,” said the fifth grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.

“Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn’t make sense,” she said.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernize Poland's education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.

Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn't count towards a grade.

Not everyone likes the change – and even Ola’s parents are divided.

“If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school,” said her father, Pawel Kozak.

His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. “I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned,” she said. “It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what’s going on at school.”

(Ola's brother Julian, a third grader, says he sees both sides.)

Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.

Poland's educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.

For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.

But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers' Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.

The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children “had no time to rest.” The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.

Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children’s mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, "the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework.”

Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be “very individual and contextual.”

“We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child,” Sahlberg said.

In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.

In the U.S., teachers and parents decide for themselves how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework entirely to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.

A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the U.S. recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.

The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the U.S., extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning, which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student wellbeing led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.

It's important for children to learn that mastering something "usually requires practice, a lot of practice,” said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, “things will go wrong.”

AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed.

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Poland’s kids rejoice over new rules against homework. Teachers and parents aren’t so sure

Ola Kozak, 11, sits at the table where she used to do her homework at the family home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday April 5, 2024. Ola is happy that Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. Julian enjoyed doing his homework. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Arkadiusz Korporowicz teaches history to 5th grade children at Primary School number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Pawel Kozak and his wife Magda Kozak, parents of three, stand at their home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. They have different opinions on the decision by Poland’s government that ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Children enter a classroom at the Primary School number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Julian Kozak, 9, sits at the table where he used to do his homework at the family home in Warsaw, Poland, on Friday April 5, 2024. Julian is not very happy that Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Ola Kozak, 11, right, and her younger brother Julian Kozak, 9, sit at the table where they used to do their homework at the family home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday April 5, 2024. Ola is happy that Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. Julian enjoyed doing his homework. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Poland’s Education Minister Barbara Nowacka announces restrictions on the amount of homework for primary school children, at school number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Opinions are divided on what results can be expected from the strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Pawel Kozak, father of three, speaks at his home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. Pawel and her wife Magda have different opinions on the decision by Poland’s government that ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Magda Kozak, mother of three, stands at her home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. Magda and her husband Pawel have different opinions on the decision by Poland’s government that ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Julian Kozak, 9, sits at the table where he used to do his homework at the family home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. Julian is not very happy that Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Magda Kozak, right, spends time with her son Julian, 9, at their home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. Neither of them is happy that starting in April, Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Children walk in the corridor of Primary School number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Children with flowers wait for the arrival of Education Minister Barbara Nowacka at Primary School number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Julian Kozak, 9, plays with his cat at their home in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 5, 2024. Starting in April, Poland’s government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Ola Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland’s government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.

“I am happy,” said the fifth grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.

“Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn’t make sense,” she said.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernize Poland’s education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.

Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn’t count towards a grade.

Not everyone likes the change – and even Ola’s parents are divided.

“If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school,” said her father, Pawel Kozak.

His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. “I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned,” she said. “It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what’s going on at school.”

(Ola’s brother Julian, a third grader, says he sees both sides.)

Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.

Poland’s educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.

For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.

But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers’ Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.

The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children “had no time to rest.” The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.

Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children’s mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, “the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework.”

Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be “very individual and contextual.”

“We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child,” Sahlberg said.

In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.

In the U.S., teachers and parents decide for themselves how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework entirely to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.

A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the U.S. recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.

The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the U.S., extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning , which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student wellbeing led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.

It’s important for children to learn that mastering something “usually requires practice, a lot of practice,” said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, “things will go wrong.”

AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed.

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Poland’s Kids Rejoice Over New Rules Against Homework, Teachers, Parents Aren’t So Sure

Arkadiusz Korporowicz teaches history to 5th grade children at Primary School number 223 in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. Poland's government has ordered strict limits on the amount of homework that teachers can impose on the lower grades, starting in April. in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday April 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Ola Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland’s government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.

“I am happy,” said the fifth grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.

“Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn’t make sense,” she said.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernize Poland’s education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.

Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn’t count towards a grade.

Not everyone likes the change – and even Ola’s parents are divided.

“If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school,” said her father, Pawel Kozak.

His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. “I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned,” she said. “It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what’s going on at school.”

(Ola’s brother Julian, a third grader, says he sees both sides.)

Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.

Poland’s educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.

For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.

But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers’ Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.

“In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily,” he said.

He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.

The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children “had no time to rest.” The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.

Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children’s mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, “the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework.”

Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be “very individual and contextual.”

“We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child,” Sahlberg said.

In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.

In the U.S., teachers and parents decide for themselves how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework entirely to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.

A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the U.S. recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.

