By Pepper Parr
April 29th, 2026
BURLINGTON, ON’
Ramp up the access to psychological services for High School students.
The province is considering banning students from looking at a social media when they are in schools.
Those students who were never able to discipline their use of being on their cell phone for much more than five minutes will be going into withdrawal.
Parents should take some responsibility for this, but they too are addicted to their cell phones.
I’ll call this one – you call that one.
Students have forgotten how to have conversations.
Minister of Education Paul Calandra says the province will be working closely with the federal government on a social media ban for kids under a certain age.
He also says he is considering implementing an “outright ban” of cellphones on school properties, with some medical exemptions.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s government recently announced that it plans to ban children from using social media accounts and artificial intelligence chatbots, starting in classrooms.
Federal Culture Minister Marc Miller has said the government is seriously considering a law enforcing age limits on social media use, as Australia has done.
This is what a generation of parents has let happen to their children.
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When I went to school in the 1960s I always had an emergency dime in my shoe to use a pay phone if I needed to call home. Now we have traded payphones for expensive mini computers aka cell phones. Cell phones were invented to be portable phones. I loved my little flip phone. Fast forward to today when I had to buy a bigger purse to accommodate the ever-growing size of my Smartphone. The phones are not the problem. It is the data plans within them. You do not need to include a data plan in your cell phone plan. I have one I never use; my husband has a cell phone with no data plan. They can still be tracked. Get rid of the kids data plans and you get rid of their social media (and save a wack of money too)! Of course you still need to put up with the texting
It’s about time that cell phones are banned from schools.
While I agree that the parents are the ones who should regulate the use of cell phones it doesn’t seem to be happening. Perhaps because some parents use the cell phone as a babysitter.
For those parents who feel they know where their children are because they can track them I have a bit of information for you. Your child leaves his cell phone in his locker and leaves the school. The cell phone is in school but not your child.
I am certain that many of us can recall going into a restaurant and seeing everyone at the table adults as well as children scrolling on their cell phones. No interaction, not conversation.
Just this past weekend I was in a restaurant and there was a family of 3. The husband, wife and a child about 4 or 5. The parents were sitting in a booth. The child was standing at the end of the booth watching something on his tablet and the father was finger feeding the child.
Have you noticed that young people as well as some adults have no idea how to have a conversation face to face. Texting has become a way of existence.
I have heard of people texting each other in the same house to tell them “dinner is ready”. For students in schools it is, in my opinion, “missing out complex”.
More importantly, and sadly, it allows students to be bullied 24/7.
School is meant to be a place of learning, of sharing ideas and to learn critical thinking, not of scrolling through social media when their focus should be elsewhere.
For those who think that the students need their phones to get information. This can be done outside of school time not when they are in class.
For those parents who feel they need to be in contact in case of an emergency remember you can always call the school ( speak to a real person) and have a message given to a student in class.
Parents need to back up this initiative – their children do not need to take their cell phones to school, no matter what they tell you.