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The Chromebook Nobody Banned: What School Phone Bans Miss Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

What parents can actually control on a school-issued laptop, and the five questions that get you real answers from your district. TL;DR Phone bans are spreading fast. As of mid-2026, at least 38 states plus Washington, D.C. require districts to restrict student phones, and 28 states plus D.C. go bell-to-bell (first bell to last bell, lunch and passing periods included). The bans are working on the thing they were built for: distraction from phones. Teachers in New York and New Hampshire report better focus, more talking at lunch, less bullying. The bans mostly do not cover the school-issued Chromebook, laptop, or tablet. In Utah, the bell-to-bell law says so explicitly. Teachers now rate school laptops as a bigger classroom distraction than phones. In one national survey, 56% called off-task laptop behavior a major distraction, compared to 38% for phones. From 8:00 to 3:00, you do not have a switch to flip. You have questions to ask. Most districts already own parent-facing tools (GoGuardian Parent, Securly Home, Bark for Schools Parent Portal) that are switched off by default. Tonight, without anyone’s permission: give the school laptop a bedtime on your home WiFi, and move its charger out of the bedroom. The comment that started this A while back I did a whole episode on school phone bans: what to do when your school bans phones, and how to talk to your kids about it. (Linked below if you missed it.) Then a viewer left a comment that stuck with me. Paraphrasing: phones are banned at school now, so the kids just use their Chromebooks all day. A couple of other people jumped in underneath it. Somebody brought up smartwatches. And honestly, back in the ’90s our graphing calculators were advanced enough to be distractions too. I wrote programs for my TI-83, so I am not exactly positioned to judge. But that commenter was right, and the thing they put their finger on deserves a real answer. Where school phone bans actually stand right now Here is the quick recap. As of the most recent Education Week tracking in mid-2026, at least 38 states and Washington, D.C. require districts to ban or restrict student phone use. Twenty-eight of those states, plus D.C., go bell-to-bell. First bell to last bell, lunch and passing periods and study hall included. These bans were built to solve one specific problem: phones distracting kids during school. And on that specific problem, the early results are genuinely good. Where Who was surveyed What they reported New York (2026) 585 teachers, administrators, and school staff after year one 80% said the phone-free policy delivered positive results. 76% saw better classroom behavior. 80% saw better social connections. 60% reported a drop in bullying and cyberbullying. New Hampshire (2026) 1,399 educators in grades 6 to 12 About 75% said students seemed more focused. About 65% said students talked to more people at lunch and during breaks. Phones in Focus (national, 2026) More than 68,000 educators Teachers report less in-class phone use and more face-to-face interaction after bell-to-bell bans. So the bans are doing their job. The catch is the job description. The ban covers the most visible screen in the building. It does not cover the only one. I keep picturing a house with a front door and a side door. We closed the front door. The side door is propped open, and it was propped open by the school itself. What is still in the backpack every single day? Three things, mostly. 1. The school-issued tablet, laptop, or Chromebook. This is the big one, and it is the one your kid is required to use. 2. The smartwatch. A lot of ban policies never mention it at all. Utah’s does. Our law specifically names smartwatches, and the newer version that took effect July 1, 2026 goes further. Senate Bill 69 covers cellphones, smartwatches, and “emerging technologies that could act in place of or as an extension of a student’s smartphone.” That is lawmakers looking down the road and saying: we do not know what is coming, but we want it covered too. Worth noting what that same Utah law explicitly does not cover: school-issued or school-required devices. Which is the entire point of this post. 3. The stuff nobody has written a policy about. A very capable graphing calculator, especially at the high school level. An e-reader, for the kid who really loves books. Let’s focus on the main screen, though. The one your child is handed and told to use. Why you cannot just “fix” the school laptop (and why that is not on you) Here is the most useful way I have found to think about a school Chromebook: it is a work laptop, and your kid is the employee. The district’s IT department set it up. They decide what is installed, which sites load, which accounts can even sign in. You cannot change the settings on your own work laptop, and you cannot change these either. That is not a failure of your parenting or your tech skills. It is a question of whose name is on the device. I have worked in IT for 24 years and I cannot reconfigure a device that somebody else’s management console owns. Neither can the systems administrators in my comment section. If you have been sitting there feeling behind on this one, you were never in the race. Wait, are laptops really a bigger distraction than phones? According to teachers, yes. The EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,268 teachers, school administrators, and district leaders. 