The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the U.S., extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning, which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student wellbeing led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.

It’s important for children to learn that mastering something “usually requires practice, a lot of practice,” said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, “things will go wrong.”

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Are Smartphones Just a Scapegoat for Our Unhappy Children?

Why ditching phones won’t save the kids..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I feel like all the trains in Italy. Cancellato!

Cancellato! I once got stuck in Pisa when they canceled the trains.

Yeah. It was a great opportunity for me to tell my kids about the failures of European social welfare capitalism.

Oh, good. Good.

The kids love that. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

We’re — [LAUGHTER] no, we’re reunited. We’re all recording —

And it feels so good.

(SINGING) Reunited —

— in the same room together. I could almost touch all of my co-hosts.

Please don’t.

And then Carlos would call H.R.

But I will not because we’re talking about disconnection, virtual alienation. We’re going to talk about kids and smartphones.

Dun, dun, dun.

So there is a lot of evidence that kids — American kids, maybe kids around the developed world — are not doing so well over the last 10 years. Not just in a sort of kids being kids way, but there is a real shift in rates of depression, anxiety, mental illness diagnoses, suicide and suicidality. All of these things are up for young people, and so are hours spent on smartphones.

And there’s a widely circulated theory, seemingly plausible, but also hotly contested, that screens and social media are responsible for making teenagers, especially, unusually unhappy. So this is a big problem since screens and smartphones are sort of the defining technologies of our age. And I’m hoping we can resolve this problem here today in a podcast. [LAUGHTER]

Maybe not. But maybe we can debate some solutions, responses, and talk about what might be going too far in our desire to protect kids. So let’s get started with a personal question. For those of you, us, who have kids or teenagers, in the house or out of the house, what are the rules for smartphones in your home?

So I’ve got the oldest, I think. Mine are 20 and 18. So right now there are no rules. It’s obviously a free for all. But when they were —

It’s a vicious landscape.

It’s “Lord of the Flies” at Michelle’s house.

The only contact I get is when somebody wants to text me for money. But —

That was me, so I’m sorry about that, but —

Dang, Ross! So going back, though, I think we hit the smartphone button when they were in seventh grade because that’s when they went to middle school, and that’s kind of just — that was the standard around here. And then we tried to set limits on screen times and things like that. And I have to say the pandemic made that infinitely more complicated.

So first rule of parenting is you don’t talk about parenting. [LAUGHTER]

No, the first rule of parenting is that each kid is different, right? So I have three kids. One kind of mid-teens, one early teens, and one is finishing up elementary school. My oldest, who is 16, has a smartphone. He only got it last year. And he uses it mainly to be in touch with us, with his editor at the student paper, with his friends.

My daughter who’s 13 has one of those little mini old-fashioned iPods which she uses to communicate with text and email with friends, with her dance group or her orchestra friends, and to listen to books. And my youngest, who’s 10, wants an Apple Watch, but isn’t getting it. [MICHELLE LAUGHS]

They don’t use any kind of social media. We don’t ban it, but we discourage it. And part of the trick is that they really don’t have a lot of free time between theater, or dance, or baseball, or student journalism. They don’t have a lot of time to go on social media. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it stays that way, at least until they reach the age of reason, the age of reasonableness. [LAUGHS]

We’re still waiting on that at my house.

But that is —

Good luck with that.

— the way it works so far in our home.

Huh, that’s interesting. I mean, I don’t have kids, as you all know. But I’ve tried to imagine what rules and limits would I want to set. And I think in some ways, Carlos, what you’re describing, it sounds like both an ideal but also very tough. Because in order to make sure that your kids have really, really full lives, it probably requires a lot of engagement from you and your wife. And living in the modern world —

Little sleep, yes. [LAUGHTER]

— we’re all very, very busy. And —

And think about the way that I grew up — and we’re all Gen X — and I had perhaps an extreme version of the free range childhood. Even though my mother was technically a stay-at-home mom, she did not want to see us home all day. And we sort of ran wild. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting anything different for my own children. But I realize that’s not the world that we live in.

But Ross, you have the youngest kids of all of us. So you’re just staring this down, and you have a bunch of them. So —

We — well, yeah, and the oldest is 13, and she still does not have a phone of any kind. And my assumption is that we will crack and get her some kind of what my kids call a dumb phone next year for eighth grade. She is trying to negotiate with me to get a smarter phone, insisting that she would never use social media. She will probably invoke the idea that she’s so busy, the excuse —

The lie my feeds are feeding me?

