With smartphones a near-constant presence in children’s lives, one grassroots movement is pushing back – with remarkable force. Smartphone Free Childhood began with a conversation between two parents and has exploded into a nationwide campaign that’s captured headlines, inspired school reforms and signed up tens of thousands of families
When the history of social change campaigns of the early 21st century is written, it’s sure to include Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC). In a little over a year, an extraordinary movement has sprung from the grassroots, based on the principle that “childhood’s too short to be spent on a smartphone”.
It’s signed up hundreds of thousands of parents, reached millions more, secured the support of everyone from actor Benedict Cumberbatch and Adolescence writer Jack Thorne, to a clutch of MPs, and helped inspire everything from changes in school policies to the development of a new ‘childhood-friendly’ phone. At its heart, a simple suggestion: delay getting your child a phone until they’re 14, and access to social media until the age of 16. Give young minds a chance to develop free from the tyranny of the algorithms which, to put it mildly, have hardly been designed with their welfare in mind.
And it all started with a casual conversation during a playdate. Two mothers of eight-year-old girls from the same school year, chatting. And up popped the subject of phones. No, said one, she hadn’t bought her child a phone yet, because she hadn’t asked for one. But when she did, well, she supposed she would …
It was a simple enough comment, but one that sparked into life a smouldering concern in the other mum, journalist and editor Daisy Greenwell, formerly of The Times and also Positive News. “Like everyone, I’d seen the evidence about the impact smartphones can have on mental health. I’d known that kids in [my daughter’s] year were starting to get them, and I realised it was going to be a slippery slope – every child would want to have one, for fear of being left out.”
Statistics show just how far down that slope we’ve already slid. In the UK, 89% of 12-year-olds now own a phone – as do a quarter of children between five and seven. On average, they get their first phone at just nine years old.
And for ‘phone’, these days, you can pretty much read smartphone – an open door to the whole wide world, pretty much unfiltered, for your child to step through. The thought that her daughter stood on that threshold sent shockwaves through Greenwell. “I thought: ‘My God, this is about to happen, and nothing’s been done about it!’ It lit a fire under me.”
Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) has helped inspire everything from changes in school policies to the development of a new ‘childhood-friendly’ phone
She wasn’t alone. The last few years have seen a mounting wave of worry over what the tech is doing to childhood. As Greenwell writes on the SFC website: “Explicit, violent and extreme content is only a few clicks away … Once children see these things, they can never be unseen.”
And there’s more: “the average teen now receives over 200 notifications a day … making it harder to concentrate on school work, hobbies or real- life friendships. Constant distraction is the new normal.”
Add to that the power of the algorithms, feeding content that’s designed to keep users looking at their phone (because that is, after all, how tech companies make their money). Then there are the grim reports of ‘sextortion’ and of children being groomed, and worse, by strangers, when sat in the supposed safety of their bedrooms at home.
Put it all together, and it’s no surprise, perhaps, that rates of teenage anxiety and depression have skyrocketed since around 2010, when smartphones became the norm.
In the UK, 89% of 12-year-olds now own a phone – as do a quarter of children between five and seven. On average, they get their first phone at just nine years old
Alarm calls in books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and Kaitlyn Regehr’s Smartphone Nation [see page 36] are echoed by those working on childhood’s frontline. People like Peter Cosgrove, a US paediatrician specialising in emergency medicine. Now based at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, he’s seen a surge in mental health crises on both sides of the Atlantic – and, he says, it correlates all too clearly with the advent of the smartphone. Now a medical adviser to SFC, he was struck by how quickly the children in his care improved when their phones were taken away.
It’s fair to say that there’s been pushback from some academics to the idea that smartphones are the root of all evil, arguing that, while there may be correlation between their advent and a rise in teenage malaise, there’s no nailed-on causation: smartphones, they argue, are not a smoking gun.
But Cosgrove, along with Haidt and others, is adamant that the evidence stacks up. “It’s been well proven … across multiple studies and countries that there’s a direct linear correlation between childhood depression and the longer they use their smartphone and/or social media.”
We want kids to grow up confident using technology, not dependent on it. We believe in giving kids more time to be kids before they’re always connected. SFC is about balance, not banning
That would have come as no surprise to Tom Beveridge. As headteacher of Alderbrook secondary school in Solihull, West Midlands, he’d seen at first hand what happens when mobiles invade the classrooms and corridors. Bullying, abuse, risk-taking behaviour, pupils sending explicit images, friends falling out, a rising wave of mental health crises … in so many cases, he says, “there’s a link back to smartphones”. They challenge the basics of keeping children safe, he says. “School leaders who are really good at putting boundaries for children in the real world, were finding it impossible in the online one.”
And in among this maelstrom of concern, one mum, Greenwell, in a quiet Suffolk village, feeling that “we’ve been left to figure this out alone. There’s no roadmap. No NHS guidance. No government policy. Just families everywhere trying to do their best, up against the most powerful and persuasive companies on the planet.”
Her initial response was a typical parent’s go-to: a WhatsApp group (ironically), set up with her friend and fellow mother, Clare Fernyhough, aimed at parents who might share their concerns and resolve to delay giving their child a phone. “It was just the two of us to start with,” Greenwell recalls, “then a third joined.”
Hardly a mass movement …
But over the next few days, that fire in her continued to smoulder, until one evening, it burst into life. Her husband and SFC co-founder Joe Ryrie remembers: “I was cooking dinner, and Daisy was like: ‘I have to go and post about this now!’ So I said: ‘OK – go for it.’”