56% said off-task behavior on laptops, tablets, or desktops was a major source of distraction eating into learning time. For personal cellphones, that number was 38%. School-issued devices outranked phones. In the same survey. By a lot. And then there is a much bigger one. Phones in Focus is a national research project led by University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth, with responses from more than 68,000 educators so far. Teachers in that sample estimate that, on average, about one in three students are using their laptops during class for personal things: texting, gaming, social media, YouTube videos that have nothing to do with the lesson. And here is the part that matters for this conversation: that estimate barely moves depending on whether the school has a phone ban. Ban the phone, do not ban the phone, about a third of the room is still on the laptop. Personal cellphones School-issued laptops and tablets Rated a major classroom distraction (EdWeek, 1,268 educators) 38% 56% Covered by most state bell-to-bell bans Yes Usually no Who controls the settings You (mostly) The district Changes when a phone ban starts Usage drops sharply Barely moves “Okay, but my kid isn’t doing that” Maybe not! I am not saying your kid is the one streaming YouTube during fourth period. I am saying the option is in the bag every day, at school and at home. Building your plan around the idea that it is not there is where families get caught out. It reminds me of the line from Jurassic Park I think about constantly in this job: life, uh, finds a way. Kids find a way. They always have. And finding the way is not a character flaw. That is a 12-year-old with a device and a boring fourth period. I have a whole video on my channel about the ways kids get around controls. It is one of my most watched, so go take a look if you have not. What about the pouches? Last time I covered phone bans, I talked about the pouches: a fabric pouch with a magnetic lock. Phones go in at the start of the day, stay with the kid, cannot be opened, and at dismissal the kid taps it on a base to unlock. You already know how this story goes. Within about a week of any school rolling those out, somebody’s kid has figured out the magnet, or has started putting an old phone in the pouch. The bigger problem is consistency. My son’s high school is supposed to be bell-to-bell, because we are in Utah, and I still get texts from him during the day. I asked him early in the year how that was happening, and he said nobody really cares during lunch. So, shrug. If a rule only works while somebody is watching, the rule was not the thing doing the work. There is a national study on exactly this. Researchers from Stanford, Duke, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania looked at more than 43,000 middle and high schools over three years and published the results through the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2026. The pouches genuinely did cut phone use. In schools with bell-to-bell bans, the share of students teachers reported using phones in class for personal reasons dropped from 61% to 13%. That part held up. But the first year got harder before it got easier. Disciplinary incidents went up. Student wellbeing went down. By the third year, both of those turned around, with wellbeing landing higher than where it started. Which tells us something useful: we do not have the full answer yet. A lot of these bans just went into place. Year one is not the verdict. When your kid gets around something, ask a better question At some point, one of them will get around something. When that happens, the question that actually gets you somewhere is not “how dare you.” It is: what were you trying to do? Because the answer is almost never “I wanted to defy the school.” It is usually: “I was bored.” “Everybody was in a group chat and I wasn’t.” “I wanted to know if you texted me back.” It is a bit like when your boss has you do something that feels completely pointless, right up until you finally see the bigger picture. Kids genuinely believe they can manage themselves. They have self-control, they will not look at it, it is fine. But every “I’m just checking for a second” costs more than the second. Research on interruptions by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of about 23 minutes to fully return to a task after being interrupted. That study followed office workers rather than eighth graders, so treat it as illustrative rather than a classroom measurement. Still, multiply that shape of thing by a steady trickle of notifications across a class period and you can see how little actual learning time is left. So is anything going well with these bans? Actually, quite a bit. The thing teachers keep reporting, survey after survey, is not a test score. It is noise. Lunchrooms got loud again. Hallways got loud again. Kids are talking to each other in the spaces between things. And there is real boredom now. Real, unstructured, nothing-to-do boredom, which we spent about 15 years accidentally deleting. Some of that boredom is going to turn into a friendship, a sketchbook, or a very stupid joke they will still be telling at 25. From 8:00 to 3:00, you do not have a switch. You have questions. Let’s talk about the school day specifically, because that is what the comment was about. Not 3:00 to bedtime. 