Our Children’s Homework Now Comes With a Distraction Machine. It Is Time to Switch It Off -

BY ZAINULLAH KHAN
The homework took four minutes. The phone stayed in the boy’s hands for two more hours.
His mother, in a small house in Tangi tehsil, saw him bent over the screen and thought he was still studying. He had told her he was checking the homework group, and she believed him. Why wouldn’t she? Between the school fee and an after-school tutor, nearly half of her husband’s salary goes to his education. That money is her ticket to a future she never had.
She is not alone. Across Charsadda, Peshawar and Mardan, many private schools now post homework in WhatsApp groups. The assignment arrives on a parent’s phone, so the child must borrow it. A father is out earning. A mother is running the house. Neither can sit beside the child for two hours.
I have watched what follows. A boy near Charsadda scored 85 percent in Class 5 and 43 percent in Class 7. A girl, just as bright in Class 6, now hovers around 60 percent in Class 8. Her parents see a phone in her hand and assume she is studying. Then there are two children from same family, who are not allowed a phone, not even for the class group. At the end of the year they stood first and third in class. These are not statistics, but researchers have been finding the same pattern for years.
A 2021 study in Education Sciences, led by Alissa and Michael Mrazek with Jonathan Schooler, surveyed 135 students at four American public high schools. Teenagers were distracted during homework about 38 percent of the time, partly from mind-wandering and partly from their devices. Sixty-four percent said they should focus more than they did, and the authors estimated that students may lose around 204 hours a year to unintended distraction. These children want to concentrate. A phone that arrives with the homework makes it harder.
Taking phones away works. Economists Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy of the London School of Economics studied schools in four English cities and found that test scores of 16-year-olds rose about 6.4 percent after phones were banned. The weakest students gained the most. Where bans were not widely followed, there were no gains.
Governments are finally acting. On 10 December 2025, Australia began enforcing a law that requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s off their services, with fines up to A$49.5 million. The burden falls on technology companies, not on children or parents. Within a month, about 4.7 million accounts had been deactivated or restricted. Later research by the regulator found under-16 account ownership had fallen from 49.7 to 31.3 percent, and parents reported more success in setting healthy limits. It is not perfect, and some children still slip through. But a country decided that childhood should not be left to an algorithm.
Pakistan is moving more slowly. Punjab banned phones for students in all government and private schools in November 2025, but that covers the school day, not the evening homework group. In the Islamabad High Court, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has said no law bans social media for under-16s and that it cannot set up age verification beyond its powers. Parliament may take years. A child in Class 6 today cannot wait.
That is why the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government must act now, using the powers it already has over schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Department and the private schools regulatory authority should issue a clear order. Schools must be banned from giving homework through WhatsApp or any internet app, and required to use diaries and notebooks. Students must be barred from using phones in school, with inspections and penalties for schools that ignore it. In addition, a public campaign should tell parents why a phone in a child’s hands is not the same as studying.
The boy who scored 85 percent did not lose his ability. He lost his habits, one evening at a time. We can still bring them back, for our families and for the love of learning our culture has always honoured.