When I had my first child in 2015, among the flood of new mum anxieties, I remember being alarmed at the thought of her navigating the Wild West of the internet and social media as she grew up. But surely, I reassured myself, someone would have fixed it by then. Smartphones and social media had only been with us a few years, and by the time she was online, someone would have figured out how to make it safe for kids.
Fast-forward eight years, and children in her Year 4 class began getting smartphones. The problem was, the internet was far from ‘fixed’. In fact, it was more toxic and addictive than ever before.
It felt way too young, but the data shows that 25% of 5-7 year olds in the UK own a smartphone, and by 12, 89% do. Every parent I asked said “it’s a nightmare, but you’ve got no choice. They all have them now, and you can’t leave your child the only one without.”
I wanted to try to resist for as long as possible, so I set up a WhatsApp group with an old friend, Clare, to support and empower each other to wait. It felt like a really lonely path to take, so I posted about it on Instagram, inviting others to join. Within hours the post had gone viral, and a thousand people had maxxed out the group. We started another, which also maxxed out, and then encouraged people to start them in their regions. Within days, there was one in every county in Britain, as well as thousands of school-specific groups. We were not alone.
It felt like a terrifying and magical tornado of parental love and concern had swept into our kitchen. It was clear that families everywhere were struggling to cope and desperate for solutions. My husband Joe and I realised that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. We might be able to use this viral explosion to create genuine, long-term change– if we quit our jobs (in branding and journalism) and devoted our lives to it. So that’s what we did.
In the fifteen years since the iPhone became ubiquitous, the work of parenting has been transformed. No longer is the paedo in the park the no.1 concern – it’s the millions of them potentially in your child’s pocket 24/7. Or the anxiety machine that is social media, and how it affects your child’s identity and mental health. Or the addictive design that makes handing over a smartphone the start of a daily battle with the most powerful companies in history for your child’s time and attention. This is the new frontier in parenting.
As a society, we have sleepwalked into a situation which is harming kids, harming families, but working out handsomely for a handful of gigantic tech companies. Their business models, which rely on capturing as much of our attention as possible so they can gather our data and sell it to advertisers, is fundamentally misaligned with the needs of healthy child development. On average, 8-12 year olds in the UK are spending 21 hours a week on their smartphone – equivalent to a part time job – blocking them from exploring the real world and relationships around them.
There is a vacuum in guidance from the government or the NHS on what age is the right age to get a smartphone, or how to manage it once you do – and an equally laggard approach to policy on the issue. The technology that makes up these tiny, pocket supercomputers has moved so quickly, that regulation simply hasn’t caught up. And the tech companies that make them are so powerful that governments are too busy trying to attract even a fraction of their business to their shores – with the billion-pound benefits that would bring to their economies – to consider putting them off with onerous regulation.
Parents, on the other hand, are clear that something needs to change. It’s been astonishing to see 200,000 of them joining the Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) movement over the past year since we launched – and to see SFC offshoots launching in thirty different countries, from Nigeria to Australia to the UAE.
Our core aim is to help parents change the culture around kids and smartphones, providing them with the tools they need to do so. Whilst regulation can take decades, taking collective action to delay smartphones in our schools and communities is a power we have in our hands right now. It’s easy, simple and effective - if your child’s best mates also have brick phones instead of smartphones, they’re not bothered. We’ve enabled people to do this through our Parent Pact, a simple digital tool that you can sign agreeing to wait till at least 14 to get your child a smartphone. You can see how many others have signed up in your school and class, and then meet them in your regional SFC WhatsApp group. Since we launched it 4 months ago, 90,000 parents have signed at a third of schools in the country.
Parents everywhere, most of whom have never seen themselves as campaigners, have been empowered by the movement to persuade their schools, and even whole towns to go smartphone-free. SFC panel events with local doctors, teachers and young people are popping up across the country. Thirty thousand people have emailed their MPs asking them to back the Safer Phones Bill, which we've worked on with Labour MP Josh MacAlister, which aims for the first time to tackle the addictive nature of the devices and platforms.
And it’s working, culture is changing. Since SFC launched in Feb 2024, sales of brick phones have doubled, according to 02, with a particular spike in September, when children started back for the new school year.
Everyday we hear stories from parents now whose children have started secondary school without a smartphone, and are thriving. As one teacher told us last week, “you can tell instantly which kids don’t have one, because it’s like they’ve got a secret superpower compared to their peers. They can concentrate, they can hold a conversation.”
All around the world people are waking up to this, and demanding change. Australia has proven that the tech companies can be regulated, by raising the minimum age of social media to 16, which will embolden other governments to follow suit.
There are powerful forces and huge financial interests at play working to prevent any change to the status quo. But the weight of public opinion is more powerful than any corporation or CEO. If person to person, family to family, we can collectively agree that this isn’t right – that our kids deserve the right to grow up free from toxic algorithms – then change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.
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