The Phone Advice a Bangkok Teacher Gave Before It Was Law

In October 2023, a middle school technology teacher at the International Community School of Bangkok, known on the Students Incorporated podcast as Mr. James, floated an idea he presented as little more than a hunch. Asked what might reduce the harm smartphones were doing to his students, he suggested capping screen time at an hour a day and, if possible, holding off on giving kids phones at all "until they are in middle school." He hedged it immediately: "I'm not sure that you agree with that or not." Two years later, versions of that hunch are law in Australia, policy in more than half of U.S. states, and the organizing principle behind a parent movement with over 150,000 members.

"Wait until they are in middle school before giving them a phone."

A teacher's aside, before it was a movement

Mr. James, who had taught at ICS for 15 years by the time of the recording, was on the show to talk shop about educational technology with student hosts Rebecca and Premi: the usual territory of a school podcast, how touchscreens have warped kids' expectations of every device they touch, how AI tools like ChatGPT were, in his words, "going to be involved in education even more." That segment was low-stakes and a little funny, generational-gap material that makes for easy radio: a teacher fielding fingerprint smudges on old hardware and reminiscing about slow boot times and floppy disks.

The second half of the conversation turned more pointed. Premi and Rebecca pressed him on the trade-offs of youth technology use: the pros (information at your fingertips, falling hardware costs) and the cons (information overload, cyberbullying, and what he called "isolation," kids alone with a device for hours at a stretch). Asked which of those cons worried him most, he didn't hesitate: isolation, he said, is what turns into loneliness and depression and the fear of missing out, and, taken to an extreme, something closer to withdrawal. "It's like you have a headache, you have all sorts of symptoms because you don't have your device with you," he said, adding that at that point "technology and phones like devices became our master instead of thought." Asked directly what might help, his answer was the line that, in hindsight, reads less like a teacher's offhand suggestion and more like a preview of where an entire policy debate was headed.

From a school podcast to state law

The suggestion he made, delay the phone, cap the screen time, do it as a community rather than family by family, is now close to formal consensus among researchers and lawmakers who've spent the two years since litigating exactly this question. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book "The Anxious Generation" crystallized the case into four specific asks: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independent, unsupervised time for kids in the physical world. According to reporting from GovFacts and education policy tracker ExcelinEd, at least 28 states committed to some form of phone-free classroom policy heading into 2025, with Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and West Virginia passing legislation in 2025 that took effect for the 2025-2026 school year. California's Phone-Free School Act, signed in 2024, requires every district in the state to adopt a restriction policy by July 2026.

The grassroots version of Mr. James's suggestion has scaled just as fast. Wait Until 8th, a pledge campaign that asks parents to hold off on smartphones until at least the end of eighth grade, had drawn more than 155,000 signatures by 2025, built specifically around the same community-coordination logic he named on the podcast: asking ten or more families in a single grade to commit together so no one child is the odd one out for not having a phone.

Australia went further than any pledge or classroom policy. On December 10, 2025, it became the first country to enforce a nationwide ban on social media accounts for anyone under 16, backing the law with fines of roughly $50 million for platforms that don't comply. Within days, according to CNBC's reporting, age-restricted platforms had removed access to 4.7 million under-16 accounts nationwide. Time magazine argued in July 2026 that the law had become a template other governments were actively studying, even as critics noted teens were finding workarounds.

The data that's caught up to the anecdote

Mr. James and his hosts weren't inventing the mental-health concern out of nothing. They cited a report from Children's Health during the episode claiming that teens who used technology more than an hour a day were more likely to report depression, loneliness, or anxiety. Less than a year before that episode aired, in May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory on the same subject, warning that adolescents spending more than three hours a day on social media faced a measurably higher risk of anxiety and depression, and noting that up to 95% of teens ages 13-17 were already using social media, more than a third "almost constantly." What's changed since 2023 is how much national survey data now backs that claim. Pew Research Center's April 2025 survey of American teens found that 48% now say social media has a "mostly negative" effect on people their age, up sharply from 32% in 2022. Teens' assessment of their own screen habits has shifted too: 45% say they personally spend too much time on social media, up from 36% just two years earlier, and 44% say they've actively tried to cut back on both social media and general smartphone use.

Near the close of the interview, one voice summed up the same idea more simply: technology is only a tool, and the goal is to keep it from becoming part of us. That distinction is exactly what separates the softer, pledge-based interventions from the harder legislative ones now on the books. Haidt's argument, and increasingly the policy response built on it, treats phones less as a tool a kid controls and more as an environment that, left unmanaged, ends up controlling the kid, which is the isolation problem Mr. James named as the biggest risk two years before most state legislatures agreed with him.

What the policy wave hasn't settled

The underlying disagreement isn't resolved, even among researchers. Haidt's own thesis has drawn pointed pushback from psychologists who study the same data. Candice Odgers, a psychological scientist who has reviewed the literature extensively, has said hundreds of researchers looking for the large effects Haidt describes have instead found "a mix of no, small and mixed associations" between social media use and mental-health harm, a reminder that the correlation Mr. James and Haidt both point to hasn't been proven to be causation. Most researchers agree teen mental health has genuinely worsened; they disagree sharply on how much of that belongs to phones specifically, versus other forces happening in the same years.

The podcast's own discussion raised a related counterpoint that the policy debate still hasn't fully answered: one of the student hosts argued that equal access to information helps close the gap between richer and poorer households, even while acknowledging the same openness creates real privacy risks, down to the unsettling experience of Googling your own name and finding a photo you never uploaded. Mr. James agreed some information, personal or governmental, has to stay confidential, without ever landing on exactly where that line should sit. Australia's own early data adds to the uncertainty: under-16 social media use fell only partially after its ban took effect in December 2025, evidence that legislating the behavior away is proving harder than legislating the access away.

Mr. James's fallback in 2023 was more modest than any of the laws that followed it: "I don't think we have any solution yet, but I have some suggestion." What's changed since is not that anyone found the solution. It's how many governments have decided his suggestion, imperfect as he knew it was, was worth turning into one anyway.

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