It's destroying their ability to experience reality as paths, free navigation, vicarious trial and error, all of this is fundamental to memory consolidation: the brain's fundamental unit: action-syntax in memory, is built from non-screen topological integrations of landmark and allocentric experiences. Phones destroy this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6059409/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0
“A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,”