NORTHAMPTON — As the movement to ban smartphones in schools gains momentum in the state, a new group of local parents and educators has been formed to highlight the dangers kids are facing from the devices, as well as to advocate for school policies and state laws around youth smartphone access.

Emily Boddy, a founding member of the group, known as ReConnect Western Mass, said it began as a meeting in her living room in Northampton around seven months ago. Boddy, who has two children ages 8 and 11, said she became more alarmed when an older niece of hers began to suffer negative effects of social media.

“She was on TikTok, and that really led to a pretty bleak period of very high anxiety, sleeplessness, difficult mental health issues,” Boddy said. “There was an intervention they had to do, she now doesn’t have TikTok, but it was really clear that it’s very difficult to monitor and to keep tabs on.”

Inspired by the 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, Boddy began seeking out ways to do more collective action around the issue of youth smartphone use, and sought out other parents and teachers who felt the same way and who had also been personally affected by their children’s smartphone use.

In Northampton High School auditorium on Monday evening, around 100 people turned out to for ReConnect Western Mass’s launch event and to hear from Allie Baker, a child and adult psychiatrist affiliated with Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who spoke on the dangers of granting children smartphone access at too young an age.

Baker spoke on the topic of “neuroplasticity,” comparing a developing child’s brain to a piece of origami paper that, once folded, is nearly impossible to flatten and remove the creases.

“The more a young person is repeating a thought pattern, repeating a behavior or an emotional response, the more deeply that fold can get creased,” Baker said. “With respect to smartphones and smart watches and iPads and other portable tech, they’ve become these really powerful sculpting tools. Not because our kids are lazy, and not because screens are inherently evil, but because these devices are just always there, and they’re designed to be irresistible, to keep kids and us coming back again and again.”

Baker also presented data that showed that since 2010, when Apple allowed all wireless carriers to include the iPhone, anxiety and depression rates increased sharply among youth, in particular teenage girls. She said that studies showed that one in five teenage girls spend more than 40 hours a week, equivalent to a full-time job, on social media, and that girls were also experiencing higher rates of self-harm.

“By 2023, over 50% of our teens report being online, quote, almost all of the time,” Baker said. “This underscores that our kids are not seeing each other enough, they’re also not sleeping enough. They can’t concentrate, and their brains, like the origami paper, are being folded to prefer screens.”

Wait until 8th

Baker serves on the board of another parent’s group, Wait Until 8th, where members pledge not to give their children smartphones until they are 14 years old, or after completing eighth grade. She also said parents themselves had a role to play when it came to ensuring their child’s well-being, such as allowing more unsupervised play and independence.

“Mentally healthier parents make mentally healthier kids,” Baker said. “Parental anxiety is a significant reason why the kids are getting devices earlier than they need them.”

Northampton Public Schools Superintendent Portia Bonner, who attended Monday’s event, said that limiting smartphones for youth could be a way to address cyberbullying as well as an opportunity for students “relearn social graces.”

“For me, it’s looking at really helping get students to focus on their academics, and reconnect with their peers,” Bonner said.

Currently, Northampton High School follows an “off and away” policy regarding smartphones, in which students must have their phones off during class but may use them around school when not in the classroom. Bonner said the district’s Rules & Policy Subcommittee, led by Ward 1 Committee Member Holly Ghazey, is exploring the possibilities for a “bell-to-bell” policy in which students would not have access to their phones throughout the entire school day. Such policies are already in places in Holyoke and at Hampshire Regional High School in Westhampton.

Also present at the meeting was Kat Allen, the mother of an NHS graduate and a current student at the school. Allen, who works with student health data for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments in Franklin County, said that according to her data, 27% of children in the county say they’ve been shown pornography against their will while at school by another student.

“I’ve been watching the mental health crisis develop since 2012, and even though we can’t prove causality, it seems really clear that cellphones, social media and screen time have a big role to play,” Allen said in an interview with the Gazette. “The toxic content that comes out, hate speech, racist memes, it’s impossible to avoid and it becomes part of the fabric that we are raising our kids in, whether we like it or not.”

For Allen, more action is needed at the legislative level to limit smartphone use, saying asking just parents to monitor all their kids activity is too much of a burden.

“I feel very passionately that we need to put more guardrails in place for our young people when it comes to screen time and social media,” Allen said. “We need phone free schools ... we need to raise the minimum age of social media and require age verification at the app store level.”

At the state level, there is also strong advocacy for greater smartphone restriction in schools, with Attorney General Andrea Campbell sponsoring a legislative bill known as “An Act promoting Safe Technology Use and Distraction-free education for Youth,” or the STUDY Act, which would mandate “bell-to-bell” school policy statewide.

“By restricting cellphones during the school day and raising the bar for social media companies, we are taking bold steps to create learning environments free from distraction and a digital landscape that prioritizes the well-being of our youth,” Campbell said in a statement issued in January regarding the proposed bill.

Several other states, such as California, Florida and Louisiana, have enacted similar policies. In Australia, legislation recently passed that banned social media use for anyone 16 years or younger nationwide.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.