N. Raghuraman's column: From Reels to Readings: Children are becoming children again

When my cousin Giri and his wife Radhika's six-year-old elder son Arjun started going to school, they both decided to reduce the scream time. Arjun was four years old at that time and when Radhika used to cook, he would often watch children's shows on iPad with his younger sister Gayatri. After learning about the kindergarten's screen-free policy, Giri decided to implement the same rule at home. Surprisingly, the children did not complain. "We saw a big change. Not only did they become calm and steady, but their curiosity about other things also increased. They would go out, dig up the soil in the back yard and pick wood, acorns and stones. Two and a half years later, they have not backed down from their decision. Giri says that Arjun and Gayatri are doing well in a school where no devices are given till the age of 12. As the slogan of 'New Year, New Me' resonates across the globe as 2026 enters our lives, the children of Bengaluru, India's tech capital, are surprising us with a different resolution – to be attracted to reading again. Globally, this change was only visible in 2024. In a large urban district in Florida, students' scores on the test increased, while problems related to students' behavior decreased sharply in rural counties of Europe. The reason is that there is no smartphone in the classroom and that is why its use in everyday life is also less. Parents accustomed to having access to the child at all times have caused a lot of problems for schools that decided to keep smartphones out of the classroom. This is still a big challenge for many schools. Despite this, many states in developed countries have made policies and regulations to limit the use of phones by children in schools. Some have even started offering Faraday bags to keep phones, in which all wireless signals such as cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC and RFID are blocked by creating a metal layer. Due to this, no network can reach the phone kept in the bag. In the first year of the ban, there was an increase in disciplinary action and suspension against students for using phones illegally. But in the second year, i.e. at the end of 2025, parents and students accepted this rule even in schools with excessive use of phones. They felt that the complaints about their children had decreased. Disciplinary actions dropped by 89 percent and suspensions by 69 percent in some schools. Two economics researchers at the University of Rochester who were studying this change saw an improvement in students' test results in late December, just before the Christmas break. They have not yet been able to convert the improvement in grades into statistics, but they have seen an improvement in the performance of the students. Boys' scores showed double-digit improvements, and attendance in colleges also increased by a few percent. Surely, people are beginning to understand that phones cause children to behave differently and that is what affects their grades. Perhaps Tech City was the first to sense this wind. Not only children, college students have also started getting used to reading. Students are gradually realizing that by being immersed in doom-scrolling, they cannot step into the professional world. Most of the colleges now have newspaper stands and students are coming to them and rediscovering the joy of reading. The trick is that when you see kids playing old clapping games or sharing food with each other at lunchtime, academics strongly think that children are becoming children again in the absence of screens.