The lie your kids are feeding you. But it is very unlikely that we would crack on that. But we really haven’t entered fully into this world. But I want to pick up on Lydia’s comment about the free range childhood, because one of the reasons we’re talking about this this week is that this debate has been running for a while, but it’s resurfaced because of a new book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Anxious Generation,” that’s basically Haidt making the case not just that there’s something specific about, let’s say, the social life of teenage girls on Instagram or TikTok or the social life of teenage boys playing video games, that’s a problem for mental health, but also that this is a substitute for exactly the kind of childhood you’re describing.

So it’s not just the screens themselves are the devil. It’s also that the screens themselves have reshaped social life and eliminated certain features of childhood that taught people how to be adults, taught people how to navigate interpersonal dynamics in person, how to communicate with the opposite sex, how to settle fights on the playground with their friends, this kind of thing.

Haidt has a number of critics who basically say he’s making a correlation/causation mistake. That, yes, it happens to be that mental health has gotten worse over the smartphone era, but that does not prove that the phones are the problem. Do you guys buy the argument?

I mean, I’ve read the competing correlation/causation arguments, and, of course, have looked in detail at every single study and weighed them —

I have been personally running regression analyses in my spare time.

I was going to say, I have so many histograms, you would not believe it. [LAUGHTER]

You would not believe the number of histograms. But to me, the bigger question is one of emphasis. Should we be more concerned by the vacuum that was created by putting children into a much more protective bubble? Is the problem that we need to solve the transformation of childhood into what many kids experience as much more tightly controlled and scheduled and mediated through parents as opposed to mediated through your friend groups and learning how to build your own boundaries and relationships and things like that, or do we tackle the problem at the level of smartphones?

Look, I personally believe that I have a dysfunctional relationship with smartphones. And so it’s very easy for me to look at kids and be like, oh, yeah, of course they must also have a very dysfunctional relationship. But honestly, I don’t know.

I think it’s always a problem to put too much emphasis on any one particular culprit, and it is generally our impulse to blame technology. I mean, TV — did TV ruin kids? Probably. But that is —

I mean, look at us.

— one of the panics that we had. And then for years everyone told us that violent video games absolutely positively were turning our children into sociopaths. This, on one level, is what we do. We decide it’s something that we can tackle simply or blame simply. But then there’s 30 questions I have as to what we’re really worried about here.

I mean, are we upset about kids sitting around on their phones rather than playing outside, worried about them doing less in-person socializing, worried about them becoming addicted to external affirmation from their online groups, upset about them having access to scary news and inappropriate information, upset that they’re not as independent, worried about bullying? I mean, there’s so many things that fall into this category that we’ve just decided are all about smartphones.

So I think the virtue of the Haidt argument, it’s a technology is doing something bad argument that has a pretty narrow and focused zone of concern. And that zone of concern is the fact that young people report being unhappier as young people than was the case generally in our cohort and preceding generations. And this pretty clearly tracks to a kind of point of divergence.

I think 2012 to 2014 is sort of a break point in the data. If you just look at the charts that Haidt puts together, you say, well, yeah, something clearly happened in this window that is not just teenagers or teenagers. You need some explanation. And that’s why his critics have tended to also put forward contingent time bound speculations. Like it’s the aftermath of the financial crisis, it’s the rise of school shootings and school shooting drills. There is, I think, a quest for a particular kind of explanation because you have this divergence in the data.

Now, there is also the response or argument that what we’re seeing here is just better diagnosis. That kids have had these mental health problems all the time, and, for better or worse — many people would say for better, some people would say for worse — we’re talking more about mental health. Maybe that’s the whole divergence. We’ve become more open to these discussions or more likely to offer these diagnoses, and that alone is enough to —

We’re a therapeutic society.

Right. We’re a therapeutic society and it’s finally achieved takeoff, and that’s where we are now. I try to be skeptical of the Haidt thesis because it confirms my priors. Like Lydia, I have a toxic relationship to my smartphone. I don’t use that much social media. But the social media I use I’m addicted to and make the excuse that it’s part of my job. So I have a natural inclination to buy into the argument. So I try and be more skeptical of it. But I think that right now it’s a pretty parsimonious explanation for at least some of this divergence.

You’re saying parsimonious in a positive sense?

Right. In a positive — in a positive sense, yeah.

Because the data are quite dramatic. I mean, I was looking for other sources of information about this because Haidt, in his book, talks about, actually, this data is global. These are things that we’re seeing in other countries. So I was looking at other alternative sources of data on this.

And there was a UNICEF report that was published in 2020. And it’s really interesting actually how much of an outlier the U.S is. And this is a place where I actually have a significant amount of skepticism about the Haidt book. It counted 38 of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the United States was 32nd in terms of mental well-being on this list. And the top five were not what you would expect. They were the Netherlands, Cyprus, Spain, Romania and Denmark. So this is just —

I mean, I would have predicted Romania.

