"A phone ban will not help me, because it is bad when I am home."
A high school student said this to me recently, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.
I work with students across schools, and listening is at the heart of that work. But with high schoolers, I am not always given the time to really listen. Often, the format is an assembly or a large workshop. Important, yes, but not the kind of space where students say what they actually carry. Sometimes students will come find me afterward, but I am often rushing to my next talk. The real conversations happen in smaller groups, in sustained listening sessions where there is time to go deeper.
This year, I was given more of that time and space than I have had in a while. Intentional listening designed to bridge the gap between how adults think school life works and how students actually experience it.
What I heard both confirmed what I suspected and stopped me for a moment.
These students are thoughtful, articulate, and deeply aware of what is happening around them. When given time and space, their understanding of the challenges they face and their desire to talk about them was striking. Beautiful, and honestly, heartbreaking. Too many adults assume they are fine simply because they are quiet, capable, and high-achieving. We mistake silence for stability.
We mistake silence for stability.
These conversations happened across multiple schools, with students from different backgrounds and achievement levels. And what emerged was consistent.
Many of the challenges schools associate with middle school have not disappeared by high school. They have gone underground. Students have learned how to manage their image, curate their silence, and keep large parts of their digital lives out of adult view. The calm we see is often misread as resolution.
It is not.
In middle school, the digital layer is still visible through behaviour, conflict, and emotional spillover. By high school, that same layer shapes stress, relationships, risk, and identity more quietly. When schools stop paying attention at this stage, we misunderstand what students are carrying and how alone they are carrying it.
What stood out most was not the presence of difficult topics. It was how clearly students wanted help. They were not asking to be rescued or monitored. They were asking for skills. Language. Perspective. And for adults to actually see them.
Take online gambling. Students described how normalized it has become. It starts casually, through sports betting apps or friends sharing tips. How quickly it becomes a way to escape boredom or stress. And how few adults even know to look for it.
But gambling is part of a larger pattern. Students are learning to cope through screens. Numbing discomfort, managing pressure, and escaping anxiety through behaviours that offer instant gratification that can lead to long-term risk. Pornography. Endless scrolling. Comparison spirals. Online spaces that quietly pull people toward more extreme thinking. These are not edge cases. They are part of daily life.
When things go wrong, students turn to each other, not to adults.
A friend discloses an eating disorder. A friend spends hours in disturbing online spaces. A friend sends a message at midnight asking to be talked down. The student on the other end needs sleep. They have a test in the morning. But they also cannot ignore the message. And they have been sworn to secrecy. They do not know what is serious. They do not know when to break confidence. They carry responsibility they are not equipped to hold.
This is different from the secrets teenagers have always kept. Before, those secrets had boundaries. Now, digital access means the weight never stops.
Now, digital access means the weight never stops.
A friend in crisis can reach you at any hour, and the responsibility follows students into the night, into their sleep, into the next day. It is relentless. And it is affecting well-being in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Adults see supportive friendships. We do not see the hidden counselling happening underneath. Students trying to manage crises alone because they fear adults will overreact, will not understand, or cannot be trusted with the truth. Or because they genuinely do not know when a problem has become too serious to handle alone.
The cost is real. Students are carrying not only their own struggles but the struggles of their peers, without the skills or support to do so safely. And we remain largely unaware of both the problems and the invisible system trying to hold everything together.
This is not sustainable. And it is showing up in the mental health crisis schools are now facing.
Schools are right to limit phone access. Phones do not belong in schools. But what students told me complicates what happens next.
"A phone ban will not help me, because it is bad when I am home."
That sentence matters.
It tells us that while schools can and should create healthier digital environments during the school day, the struggle does not stop at the school gate. Phones are not the problem in isolation. They are part of a larger digital ecosystem shaping how students cope, connect, escape, compare, and numb discomfort.
When we reduce the issue to phones alone, we miss the skills gap underneath. Removing access does not teach students how to manage boredom, loneliness, pressure, or exposure once they are back online. It does not help them make sense of what they are seeing. And it does not help them understand themselves.
This is where I hear schools say, we do not have time for this.
The curriculum is full. The pressure is real. Academic demands are high. And yet, if we want students to thrive: wellbeing, engagement, and belonging cannot remain secondary. Many schools are seeing engagement and belonging decline in secondary school, even as expectations rise.
We cannot say we want students to thrive and then cut time for the very conversations and skill-building that help them navigate the world they already live in. This does not require a new course. It requires integrated, age-appropriate conversations woven into advisory, health education, and the spaces where students are already reflecting on their lives.
What troubles me most is not that students are struggling. It is that we keep centring adult comfort and adult certainty in conversations that should be centred on student reality.
Schools often describe themselves as student-centred. And yet, when it comes to digital life, decisions are frequently driven by adult fear, adult assumptions, or adult confidence in skills we may not actually have. We tell students what to do without always taking the time to understand how they are already navigating these spaces.
Most educators are doing their best. But being a responsible adult does not automatically make someone a skilled digital guide. Most of us are still figuring out our own relationship with technology. Pretending otherwise distances us from students rather than supporting them.
The starting point is not a pre-packaged solution. It is a willingness to examine our own digital habits, to admit what we do not know, and to design with students rather than for them.
Listening is not a soft skill here. It is a core leadership responsibility. If we are serious about wellbeing, engagement, and belonging, then students cannot simply be the audience for adult decisions. They have to be at the center of the conversation.
Teaching students how to live well in a digital world requires time, humility, and a willingness to listen even when the answers make us uncomfortable.
The students are already telling us what they need.
The question is whether we see enough urgency to act on it.
Allison Ochs, Social pedagogue, author, and student listening specialist
I work with schools and parents to navigate the realities of digital life and design education built on what students actually need. Interested in bringing this work to your school or parent community? Contact me here.