Taking Back Childhood From Phones—Finally

Americans don’t agree about anything. Except this: Kids belong in the real-world.

[This post ran in The Free Press on March 27, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the publication of The Anxious Generation]

Image. Shutterstock

The Anxious Generation was published one year ago today. Our plan was to promote the book in the spring, take the summer off to recharge, then get to work in September on Jon’s next book, a deeply depressing investigation of technology’s effects on democracy.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spectacularly, schools, states, and entire countries implemented phone-free school policies, and Australia raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16.

This went well beyond our wildest expectations of what could happen.

The question is why this change is unfolding so quickly—and what this mass movement says about the state of our culture and its prospects for renewal.

Wherever children have smartphones in their pockets and social media on those smartphones, family life turns into an eternal struggle over screen time. That’s been our reality for a while. Then came Covid.

For several years, children—deprived of school and every other normal social activity—were confined to their screens. As Covid restrictions faded away, the device addictions they had amplified did not. And that struggle between parents and their kids only intensified.

By early 2024, parents were sick of it. Teachers, too, were exhausted from competing for their students’ attention against platforms designed by multibillion-dollar companies to grab and hold attention. So we didn’t need to persuade people that there was a problem. The Anxious Generation put into words, graphs, and metaphors what parents, teachers, pediatricians, and young people had felt for more than a decade: that smartphones, social media, and video games were pulling children out of the real world and transporting them someplace strange, inhumane, and harmful.

What the book made clear was the extent of the problem. It turned out most parents felt that way but lacked the tools to establish new cultural norms for their communities. Through book clubs, Facebook groups, text threads, podcasts, PTA meetings, faith-based gatherings, and just about every place where parents, teachers, and community leaders talked among themselves, parents organized.

The book framed the situation as a collective action problem from which we could escape, but only if we do it collectively. The escape route? Four simple norms for collective action.

We can give you an update on the progress of the movement and draw lessons for the future by reviewing what has happened for each of the four norms. Each gives a glimpse of the profound change that’s underway:

Norm #1: No smartphones before high school (or age 14)

The best way to delay the arrival of the phone-based childhood is to delay giving your child a smartphone. If you need to communicate with your children, give them a simple phone watch, flip phone, or other basic phone that has no internet access. Although many parents had wanted to delay, they fell victim to the emotional power of the plea “Mom, I’m the only one who doesn’t have one. I’m being left out.”

That is now changing. What was needed was a clear norm, a bright line, a minimum age target that parents could aim for together. We offered that in the book: high school (or age 14 in other educational systems). Keep smartphones entirely out of the lives of younger students. If even one-quarter of the families in any elementary school stick to that pledge, then no child can later say, in middle school, that they are “the only one.”

Mothers across the globe are leading the charge for change. Two groups started by moms—Smartphone Free Childhood in the UK, and Wait Until (the end of) 8th in the U.S.—had already designed pledges for parents to support one another in delaying smartphones. These groups, along with dozens of other grassroots organizations (nearly all founded by mothers) were already doing great work, yet remained small and disconnected from each other. We helped amplify their efforts by gathering these groups onto a single webpage and directing traffic to them.

In most social movements, it takes decades and a great deal of advertising money for social norms to change, as happened with teen smoking and drunk driving. This movement is different.

At lightning speed, we’ve seen parents of younger kids commit to delaying smartphones, and parents of older kids set new boundaries, swap smartphones for flip phones, and have meaningful conversations with their kids about the risks of online life. To take just one example: Smartphone Free Childhood began in early 2024 with a simple post by two British moms to a WhatsApp group. They were looking for other parents who shared their desire to delay smartphone access. By the end of the first week, they had 10,000 people, organized into 75 WhatsApp communities. In March 2025, they have over 300,000 parents and 29 offshoot groups in countries around the world.

Norm #2: No social media before 16

Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. The major platforms welcome anyone who is old enough to say that they are 13. They collect and sell children’s data, capture their attention for an average of five hours a day, and routinely expose them to sex, violence, and content that promotes suicide. Although an ideal minimum age would be 18, we chose 16 because it sets an age floor that could realistically emerge as a global norm.

It’s working.

Initially, we anticipated little help from Congress, given the considerable influence of social media companies.We thought parents would have to do this on their own, as with delaying smartphones. But what surprised us was the degree to which leaders and legislators from both parties sprang into action. Governors and legislators from red states (Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah), blue states (California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont) and purple states (Virginia) reached out to us to discuss their plans. Many began proposing and enacting policies supporting phone-free schools and safer social media design, and raising the age for opening social media accounts (as Florida did). It turns out that politicians in both parties are usually parents, too. Many saw the problems firsthand, and they could see the passion for this cause among other parents. Then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also took action. Building on his previous report on the dangers of social media for children, he asked Congress to require social media companies to offer warnings of the sort mandated for tobacco products, which gained the support of 42 state attorneys general.