Yeah, absolutely.

But maybe not the rest.

Absolutely. The reports in this study on the effect of technology use was one quarter the size of the effect from bullying, for example. So I came to this information saying, like, oh, yeah, this all sounds plausible. But the more I dug into other sources and other cuts at looking at this question of child happiness, the more skepticism that I had that this one explanation was enough. I think you need to take the changes of childhood and technology together.

Haidt does push back against the critics who say it is a monocausal explanation by saying that, look, I’m talking about the changes to the independent childhood that we had in the ‘70s or the ‘80s versus today. And I accept that defense of his. But in some ways, if you look at just his body of work, even just his “Atlantic” articles over the years, he does feel like he’s beating the same drum over and over again with slightly different speeds.

I read each piece individually and I feel persuaded. I read them together and I feel suspicious, right? I don’t mean suspicious in an ill intent on the part of the writer kind of way. But I think of a worldview that maybe explains too much.

And I also wonder if different kids are different. So when I was a kid, my mother was obsessed — obsessed with us not watching too much television because she thought it was going to rot our brains. She would come home and she would put her hand on the top of the TV set. And if it was warm, she’d know — [LAUGHTER]

— that we’d broken the rules. And my mother did not mess around. She’d unplugged the TV. She’d get out a pair of scissors and she’d snip off the plug.

As a punishment, so that we would not watch it again.

Totally, totally badass.

That’s real parenting.

But I want to tell you — I want to tell you, it’s even better parenting. You know what my brothers and I did? We would go to RadioShack and we would buy a plug, and then we taught ourselves how to reattach a plug and then not make it look like —

Yeah, but this is exactly —

You have skills.

This is the bypass of childhood.

Kids are going to bypass any form of control over —

But Haidt would say that is the kind of childhood creativity that is being lost, the ability to do end-arounds when your parents —

To McGuyver your TV set!

Ross you mentioned school shootings. I mean, this month, believe it or not, will mark 25 years since Columbine. And the kids that Haidt is talking about are kids that have grown up entirely in a world formed by that experience. I don’t just mean Columbine, but I mean the experience of lockdown drills in schools, knowing that every day they’re going to a place where they’re meant to be taught and educated and protected, but that they feel at risk.

The reason my son has a smartphone is because there were bomb threats at his school, which he covered as a student journalist. But that’s why he has a smartphone to begin with.

I find that argument totally unpersuasive to explain the divergence that you see —

Oh, no, no, I meant —

— starting in the early 2010s.

No, I’m not saying — I’m not saying —

It doesn’t track, particularly, with the rise of school shootings. It doesn’t track at all with general violence in schools, which was much higher in the 1980s and early 1990s than today. And it does, allowing Lydia’s point that the data is complex, it does show up — the teenage mental health issue — in lots of other countries that don’t have active shooter drills and so on.

What’s odd in this debate is that Haidt is making an argument that in a way tracks pretty well with a lot of traditional left wing preoccupations. He’s saying a bunch of big rapacious capitalist entities, in order to make a profit, are exploiting your children and destroying their mental health.

And a lot of people on the left are like, no, that’s not satisfying enough. It has to be something that Republicans did, right? Because Silicon Valley isn’t coded as Republican. It has to be climate change because we can blame Republicans for that. It has to be school shootings because we can blame Michelle’s Southern relatives and their guns for that.

That feels very sensitive.

I don’t know. It’s like you’re just looking for — I mean, there are many reasons why children can be anxious all at once. I worry a little bit about Haidt pointing to smartphones as the overwhelming reason. There are multiple reasons why any one kid can be having trouble.

And another — and this is where I was headed. I wasn’t saying that therefore the explanation is school shootings. In the panoply of possible reasons for kids to be struggling, another is — Lydia and Ross have mentioned that you have your own toxic addictive relationships with your phones. I mean, these are also kids who have grown up with parents —

With parents, yes.

— who are entirely tethered to their devices and who basically — a few years ago, I read this book by Sherry Turkle called “Reclaiming Conversation,” and she had a line that has stuck with me since then where she says that all our relationships now come with the assumption of divided attention. And that is all the more so with children seeing the divided attention that their parents, already distracted and busy and tired parents, give to them.

All right, let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’ll talk about whether we should be even looking for solutions here. And if so, what they might be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

One of the things that I’m interested in is when you start talking about what to do about it, then it gets really sticky, though. And I think one of the things that does bother me is when the states start looking at, well, how are we going to save our children?

