Every time you hand your kid a cell phone to take to school, you are handing him a distraction. Think about whenever you have your phone on you. What are you doing with it? Checking it. Refreshing your email. Looking at your social media feeds. When your phone is in your pocket, the temptation is to look at it every 15 minutes.

When a child goes to school with a cell phone, all that child wants to do is look at their cell phone. That’s not fair to the child. At age 10, 15 or 18, kids are cognitively immature. They are not able to reason in an abstract fashion. In other words, they have difficulty believing that if they fail in school this year, they will have limited options later in life. And, they have difficulty disciplining their minds to attend to matters at hand.

The best way for you to help is to do the adult thinking for your children and make a path to success as clear as possible. This means, limit things (like cell phones) on the path that sabotage their efforts to succeed. Letting your kid bring a phone to school isn’t fair to them, and…