The Revolution Has Begun in the UK
75,000 UK parents have come together to give their kids a smartphone-free childhood
Introduction from Jon Haidt:
February 17th, 2024, was the day I became confident that childhood was going to change for the better. On that day, several people sent me an article from The Guardian, with this headline: ‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood. The article described the efforts of two British women who each had children in the 7-9 age range, the age at which many British kids are given a smartphone. (In fact, 24% of British kids aged 5-7 have their own smartphone.) They could see what had happened to children who burrowed into their smartphones and never re-emerged. They didn’t want their kids to be next. So they started a WhatsApp group to find other like-minded parents who would join them in breaking the norm, resisting, and maybe even trying to create a smartphone-free childhood.
It turned out that most British parents were feeling the same fears, the same sense of being trapped, and the same desire to scream. That’s why their simple call to join their WhatsApp group “went nuts.” Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell tell their story below. I reached out to them as soon as I read the article, and together, we put on a public Zoom call for British parents on March 21. We had over one thousand people on the call, discussing the challenges we faced and the power we had to change things as our numbers swelled.
By the end of the call, it was clear: The UK reached its tipping point in February 2024. Parents are up in arms about what addictive, distracting, and omnipresent digital technology is doing to their children at home and at school. They’re not going to take it anymore. I hope you’ll read their essay below and then join them. Sign up to take action. The two most important sites for British parents are Smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk, which is the site that Daisy and Clare created, and also DelaySmartphones.org.uk, created by Hannah Oertel.
American parents and parents everywhere: Let’s do it too! Let’s unite the way British parents have. Let’s change norms and laws. Let’s roll back the phone-based childhood now! For American parents, please start by signing up at our site, AnxiousGeneration.com. At the bottom of the page, you can sign up for our mailing list, and also find links to dozens of other excellent organizations, including some in Spain, France, and Australia.
One important note about ages: In the four norms I’m promoting to roll back the phone-based childhood, norm #2 is “no smartphones before high school.” In the U.S., students generally move from middle school to high school (or secondary school) in 9th grade, around the age of 14. It is vital to keep middle school clear of phone-based life, which is why I picked high school as the best “bright line” to serve as a universal minimum age. But in the UK, age 14 falls right in the middle of their secondary school, which runs roughly from ages 12-16, so it would be terrible to flood secondary schools with phones just for the older kids. The line would not hold at 14; it would drop to 12. Therefore, in the UK (as in Spain and other countries), the bright line is after secondary school, which is around the age of 16. Daisy and Clare proposed 16 as a more ambitious minimum age, and it seems to be working. In fact, two-thirds of British parents support keeping smartphones away from children under the age of 16, according to a recent survey.
And now, here is Daisy and Clare’s story, as told by Daisy:
Two months ago, I wrote a post on Instagram about not wanting to give my 8-year-old daughter a smartphone, as one by one, kids in her class were starting to get them. It was an impossible choice: hand my daughter a portal in her pocket to the anxiety machine that is social media (in addition to porn, cyberbullying, and the host of other things kids can find and experience online) or to socially ostracise her from all of her peers who would gradually begin spending more and more of their time on their devices.
Image. Daisy’s viral instagram post, which shows her three kids, aged 4, 6 and 8
At the time, my daughter was already a “late adopter.” In the UK, 24% of 5-7-year-olds own a smartphone. By age 12, just about everyone (97%) owns one. A few days before that post, my friend Clare Fernyhough and I had started a WhatsApp group called Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood, in an attempt to support each other in holding back the digital tide. We were inspired by a group started by a mum worried about smartphones in Barcelona which had gone viral a few months earlier. We assumed it would just be the two of us and any friends we could rope in, but within hours of my post, thousands of parents across the UK had joined us. We were not alone.
An explosion of parental concern
The WhatsApp group size limit is 1024, so we quickly maxed out and had to get creative. We suggested that people start county-level communities so that they could find like-minded parents in their neighborhoods. Within days, there was a Smartphone Free Childhood community in every county in Britain, and people began starting groups within those counties for their schools or to gather parents together at a hyperlocal level. By the end of that first week, there were 10,000 people and 75 communities, with hundreds of school groups within them.
Image. From left: a parent shares his wish that he’d been stricter on the issue of smartphones; two weeks after we launched, the first set of parents on the group to make a parent pact describe how they did it; a parent shares how her child came back to her after she removed her smartphone.
Although these thousand-person WhatsApp groups were pretty chaotic, the atmosphere was euphoric, with a collective sense of relief. It was clear that most parents felt lost and were desperate for support. Before long, we began to sink under a tidal wave of interest, questions, offers, and advice, so my husband, Joe Ryrie, who builds brands for startups, joined our kitchen table movement and we began the process of setting up an official organization.
Image. Cofounders Daisy Greenwell and Joe Ryrie, left, Clare Fernyhough, right.
The birth of a grassroots parent movement
The next phase in our journey led us to start speaking to experts and writing toolkits that would help people navigate making pacts in their schools not to get smartphones. We formed a working group of teachers from our community, figuring out how to shift the dial within the education system. A second working group, all experts on the machinations of government, set their sights on how to protect our children through better regulation of big tech.