At the heart of the campaign is a simple suggestion: delay getting your child a phone until they’re 14, and access to social media until the age of 16
Greenwell takes up the story. “So I wrote this Instagram post” – in effect a brief manifesto for what became SFC, in part inspired by other nascent campaigns in Spain, and encouraging people to join the WhatsApp group. “Then we had some friends over, and I didn’t look at my phone again the whole evening.”
By the time she did a few hours later, what she saw was to change her and her husband’s life. “Suddenly, the group was full of random people from all over the country.”
“And the Instagram post had gone absolutely wild,” adds Ryrie.
Over the next few days, things became wilder still. The WhatsApp group hit its ceiling of 1,000 members, so new groups started. “Within a couple of weeks, every county in Britain had them,” says Greenwell. People were getting in touch, asking for advice, offering to help. “All these questions were popping up,” recalls Ryrie, “and people were expecting us to have answers.”
“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” says Greenwell. “Even though we were sat in our house in Suffolk, suddenly we were in the eye of the storm.” She turns to Ryrie: “I remember you saying: ‘It feels like a magical and terrifying tornado has just come into our kitchen.’”
As director of a branding agency, Ryrie adds: “I’ve been involved in quite a few startups, some of them have been quite successful, but never before have I felt anything like that kind of energy and momentum. There was so much demand, it had struck such a nerve. I thought: ‘If this was a business, there’d be this huge market opportunity, because we had hit on something that everyone wants, but no one has.’”
Pulled by purpose
It was decision time. Do they go with this momentum or let it slide? Thinking about the smartphone future that might lie in wait for their three children, they didn’t debate for long. Ryrie started to wean himself off his branding agency, Greenwell gave in her notice at Positive News, and they threw themselves into making SFC a reality.
A couple of friends came on board, Ryrie drew on his experience and some of his colleagues at his agency, and, as if often the way with an idea whose time has come, some initial funding materialised, in this case care of the Tenacious Awards, a project that provides funding and mentoring to campaigners and journalists. Further donations from private sources followed.
Fast-forward just over a year, and SFC has a team of six, including its founders – but punches way above its weight thanks to thousands of supporters and volunteers. At its heart is the Parent Pact – now signed by 140,000 families “on every continent apart from Antarctica” – which allows them to commit to the ‘no smartphone until 14 / no social media until 16’ stance, and encourage their kids’ schools to do the same. As Ryrie puts it, this is all about people “stepping into their power as citizens and saying: ‘I’m actually going to do something here; I’m going to put my hand up and make a difference.’”
Mother-of-three and SFC co-founder Daisy Greenwell with the family's cat, Quincy
And the benefits can be surprisingly personal. “We’ve had people saying that this has been a life-changing experience – the most profound thing they’ve ever done,” says Ryrie. Greenwell adds: “I’ve had a lot of messages saying: ‘I’m crying just seeing that this campaign exists … that I can be seen and heard.’”
SFC increasingly works with schools like Alderbrook, which is framing its own policy. After consulting with parents, says Beveridge, they’ve introduced a voluntary hand-in scheme, starting with its youngest (year 7) students, who now surrender their phones at the start of the day. The difference is palpable, he says. “Instead of the canteen [at breakfast club] being full of students on their phones, it’s a really lovely atmosphere of kids talking and having a laugh with their mates.”
I’ve never experienced anything like it. I remember Joe saying: ‘It feels like a magical and terrifying tornado has just come into our kitchen’
Emboldened by the experience, and with the virtually universal backing of parents, the school is planning to make the hand-in compulsory and “roll it up”, year on year – so that eventually it will cover the whole school. Intriguingly, adds Beveridge, numerous older children are saying that they wish this policy had been in place when they were younger.
With Beveridge, backed by SFC, as the driving force, 68 of the 80 schools within the area have committed to similar steps, “and I’m working on the rest”.
Everyone interviewed for this article is quick to insist that they’re not ‘anti-tech’ or even anti-smartphone. Whatever their downsides, smartphones are here to stay – and SFC isn’t waging a culture war on them, says Ryrie. The team has even been talking to smartphone maker HMD, owner of the Nokia brand, which largely as a result is now developing a child-friendly device. It will allow access to essential information, without opening the gates to social media.
The movement's Parent Pact has been signed by over 140,000 families 'on every continent apart from Antarctica' and allows them to commit to the ‘no smartphone until 14 / no social media until 16’ stance, and encourages their kids’ schools to do the same
Meanwhile, says Ryrie, a lot of media coverage on SFC still tends towards the: “‘Meet the parents who want to ban smartphones’ angle – and we’ve never said that. Tech isn’t the enemy, it’s how we use it that matters. We want kids to grow up confident using technology, not dependent on it. That’s why we believe in building digital skills gradually and intentionally, and giving kids more time to be kids before they’re always connected. SFC is about balance, not banning.”
That said, they’d like to see some legal shifts, such as raising the age of digital consent – which allows companies to harvest data and so develop algorithms specifically to target the users – from 13 years currently, up to 16. And they’re watching with interest governments elsewhere, such as the Australian government, which is about to ban social media for under-16s.
And in the UK? Ryrie recalls running into Peter Kyle, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, at an SFC event in Sussex, where he was the local MP. So did you buttonhole him? Yes, answers Ryrie, but “he did an excellent job of very articulately saying very little, in that way politicians can do”.
As SFC gains ground, it’s hard to imagine, that, even for seasoned politicians, articulate nothingness will be an option for long.
Photography: Eleanor Church
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