They start talking about putting limitations on what kids can do on their phones. And you quickly get into questions of First Amendment rights and things like this. None of which is going to matter if you’ve got kids who are watching their parents sit on their phones all day long 24/7. That’s like lecturing kids not to do drugs while you’re sitting there dropping acid.

So there is a question about how we’re going to tackle this. And this just seems to be one of those areas that we rush to because it seems very easy to tackle. We’ve had several states try and limit what kids can do and what their social media account age is. But it’s a lot of constitutional questions, and a lot of time and energy going into something that doesn’t strike me is going to be all that useful.

I mean, just on the personal side, Michelle’s first, right, since you’re the senior parent in this conversation, meaning the one with the most experience.

Yeah, call me old.

The one with the most experience.

Walk that one back, Ross.

The wisest.

Your kids are basically through high school into college, right?

Mhm. And if you look back over the last 10 years, setting aside the state, setting aside government, are there things that either you as a parent or you as a consumer of school-based services — are there things that you wish you had done differently or things that you wish your kids’ schools had done differently?

So, now, one problem that I do think parents have is once you hit a certain age with kids, you can’t limit their screen time because they’re doing homework online. So I would try to keep limits on my kids’ screen time, and they would just be like, well, we’re just doing math homework on our computer.

And unless you are going to stand over that child every minute — and let’s be clear, it wasn’t a question of I didn’t want to put in the time or effort to stand over my child. It’s also, you can’t police your children like that. I mean, you have to give your children a little bit of freedom to screw up or whatever. So it was absolutely impossible on some level.

It got even worse during Covid.

Yeah. And COVID —

It was impossible, where it all got conflated.

— completely — my kids’ friends and my kids themselves had real Covid isolation issues. And it became really dark at certain times. And it was really hard to tell whether being able to connect with their friends on their smartphones was helping or hurting or whatever because technology has taken over our lives. I tend to think that as a society when we’ve given up on being reasonable about something, we then try to put limits just on the kids.

I asked my daughter, who’s 13 — I told her that we were going to have this conversation, and I asked her what she thought about rules and limits and bans. And she said she didn’t have a problem with there being rules and limiting access to certain things. She’s like, we do that for lots of other stuff that seems OK. But maybe you all should have some limits, too. She felt that —

Her reaction was that it shouldn’t just be for children. That a lot of bad things happen on social media when adults use social media.

Yeah. I don’t how we think we can save our children if that’s the approach that we’re going to take.

Well, I guess I’ll speak up for the kids first approach then. I completely agree that obviously the example that you set for your kids makes a huge difference. And I obviously think social media and smartphones have a deranging effect on adults too. But childhood is both a era of greater personal social emotional vulnerability than adulthood and also a period in which we take for granted that it is possible to impose substantial regulations that in a free society we can’t impose on adults. And we do this with lots of things. We do this with driving. There’s lots of terrible drivers on the road, but we don’t say, oh, we can’t let adults drive because we’re showing kids that they’ll be bad drivers when they grow up. Same with alcohol, tobacco products, all of these things.

And we can argue back and forth about where the exact line should be. But I do think that social media age requirements, things like banning smartphones from schools and so on, are just obvious first steps, that don’t get you close to fixing all of the problems, but are things that you should just do and see what happens.

As you were talking, I was thinking about some of the cultural differences about this. I don’t think there’s any society that’s like, OK, we want to teach our children to have a healthy relationship with tobacco. But when it comes to alcohol, there is a different attitude. Alcohol is seen as an important source of conviviality, of pleasure, of enjoyment, and cultivating one’s temperate enjoyment of it is something that starts relatively early in life.

And let’s set social media aside for just one second and just talk about technology and screens in general. We are all going to live in a world where screens are going to be a part of it. And I’m not going to give my baby a bottle filled with watered-down wine, right? But I might give my 13-year-old, a very, very small glass of wine watered down with seltzer at Thanksgiving or whatever. That to me feels more of an approach that I could get behind rather than just ban it. And I think about my own consumption of television. I mean, I told that very funny story about my mom and cutting the cord. The reality is that if there is a television on in a room, I cannot pay attention to anything else. I mean, if there was a television over the other side of your shoulder, Ross, I would be so distracted.

Fascinating.

Whereas, my wife, who grew up in a household where the TV was on all the time, can just tune it out. It’s just white noise to her. So I guess if we’re going to live in a world with these technologies, how do we prepare kids to have healthy relationships to them, to turn them into tools that can serve them? The problem is if it just takes over your entire life. [LAUGHS]

To be the optimist — the cockeyed optimist here, right? Lydia brought up tobacco. The United States had a massive public health campaign against tobacco that, in fact, did lead to dramatic changes in smoking’s social acceptability and all of these things.