8:00 to 3:00. During those hours, the laptop is the district’s. The network is the district’s. The rules are the district’s. What you have is questions. And in most districts, the answers already exist. Somebody already set this up. Nobody ever turned on the part that is meant for you. The classroom view your kid’s teacher may or may not be using Almost every district running Chromebooks has monitoring software on them. GoGuardian and Securly are the two names you will hear most often. The first thing that software does is give the teacher a live view of every screen in the room at once. The tab the kid is on, plus every other tab they have open behind it. So the exact problem that commenter described, a third of the room quietly on something else, is visible to somebody in real time. If they are looking. Which makes this a completely fair question at parent-teacher conferences. Not as an accusation. Just: do you use the classroom view during class? Some teachers use it constantly. Some have never opened it. It varies teacher to teacher, in the same building, down the same hallway. The parent version nobody told you about Here is the part that surprises people: a lot of that software has a parent version, and it comes with the license your district already bought. GoGuardian Parent shows you your own kid’s activity on their school device. Depending on what your district enables, it also lets you filter that school-managed device at home and pause the internet on it. Straight from GoGuardian’s own documentation: those parental controls are available only if the school’s IT administrator has enabled them, and they apply only during out-of-school hours. They are switched off by default. Somebody at the district has to go into a settings page and turn them on. Securly Home works similarly. It is free to families as part of the district’s Securly purchase, and it gives parents a real-time activity feed, home rules on the school device, internet pause, and offline scheduling. Also school-owned devices only, and also only outside school hours. Notice the pattern. These tools exist, your district may already own them, and nobody is going to send a letter letting you know. So if you have spent the last few minutes thinking “great, so I have zero control over this machine,” you might actually have some. It may just be turned off. Bark for Schools: free, and frequently switched off Before I say a word about this one: I have an affiliate relationship with Bark on their family products. If you buy one of those through a link of mine, I get paid. The school version I am about to describe is free, so there is nothing here for me to sell you. But you should know the relationship exists before I start talking. Bark for Schools is free. Not discounted, not a trial. Free to every public and private K-12 school in the United States. Your district is not paying for it. So if the answer you get back is “we would love to, but it is not in the budget,” budget is not the barrier on this one. It also has a Parent Portal that shares your own kid’s alerts with you. Same story as the others: the school has to switch it on and choose the alert settings, and plenty of schools never have. Bark for Schools and the family version of Bark are two different products This trips up a lot of families, and the letter that came home in August almost certainly did not make it clear. Bark for Schools follows the account. The family version of Bark follows the kid. Bark for Schools (free) Bark family plans (paid) What it watches Your child’s school Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account: school email, school chats, school documents, and Chrome browsing tied to that account The child’s own device and personal accounts Where it works Anywhere they sign into that school account, including on their own laptop at home on a Sunday On the phone or tablet you set it up on What it does not see Personal Gmail, texts, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, anything on their personal phone Not applicable Cost $0 Bark Jr is $5/month. Bark Premium is $14/month, or $99/year. Who turns it on Your district You So when a district letter says your student is protected by Bark, what that actually means is their school account is covered. Not their entire life. Covering the personal device is a paid family product you would buy yourself, and that is the one I get paid on, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. One more thing worth asking: some districts negotiate a family deal. Bark partners with schools and organizations to offer family packages, and I have seen partner arrangements where families get the junior version free and the premium version at a discount. Not everybody does it, but enough do that it is worth a question to your district. If you are in Utah, something just changed This is new enough that most families have not heard about it yet. Utah Senate Bill 88, “School Technology Amendments,” passed in the 2026 session and took effect July 1, 2026. It requires public schools to provide a parent-accessible monitoring system for school-managed devices. That means a portal where you can see how long your child spent on their screen and what websites they visited. It also says that at a parent’s re…

