We wanted to change the norm on smartphone use’: grassroots campaigners on a phone-free childhood’
- tanand79
- Jun 24
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 17
The Guardian – Alex Moxhakis,
30 Jun 24
Last year, Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, long time friends who have eight- and nine-year-old daughters, began having drawn-out conversations about smartphones. Rumours were swirling that children in their daughters’ classes were asking for their own and both Greenwell and Fernyhough were apprehensive about the knock-on effect. If their daughters’ friends owned smartphones, wouldn’t their daughters eventually demand them, too? And what might happen then? Talking to the parents of children who already owned smartphones only helped to increase their concern. “They told us about kids disappearing into their screens,” Greenwell said recently. “They don’t want to hang out with family any more. They don’t want to go outside.” A local teacher told Greenwell he was able to speak with his daughter only when the wifi was turned off. “And these are the lighter problems,” she said.
Neither Greenwell nor Fernyhough wanted to buy smartphones for their children until they turned 16 (preferably they wouldn’t own them until much later). But they could feel pressure mounting. In the UK, 91% of 11-year-olds have a smartphone – it became common remarkably quickly for children to be given a phone when they began secondary school – and 20% of children own them by the time they are four. (The average age for a UK child to receive their first smartphone is around nine.) With grim acceptance, secondary school parents told Greenwell, “It’s the worst, it’s so, so bad, but there’s no choice” – they couldn’t find a way to prevent their children from having something all of their friends already owned. Both Greenwell and Fernyhough felt trapped; for their daughters, secondary school loomed on the horizon. “We thought, ‘What can we do about it?’” Greenwell told me. “Shall we not get one? But what if everyone else gets one and our children are the only ones without?”
One day in February, the pair set up a WhatsApp group to support each other in their decision to delay smartphone access for their children. “We were like, ‘Let’s just invite people who really care about this,’” Greenwell said. Greenwell lives in Suffolk; Fernyhough lives in Hampshire. WhatsApp was in part a way to stay in touch regularly despite their geography. But soon a vague plan for action arose out of their conversations: they would agree not to buy smartphones for their children, while trying to gently convince other parents to do the same. “We wanted to change the norm on smartphone use,” Fernyhough told me. “Even if it was going to be just a small group of us.”
A few days later, Greenwell posted to Instagram about the plan, while her husband, Joe Ryrie, had dinner with friends. That evening, the WhatsApp group filled with parents similarly anxious about their children’s impending smartphone use. By the next day, the group had maxed out at 1,000 participants, many of whom neither Greenwell nor Fernyhough knew personally. Within a few weeks, more than 60,000 people had joined or created similar local groups, and Greenwell, Fernyhough and Ryrie decided to transform their initial conversations into a campaign group, the Smartphone-Free Childhood (SFC). “What we started to find out from the WhatsApp groups was that everyone felt so lost,” Fernyhough told me. “They were like, ‘What do we do? How do we cope with this? We’re so glad you’re here!’” On the campaign website, the trio wrote, “We’re now more determined than ever not only to provide solidarity and support for parents navigating these stormy seas, but to use the voice of our community to push for far tougher regulation on tech companies – and solve this problem for good.”