And there is this range of proposals in Congress. There’s the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require tech platforms to make various design changes. Protect Kids on Social Media Act, which would establish an age minimum and parental consent. And then there’s this general — there’s a lot of grandstanding in Congress about what Meta has done wrong and the different ways these platforms have exploited kids.

And to the extent that you find the public psychological health arguments around tech and social media persuasive, is there any law or public health measure that you would like to see pass or imagine would be helpful? Or does it just not seem like a political problem?

I’m not convinced it’s a political problem. And I also think a lot about the ways in which such laws could be used. As a queer person, I think about kids who are trying to figure out who they are and what are the places that they might connect with other people like them.

Obviously, I grew up in a connection desert growing up in East and West Africa. We didn’t even have a home phone for a while. So I don’t romanticize the disconnected life at all. I think loneliness has lots of different facets to it. And I think that IRL friendships are great. But friendships over distance I think can be very, very meaningful. We have a whole literature of epistolary friendships —

Letter writing is another lost art —

Another lost art. I mean —

— that the smartphone has killed.

Yeah. Voice memos on the other hand — [LAUGHTER] so, yeah, I’m skeptical about the role of legislation in this area. I mean, I think, actually, profound social changes are needed. I think that we need to rethink the way that we treat children in society, the amount of freedom, the amount of autonomy that we give them. Obviously I believe that they need to be protected from dangerous things. But — and this is just my bias from my own experience, having been a very, very independent kid — I’m a strong believer in child independence.

I think laws sometimes reflect social changes and sometimes anticipate them. And I would be open to a lot of the kind of reforms that Jonathan Haidt suggests, to some degree, of limiting access to social media. I’m persuaded by the potential educational impact of smartphone bans or at least severe reductions in smartphone use in schools.

At the same time, I still believe that there is a multiplicity of factors behind the mental health and well-being crisis that we’re seeing with kids in the United States. So I’m both open to them, but skeptical that they would solve the underlying issue that we’re facing.

All right, well let’s close out by just looking forward a little bit, because I’m curious where you guys think this debate will be in 10 or 20 years, maybe at the point where some of our children are parenting themselves.

Oh, I can’t wait for that.

Can’t wait for that. And grandchildren reversing the birth dearth. [LAUGHTER] Anyway —

Different podcast, Ross. Different podcast.

Different episodes.

But isn’t it all the same episode, Lydia? I’m curious, generally, because there’s also a way in which when technological change happens, sometimes by the time you figure out what’s going wrong in one particular dispensation, we’re headed into a new dispensation, right?

So just hearing the way that schools rely on the internet and tech for assignments and so on, does that survive the age of ChatGPT and AI assistants? Is it possible that we’re going to head into a landscape where all of education is going to have to recalibrate itself?

They’re never going analog again, Ross.

Well, that’s —

They’re not going back to analog. It’s too — it’s not going to happen.

OK, but so then what is the world on the other side of AI or on the other side of any other looming technological change, on the other side of virtual reality?

We don’t know. That’s what’s so great about it. Could you have predicted where we are now 20 years ago? I don’t think you could have. Come on.

I mean once that’s true once Elon Musk has put chips in all of our brains, then we’ll experience the singularity and we’ll know what’s happening.

All right, let me —

No, no, I have a real answer here.

Let me — all right, Carlos — but no, let me first say, I am detecting just an incredible level of fatalism from all three of you about technological change.

And I agree with all of you that, yes, of course, we are not undoing the internet revelation — excuse me —

See, Freudian — paging Dr. Freud.

We know what you want, Ross.

We know what I want. I want the singularity, too. But it seems to me that there’s a huge question here, which is, are we going to master these kind of technologies or be mastered by them? And I feel like, are all of you just content to drift into the Neuralink future? Carlos, the humanist, I appeal to you to close us out with resistance. Come now —

Hashtag resistance.

— speak for paper, speak for print, speak for analog.

I only read on paper. Here I am saying that on a podcast. Who’s read “Canticle for Leibowitz“?

Well, you know I have. That’s a —

It’s a book that I highly recommend. It’s a book in which the existential perils of technology are taken so seriously that we attempt to fully simplify our lives to purge ourselves of these technologies. Yet, inevitably we recreate them with the same destructive results. And just because it fails, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make the attempt.

