Let’s have the uncomfortable conversation, shall we.

Indiana’s new bell-to-bell school phone restrictions have triggered the predictable reactions: “Overreach!” “Finally!” “What about emergencies?” “Tell that to the dead kid!”

And then there’s the line that keeps bubbling up in coffee shops and comment sections:

Be a parent.

It’s blunt. It’s not wrong. And it’s not the whole story either.

For years, teachers have been fighting a quiet war they were never trained for. They didn’t sign up to compete with TikTok’s algorithm. They didn’t go to Ball State to referee group chat drama at 10:17 a.m. They’re trying to teach fractions while a thousand-mile-away influencer is monetizing their students’ attention span.

So when lawmakers say phones should be stored away and inaccessible during the school day, a lot of educators nod. Not because they hate technology. Not because they crave control. But because they’re tired of negotiating screen time during Algebra II.

And yes — parents bear responsibility. Phones come from home. The data plans come from home. The late-night scrolling happens at home. If a 13-year-old shows up exhausted because they were on Snapchat until 2 a.m., that didn’t happen in the cafeteria.

There is a cultural drift here. We handed kids casino-level dopamine machines and then acted surprised when they couldn’t self-regulate. Schools didn’t invent that problem.

But here’s the part that makes this harder than a bumper-sticker solution: even strong parents are operating inside a system designed to defeat them.

Phones aren’t just distractions anymore. They are social infrastructure. They are friend groups. They are status. They are emergency contact. They are identity. Telling one family to “just set boundaries” doesn’t change the fact that 600 other kids in the building are plugged into the same ecosystem.

A classroom isn’t 25 isolated parenting experiments. It’s a shared environment. And when one student’s phone lights up, it rarely stays contained.

That’s why uniform school rules exist in the first place. Not because the state wants to replace parents. But because collective order requires common standards.

Still, lawmakers need to tread carefully. History is littered with bans that sounded tough and aged poorly. Zero tolerance policies turned butter knives into expulsion cases. Dress code crackdowns became culture wars. Overly rigid enforcement creates absurd moments — and absurd moments create backlash.

The word “inaccessible” in this new policy will matter. How districts interpret it will matter more. If enforcement becomes punitive theater, it will blow up. If it becomes consistent, predictable, and focused on learning, it may quietly normalize.

The emergency debate is the emotional flashpoint. No parent wants to imagine their child unable to call 911. But in nearly every documented school crisis, the first calls come from adults in the building. Schools are structured around adult-initiated emergency response. That reality doesn’t erase fear, but it does complicate the rhetoric.

At the end of the day, this isn’t really about phones.

It’s about whether we expect schools to solve problems that start at home. It’s about whether we admit that tech companies engineered tools more addictive than most parents can counter alone. And it’s about whether restoring attention in classrooms requires both private responsibility and public guardrails.

“Be a parent” is part of the answer.

But so is this:  Schools can’t out-parent the algorithm and parents can’t fight it entirely by themselves.

If this policy works, it won’t be because lawmakers flexed. It will be because families and schools finally stopped pretending the distraction crisis was somebody else’s job.   Now we’ll see who’s serious.