Full show notes at the publisher

Instagram’s New Teen Limits, and Why You Want to Be the One Who Can Say Yes Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

Instagram is about to hand your teenager the strictest version of itself: a two hour daily cap across Instagram and Facebook, a midnight to 6 AM lockout, silent notifications during school hours, hidden like counts, and pauses every hour. All of it on by default, and none of it requires you to do anything.

Which sounds like good news until you read the fine print. Every one of those defaults can only be loosened by a linked parent. A teen with nobody attached to their account cannot change a single setting in the entire document. Meta is not allowed to say yes. Somebody has to be.

This week: what a consent judgment is and why it matters, every default that switches on and when, the three things the two hour limit quietly does not count, what parent supervision actually shows you (spoiler: a guest list, not the conversation), how Instagram plans to catch finsta accounts, what happens to a 10 year old's account, and the two scripts for having this conversation depending on what your house already looks like.

This week's task: ten minutes, their phone, not yours. Sit down and train the feed together.

Free one sheet on training your social media algorithm is linked in the show notes.

I read 130 pages of court filing for this one, which is genuinely my idea of a good time. I am not an attorney.

The One Sheet on how to train your social media algorithm: https://familytech.biz/train

Fear Is a Business Model: The 3 Questions That Turn a Scary Headline Into a Plan Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

A speaker came to my kids' middle school and put a picture of a handgun next to a picture of a smartphone. Then he told a room full of parents those two things were the same thing. He was giving a similar talk to the students the next day, and I told my kids they had my permission to skip it.

This week: why fear is a business model and you are the customer, why "just take it away" is a wish rather than a plan for most families, and the three question tool that turns any scary headline into a decision in about 90 seconds.

I also get honest about the parts that do not flatter me. What choosing calm costs me in views every single week, why fear creates a faster bond than capability ever will, and the months I spent accepting title suggestions from a scoring tool until I had optimized my own videos out of my own search results without ever noticing.

Plus the reframe at the center of the whole episode: a warning makes a kid anxious, a rehearsal makes a kid ready. Same headline, same facts, completely different result sitting in your kid's head.

One problem: Fear is a business model, and scared parents are an easier audience than capable ones. One fix: Three questions, 90 seconds, run the moment your stomach drops. One task: Catch one scary headline this week, run it through the questions, and decide what you are going to fix or what you are going to stop worrying about.

If you have ever said "I'm just not good at technology," this episode is for you. You are not behind, and you are far more capable of this than anyone has bothered to tell you.

New episodes every Tuesday. This is Family Tech powering down.

The 4 Questions That Replace “Is This App Safe?” Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Sarah told parents BeReal was safe. She had good reasons: no filters, no likes, no followers, no ads, and critically, no direct messages. No inbox meant there was no door for a stranger to knock on. That was a real structural protection, not a promise or a policy.

Then BeReal added messaging in 2023. Then ads in 2025. Then a creator program. Then it got acquired by a mobile games company for roughly half a billion dollars.

The advice went bad in about eleven months. Nobody noticed for three years, including the person who reported the change herself.

In this episode, Sarah walks through the pattern behind why this keeps happening to every "safe alternative" app, using three Augusts of receipts from Instagram. Then she hands over the fix: a four-question check that works on any app, forever, because it asks about features instead of asking for a verdict. Messages, discovery, audience, money. About 30 seconds per app, no subscription, no monitoring tool, no cost.

Plus: the one BeReal setting that "is BeReal safe" would never have found, and why "that's not a parenting failure" is not just a nice thing to say.

This week's challenge: pick an app you already said yes to, one you approved so long ago you cannot remember approving it, and run the Four Doors on it. Then come tell Sarah which app it was and which door was open.

No sponsors on this one.

Asking Your Kids Before You Post: The Veto, The Undo, and The Handoff Aug 25, 2026

Show notes

There are videos on my channel that will never exist. Not because they were bad ideas, but because one of my kids said no. When the word "family" is in your brand name, that is not a small thing to give up. I killed them anyway.

This week I am walking through what about 10 years of asking my own kids for permission before publishing actually taught me, and almost none of it is what the internet will tell you.

We get into why "is this photo embarrassing?" is the wrong question entirely, and what the right one is. Why the most reasonable sounding question in parenting, "why not?", might be quietly turning your kid's consent into an appeals process. What to do during the years when your kid is genuinely too young to answer. And the counterintuitive move I make when a relative posts my kid without asking, which involves me getting out of the middle entirely.

Plus: what Congress and four state legislatures have independently landed on that looks suspiciously like the rule some families were already running at home, and why Matthew McConaughey spent real money on a right your 17 year old already has for free.

Three things you walk away with: the veto, the undo, and the handoff.

This week's challenge: two searches, about five minutes. Google your kid's name, then reverse image search their face. Do that one first, before you touch a single old post, because it is what a classmate would do.

