In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).
As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.
Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
You are misunderstanding the addiction part here. It's not about not having fun.
There are tech companies spending literally trillions of dollars on one goal: ensuring that kids keep looking at their phones.
Your framing this as a question of boredom is really naive.