So I think it’s foolish to be optimistic in this world, but it is not foolish to be hopeful. But even as we make those attempts, I’m skeptical of a silver bullet answer to the problem that we’ve discussed today. We will simply move on to a new version of it, which then we will look back with longing on this simpler time. The way that Lydia talked about the television story, we’re going to talk about trying to — you remember back in the 2000s when we tried to regulate smartphones? And we didn’t know that the fill in the blank was coming next and that was going to be even more insidious and destructive.

Brain chip. Lydia is right. Brain chip.

No, but I think that’s — I think that’s a really good way of putting it, Carlos. And I think that the reality is that things stop being cool. Facebook has been abandoned to the boomers and —

Oh, you cannot pay kids to be on Facebook.

— other social media. And I think it’s one of those things that’s seen as a punch line. But kids reject the things that their parents are into, and are addicted to, and want to talk about, and want to focus on. And I think that things become not cool. And that’s definitely a thing that I’m seeing among young people that I know, that they’re like, you know what’s not cool is spending all your time on social media.

And on that note, I’m going to return home and explain to my 13-year-old daughter that it is her duty to make the smartphone uncool in her middle school and high school. And we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold.

Just tell her how cool you think it is and that’s going to do it.

All right, guys, it’s time to get hot cold. Who’s got one this week?

I’m hot cold this week.

So I just returned from “Matter of Opinion”‘s official vacation destination, which is Italy.

And I happened to be there during Holy Week. And so we did Palm Sunday mass and Easter Sunday mass in Venice. The Palm Sunday mass, it was, first of all, very few people. And we thought like, how on Earth, in Venice, on Palm Sunday, there are only 50 people in this church? Because we were at the Latin and Gregorian mass service. And we experienced —

Carlos, be still my heart.

My children experienced the Latin mass, which they had not done up to this point in their lives. And it was wonderful. We had an absolutely — see, I was afraid that this —

Ross is going to weep.

I was afraid that this would trigger an outpouring of Rossness. But it was so beautiful.

In a good way!

Just to stipulate for listeners, who may have some stereotypical view of me, I do not attend the traditional Latin mass.

Neither do I. And I went to Catholic —

I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college. So I’ve been to many variations of our liturgy. And my wife and I were trying to explain to the kids, even whispering during the service, that they had entered a sort of time warp where they got to experience something that is a lot less common these days.

And I think of myself as very much a Vatican II Catholic. I’m all in favor of the opening up of the liturgical experience, of the role of laypeople in the church. But it took a long time. Palm Sunday mass is generally long. And the Latin mass version is, I think, a good bit longer than normal.

But even so, it was both a wonderful experience for me to think about a church before the church that I have known, and also for my children to have a sense of this experience and to have them feel — I hope some small part of them felt part of a much longer history and tradition.

That’s so beautiful.

You heard it here. I am hot on the Latin mass.

Ross is speechless.

I don’t have anything. I can’t add anything.

I’m hot on the Latin mass.

That sounds like a really, really amazing experience. I’m glad for you and your family.

That is downright beautiful.

Amazing. OK, we got to stop there before anything happens to spoil the Catholic mood.

Don’t say a word.

He says to the protestant!

He says to Michelle.

To the Southern Protestant.

I have not brought the Southern Baptist into this discussion!

OK, good. Guys, it’s been a pleasure. We’ll be back next week.

See you next week.

Good to be back.

Bye, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks so much for joining us. Give us a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review for “Matter of Opinion” while you’re there, so other people can know why they should tune in, too, mostly for the Latin mass recommendations. If you have a question you think we should think about next, like why the Latin mass is awesome, share it with us in a voice — [LAUGHING]

— OK. Sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Carlos, this only happens once. I have to milk it. If you have a question you think we should think about next, share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440 or send us an email by writing to [email protected].

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. And our executive producer, as always, is Annie-Rose Strasser.

[SINGING IN LATIN]

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• January 26, 2024   •   36:53 Could Israel Cost Biden the Election?

Hosted by Michelle Cottle ,  Ross Douthat ,  Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

It’s not just bad vibes — America’s kids are not OK. As study after study shows worsening youth mental health, a popular theory has emerged: The rise of smartphones and the addictive nature of social media is making young people miserable. But can it really be that simple?

This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate the myriad possible factors contributing to teenagers’ unhappiness, and discuss how parents, schools and the government can protect kids without doing further harm. Plus, a sui generis Lozada family vacation.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Recommended in this episode:

“ The Anxious Generation ,” by Jonathan Haidt

“ Reclaiming Conversation ,” by Sherry Turkle

“ A Canticle for Leibowitz ,” by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle ( @mcottle ), Ross Douthat ( @DouthatNYT ) and Carlos Lozada ( @CarlosNYT ).