Nobody is asking you to delete a decade. Take a breath. This is a system, not a purge.

The Gamification of Health: Why Games Work When Willpower Does not Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

Your fitness tracker is collecting dust and your habit app is buried in a folder. You are not alone, and it is not your fault. Most health technology assumes that access to data will change your behavior, and humans simply do not work that way. What does work is turning it into a game.

This episode is a practical tour of the gamification of health: the points, badges, streaks, and leaderboards that get people moving, and how to use them in a real household without adding one more thing to manage.

Sarah covers what gamification actually is and why your brain responds to it, the difference between doing something for a badge and doing it because it has become normal, and the honest truth about how long habits really take to form. Then it is into the tools: Apple Watch rings and family activity sharing, the Fitbit to Google Health transition and what it now costs, Garmin's absurdly generous badge system, Oura's readiness scores and its full price tag, and habit apps including Habitica, Finch, Streaks, and SuperBetter. Plus chore apps that turn dishes into points, and the games that are genuinely exercise: Ring Fit Adventure, Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Zombies Run.

Every cost is stated out loud, subscriptions included, and nobody paid for a single mention.

The episode closes where it should, with the guardrails: orthosomnia and sleep tracker anxiety, streak stress and how to spot when a tool has flipped on you, and what to watch for when your kid is the one using the app.

This week's challenge: pick one tool and use it for seven days. Just one.

6 Tech Parenting Mistakes I Made, Even Though I Teach This For a Living Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

I know how to check my son's browsing history. I have shown thousands of people exactly how to do it. And I have let months go by without checking it once.

This episode is not a tutorial. It is the honest version. Six tech parenting decisions I would make differently, from the parental controls I loosened for a trip and never fixed, to the Discord promise I kept when my gut said not to, to the consequence I announced and never enforced.

They all fall into three patterns: the knowledge gap, the exhaustion trap, and the commitment trap. I walk through each one, why it happens to basically every parent, and the single fix that actually helps.

If you have been quietly carrying some tech regrets of your own, this one is for you. No fear, no judgment, no doom and gloom. Just a conversation about being human at this.

In this episode:

The three patterns behind nearly every tech parenting mistake
Why temporary settings changes become permanent, and the calendar fix
What a family tech agreement actually does, and why I still do not have one signed
How to walk back a promise about an app without breaking your kid's trust
Why fitting the punishment to the crime beats going nuclear every time
Streaks, resets, and why I do not set New Year's resolutions

Free family tech agreement template: http://familytechzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/techcontract.pdf

Subscribe to Oh My Tech for honest, practical family technology guidance every week.

Lurking Counts! How to Find “Your People” Online Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

I've been finding my people online since 1994, and I've never once gone looking for a community on purpose. Once I was looking for a boy. Once I was looking for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This episode is what actually works instead: how to tell what a room is really for before you invest six months in it, why you only ever need four usernames, and why lurking counts — for months, for years, however long you need.

Plus the two Facebook groups for the same water bottle that explain everything, and the night my smart lights kept turning off on my husband's game night.

Your Kid’s School Just Banned Phones. Now What? Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

Twenty-six states now require schools to ban or limit phones, and no two are
doing it the same way. What your state actually requires, what happens in an
emergency, and how to talk to your kid before day one.

Covered: the three tiers of state law and where yours sits, why enforcement
varies school to school, the emergency plan most families skip (a family code
word and a pre-chosen meeting spot), what kids are already doing to get around
the pouches, and where I land on whether any of this will work.

This week's challenge: call your school — not the district — and ask how
enforcement and emergency contact actually work. Then pick your code word and
your meeting spot with your kid.

Less fear, more capability. Family Tech powering down.

Moving Beyond Parental Controls: The Graduation Plan Jul 21, 2026

Show notes

So, your kid is officially a teenager now.

You know exactly what that means: the parental controls that used to work flawlessly are suddenly useless. Your teen is fighting you on every single restriction; they’ve probably discovered at least three workarounds you didn't know existed, and phone time has turned into a daily household battle.

If you are exhausted from playing the role of the "screen time police," I have some great news for you. We aren't going to talk about how to lock down your teen’s phone today. Instead, we are talking about how to responsibly unlock it.

Welcome to The Graduation Plan—a three-stage framework designed to transition you from a tech warden to the person your teenager actually comes to for tech advice.

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