"Love and belonging" is the third in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

It's difficult to feel a sense of belonging if all your peers have access to something you don't, even worse if that something is your social space itself.

(Full disclosure: I am rampantly anti smartphone. But I understand kids' need to have it.)

That’s why we need blanket bans where no one has a smartphone at school.

Bingo.

We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.

You can just buy them a dumb phone? No reason they need a smartphone just for messages and calls

True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart phone dumb than the other way around.

You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that effects how much and what people are messaging you and is the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to display right or at all.

Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.

No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on. It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.

There are a lot of things schools themselves have done that end up essentially requiring it. Here's a short list from my kids' district:

* Use an LMS called Infinite Canvas. Among other things, the kids have to submit homework online -- which can be done on the web app -- which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook?

* Use Teamsnap for sports team management: scheduling, roster management, messaging, etc.

* Use Instagram for school-official communications, including things like social events, counseling services, college visits, and sports team news.

... There are more, but the point is that phone apps make certain things easy and schools are taking advantage of that fact, even if they're simultaneously banning them during school hours.

> which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook?

No, but I've used a scanner before. Surely that's still an option?

Maybe it's unusual that we've kept them, but both my ancient inkjet and my wife's ancient laser printer both have flatbed scanners on top.

Having a printer is unusual too :)

None of those things sound essential or without analog or laptop workarounds.