But the crown jewel of all legislative responses was enacted in Australia, which raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and, crucially, put the onus on the companies, rather than on parents, to enforce it. The bill takes effect at the end of 2025. If it goes smoothly, we know that many countries will follow suit, essentially forcing platforms to make it a global standard.

Norm #3: Phone-free schools

In America, left and right often disagree on how kids should be educated, but there is universal agreement that they should be educated. There is also agreement that kids who are texting, playing video games, and watching TikTok videos in class are not being educated. Phones are distraction machines.

Once again, mothers saw the threat and began organizing to get phones out of schools. Then, in 2024, governors from both parties jumped into action. In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders––a mom with young children––sent copies of The Anxious Generation to all state legislators and allocated money to encourage schools to go phone-free. In California, the L.A. public school district, the second-largest in the country, announced last June that they were going phone-free, and soon after that Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the entire state would go phone-free by July 2026. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul is backing model legislation to make all public schools phone-free, from bell to bell. It’s only when students are given the full six or seven hours of the school day away from their phones that we hear this universal report from teachers and principals: “We hear laughter in the hallways again.”

Beyond the U.S., a diverse set of countries enacted phone-free school policies or laws, including Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, the Netherlands, and Hungary.

Norm #4: More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Smartphones are the symptom of a deeper problem: the crisis in childhood itself. Children need vast quantities of free play, independence, and responsibility to guide brain development and social development. Being a kid is about the fun, risk, challenges, and thrills of exploring the richness of life with friends at your side and no parents in sight. Most people born before the mid-1980s cherish memories of this kind of childhood, making them receptive to this fourth norm.

We should note that this norm is spreading more slowly than the other three because it is not the case that the great majority of parents already wanted to send their children outside to play, with no supervision. The term anxious generation applies not only to Gen Z but also to their parents, who are stuck in a collective action problem: How can I send my kids outside when nobody else is doing it, when they would prefer to be on their devices, when I don’t know most people in the neighborhood, and—oh, did I mention that someone might call the police?

To spread this norm will require more time, more persuasion, and more collective action. To foster such action at the neighborhood and school levels, journalist and mom Lenore Skenazy, along with Jon, co-founded LetGrow.org to restore childhood play and independence. Our signature program is the “Let Grow Experience.” Rather than describe it here, we encourage you to watch a recent Instagram video where a Utah mother, recording herself in her car and exuding anxiety, explains the project: “We just read The Anxious Generation, and at the end they have this challenge where they challenge you to let your kid do something without a parent. . . . All of my kids came up with an idea, so Wells’s idea is to go to Chick-fil-A and order some dinner.”

The mother’s anxiety mounts as she waits for her 7-year-old son to return. Finally, the boy emerges from the store with a bag and a huge smile. He says “I want to do that again! That is so fun!” while also noting that his “legs are still shivering.”

Stories like this are coming to us from all over the United States, so we are hopeful that progress will accelerate. We also note that the problem of parental overprotection and over-supervision is particularly intense in the U.S., UK, and Canada, going back to the 1990s, although it does not seem to be as common in Northern Europe, where 7-year-old children still have the freedom to wander. On the other hand, as a Finnish journalist told Jon: “Yes, our kids are outside, but you see a lot of kids walking around looking down at their phones.”

Childhood freedom and independence are crucial for the success of the movement to roll back the phone-based childhood. The goal of the movement is not to take away screens; it is to restore a childhood worth having and remembering.

Where we go from here

Major technological change always causes major social change, as Neil Postman and other media theorists have long noted. Our period of rapid technological transformation is accompanied by vast social changes, many of which are turning out to be harmful to children, to our communities, and to our ability to understand each other. As social media evolves and AI spreads into more aspects of life, the speed of change will accelerate, and the harms might accelerate too.

But in moments of hardship come opportunities for cultural and political change. Just look at what happened at the beginning of the twentieth century—as America emerged from a period of great social difficulty, distrust, and polarization, driven in part by rapid technological changes. In Robert Putnam’s book The Upswing, he persuasively argues that the key was collective action—an “upswing” in civic engagement—organized by groups of citizens at all levels of society. Putnam wrote that the idea “is not that we should return nostalgically to some peak of American greatness, but that we should take inspiration and perhaps instruction from a period of despair much like our own, on the heels of which Americans successfully—and measurably—bent history in a more promising direction.”

Looking back on the last year, we see parents already bending the arc. What will the next year bring?