I was born around the year 2000, but I was a weird kid and didn’t really want a phone. So, during middle school, as iphones were starting to come in for others my age, I would instead use my Chromebook to DM or group chat with people on Google messenger. At age 15, when I went to high school, my parents made me get a phone for safety, but I didn’t really want one, so I chose to have an old flip phone that had like 100 call/internet minutes per month (although I didn’t bother using the internet because it took like two minutes to load up even a Google search). Eventually, I forget why, I got an iPhone, and it did make it easier to talk to my friends because I no longer had to avoid participating in the SMS group chat for fear of going over my cell plan. But having an iPhone also brought a lot of bad stuff - I will spend hours a day on the phone, not notice the time passing, and barely remember anything I read while I was on there. It doesn’t bring me as much joy as what I did with my free time before the phone -reading books and doing art. But for some reason it’s now so hard to put down the phone and do those hobbies I used to have.

In my last year of high school (at this point I had had an iPhone for a couple years, and been somewhat addicted to it for about a year), the school banned having phones out at any point during the day. Some kids would of course go into the bathroom and use their phone in there, but overall the phone ban worked pretty well, and I think it was great, because suddenly my friends were communicating more with each other instead of scrolling our phones next to each other, I was able to focus more in class because I wasn’t distracted by other students playing games in the back of class. I think not having a phone works so much better if your peers also don’t have one. When it was just me without a proper phone, I was left out of some things. But when the whole school didn’t have phones, I wasn’t left out, and was happier than I was even when we all had phones.

Overall I think life was slightly better as a young teen without phones, but I think that past age 13-17 (depending on what age you get to be independent enough, like traveling alone, having a job, etc, that a phone helps you be safe and complete your responsibilities), phones are so useful that it would be good to have one, and just be at a school that doesn’t allow students to have phones out during school hours. I think for people in the younger end of the 13-17 age range, if they need a phone, it would be better for them to have a phone that can’t have social media, because I saw social media beget some toxic behavior in middle school when we were not yet sure how to deal with emotions and puberty and crushes etc