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.” She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration.  @ mcottle

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @ DouthatNYT • Facebook

Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the weekly “Matter of Opinion” podcast for The Times, based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “ The Washington Book : How to Read Politics and Politicians.”  @ CarlosNYT

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “ Matter of Opinion ” podcast for The Times.

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Moscow-City: 7 surprising facts about the Russian capital’s business center

1. Guinness World Record in highlining

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7 out of 10 Europe’s highest skyscrapers are located in Moscow-City. Earlier, the  ‘Federation Tower’ complex’s ‘Vostok’ (“East”) skyscraper was the considered the tallest in Europe.

Left to right: the lower of the ‘Neva Towers’ (296 m), Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt (300 m), Gorod Stolits (“City of Capitals”) Moscow tower (302 m), Eurasia tower (309 m), The Shard’ skyscraper in London (310 m), Mercury City Tower (339 m), Neva Towers (345 m).

However, in 2018, the construction of the 462 meter tall ‘Lakhta Center’ in Saint-Petersburg was completed, pushing ‘Vostok’ (374 m) into 2nd place. The 3rd place is taken by OKO’s southern tower (354 m).

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If all the building plans of Moscow-City were realized, the ‘Lakhta Center’ in St. Petersburg wouldn't have a chance to be Europe's highest skyscraper. Boris Tkhor, the architect who designed the concept of Moscow-City, had planned for the ‘Rossiya’ tower to be the tallest. In his project, it was a 600 meter tall golden cylindrical skyscraper ending with a spire that was inspired by traditional Russian bell towers. Then, the project was reinvented by famous British architect Sir Norman Foster. He had designed ‘Rossiya’ as a pyramid ending with a spire. The skyscraper itself would have been 612 meters tall, and the height including the spire would have reached 744,5 meters (for comparison, the ‘Burj Khalifa’ in Dubai, UAE, would have been just 83,5 meters taller). Unfortunately, the investors faced a lot of economic problems, due to the 2008 financial crisis, so the ‘Rossiya’ skyscraper was never built. A shopping mall and the ‘Neva Towers’ complex was constructed at its place in 2019.

4. Changed appearance of ‘Federation Tower’

In its first project, the ‘Federation Tower’ was designed to resemble a ship with a mast and two sails. The mast was to be represented by a tall glass spire with passages between the towers. It was planned to make a high-speed lift in it. The top of the spire was going to be turned into an observation deck. But the ship lost its mast in the middle of its construction. Experts at the Moscow-city Museum based in the ‘Imperia’ (“Empire”) tower say, that the construction of the spire was stopped, firstly, due to fire safety reasons and secondly, because it posed a threat to helicopter flights – the flickering glass of the spire could potentially blind the pilots. So, the half-built construction was disassembled. However, an observation deck was opened in the ‘Vostok’ tower.

5. Open windows of ‘Federation Tower’

We all know that the windows of the upper floors in different buildings don’t usually open. Experts say that it’s not actually for people’s safety. Falling from a big height is likely to be fatal in any building. The actual reason is the ventilation system. In a skyscraper, it’s managed with a mechanical system, and the building has its own climate. But in the ‘Zapad’ (“West”) tower of the ‘Federation Tower’ complex, the windows can open. The 62nd and last floor of the tower are taken up by a restaurant called ‘Sixty’. There, the windows are equipped with a special hydraulic system. They open for a short period of time accompanied by classical music, so the guests can take breathtaking photos of Moscow.

6. Broken glass units of ‘Federation Tower’

The guests of the ‘Sixty’ restaurant at the top of the ‘Zapad’ tower can be surprised to see cracked glass window panes. It is particularly strange, if we take into consideration the special type of this glass. It is extremely solid and can’t be broken once installed. For example, during experiments people threw all sorts of heavy items at the windows, but the glass wouldn’t break. The broken glass units of ‘Zapad’ were already damaged during shipment . As each of them is curved in its own way to make the tower’s curvature smooth, making a new set of window panes and bringing them to Russia was deemed too expensive . Moreover, the investors had financial problems (again, due to the 2008 financial crisis), so the ‘Vostok’ tower even stood unfinished for several years. Eventually, the cracked window panes were installed in their place.

7. The highest restaurant in Europe

‘Birds’, another restaurant in Moscow-City, is remarkable for its location. It was opened at the end of 2019 on the 84th floor of the ‘OKO’ complex’s southern tower. Guests at the restaurant can enjoy an amazing panoramic view at a height of 336 meters. On January 28, the experts of ‘Kniga Recordov Rossii’ (“Russian Records Book”) declared ‘Birds’ the highest restaurant in Europe, a step toward an application for a Guinness World Record.

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