The energy and goodwill of all involved was deeply moving. We had accidentally tapped into a huge groundswell of emotion—love, concern, anger, determination—and it led to the world’s first grassroots parents movement to protect childhood from smartphones. In our first two months of operation, 75,000 parents have joined us in the UK, with requests streaming in from parents across the globe, from Nigeria to Japan, asking if they can start SFC in their countries.1
We soon came across the many and varied organizations that have been working on this issue for years, driving forward regulation in the form of Britain’s world-leading but still insufficient Online Safety Act.2 We also met others leading the charge amongst parents—people like Hannah Oertel, an Edinburgh mum who has devised an effective way of getting even the most hard-to-persuade parents to delay giving their child a device.
Hannah quit her job a year ago to launch Delay Smartphones, having spent months compiling data, researching the many alternatives to smartphones, and interviewing parents on the ground. Thousands of people have now signed her nationwide pledge to delay smartphones, and she’s training parents to be ambassadors in their school communities, educating others on the dangers of these devices and the alternative minimal phones they can give their kids instead. Having clued-up, determined people on the ground spreading the message in Britain’s 20,000 primary schools is an invaluable tool—particularly in areas where parents are less engaged on the issue and need hard facts to swing their support.
Starting a National Conversation
What made this issue move from a fringe discussion to one being discussed at every table—from the kitchen to the classroom to the cabinet—in a matter of months?
In the UK, a kaleidoscope of things happened all at once, driving the issue to boiling point:
The launch of The Anxious Generation, now at No.1 in the UK hardback bestseller charts, and Haidt’s global campaign to bring together organizations working to ‘free the anxious generation’. The campaign of Esther Ghey, a mother whose child was murdered by two teenagers who viewed hours of violent content on the dark web. A poll by the national parent-teacher association charity Parentkind found that 77% of primary school parents support a ban on smartphones. Millions of column inches in media outlets spanning the political divide, asking why more isn’t being done to protect childhood from addictive algorithms.
It’s exciting that our government is listening. The Prime Minister’s office at No.10 Downing Street invited us to a meeting to discuss the issues, and they shared our concerns. It’s been widely reported that they are planning to launch a consultation exploring what more can be done to protect children.
The three things we would like the government to do are as follows:
Force the social media platforms to comply with UK law by removing the millions of under 13 year olds from their sites (38% of 5-7 year olds in the UK use social media).
Raise the minimum age restriction on social media platforms to 16. Until the tech companies can prove their apps are safe for children, children should not be on them.
Mandate that children under 16 are not allowed unrestricted smartphones. Do so by creating a new market opportunity: a compulsory category of under 16 phones and app stores, neither of which allow access to algorithm-driven apps or open web browsers.
We have reached a tipping point in the UK. People are aware that something is deeply wrong. Parents aren’t able to bring up their children in the way that they want. We don’t need longitudinal peer-reviewed studies to tell us what we can see before our eyes. Our children are suffering. Anxiety, addiction, and anorexia are unfolding in our homes and schools.
This is a deeply personal issue—it’s in the heart of every home and it crosses political and socioeconomic divides. This rare blossoming of consensus means that the chance to finally protect childhood from smartphones is within our grasp. Alongside Delay Smartphones, we will continue building an army of parents to put pressure on our politicians to be pioneers, leading the way for the rest of the world.
Ways to Join the Movement:
Join the Smartphone Free Childhood movement via https://smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/join and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn
If you want to start a Smartphone Free Childhood group in your country, join our global webinar on 2nd May at 8:30 pm BST. Sign up by filling in your details here: https://tally.so/r/npLDMB
Learn more about Delay Smartphones, from Hannah Oertel: www.delaysmartphones.org.uk, and sign up for her pledge. You can also sign up for her ambassador training to help create change in your school.
Sign up for the mailing list for the Free the Anxious Generation movement at the bottom of AnxiousGeneration.com
Don’t forget that we need to restore the play-based childhood too! Sign up for the mailing list at LetGrow.org
You can find many other organizations to join and support on this page: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/aligned-orgs
We will be hosting a ‘going global’ webinar and open-sourcing our resources and content so that people can get going in their own countries on May 2nd. Fill in the form here to sign up.
The Online Safety Act came into force after five years of work by parliamentarians in October 2023. It places new legal duties and responsibilities on online service providers to keep children and young people safe online, but many believe it does not go far (or fast) enough.
 | A guest post by
|
And to all those parents I say: You first. Remove the beam from your own eye first. Ditch your own smartphone and delete your social media accounts first. Go on. I mean, you wouldn't want to be a bunch of flaming hypocrites, right?
This is great, thank you!
I think there is just one thing missing: parents themselves need to get off their phones. How can we impose a no smart phone rule in our household when our kids see us staring at our own devices for hours every day? This conundrum led me to ditch my smart phone for a dumb phone a few weeks ago and it's been incredibly liberating. For many folks, such a drastic step may not be necessary, but for me it was - I l simply lacked the self control to put down the smart phone.