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

The Revolution Has Begun in the UK - by daisy greenwell

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2024-04-29 18:30:05

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.