- Content: 
By Movieguide® Staff
Parents across the United States and abroad are joining a fast-growing screen-free childhood movement aimed at delaying smartphone use and dialing back kids’ screen time, Axios reported on May 15, 2026.
“Technology should complement childhood, not consume it,” said Daisy Greenwell, the British parent whose viral 2024 Instagram post launched Smartphone Free Childhood, a nonprofit now expanding into an international movement.
Grassroots groups tied to the cause are popping up worldwide. In the US, Massachusetts mother Emily Boddy helps lead Smartphone Free Childhood’s American efforts, running a WhatsApp group with 1,000 advocates who collaborate with The Anxious Generation, Fairplay, the Screen Time Action Network, the Tech-Safe Learning Coalition and Schools Beyond Screens.
The group’s stated goal is delaying smartphone access until age 14, but Boddy says many parents start with smaller wins — no phones in the bedroom and no phones after 8 p.m.
Related: Is Your Teen Not Sleeping? It Might Be Their Smartphone
“When kids have that opportunity to engage with each other again and not have screens present in their everyday socialization of school, they really love it,” Boddy told Axios.
Boddy joined the cause after watching smartphones contribute to anxiety, body image concerns and pornography exposure among younger relatives. Her daughter now texts on a borrowed phone, while some of her daughter’s friends carry flip phones — a small, sane workaround in a culture built on constant connection.
“Boredom is often the starting point for creativity, confidence and independence,” Greenwell said, noting that kids “consistently choose hanging out with friends over screens when they genuinely have the opportunity to do it.”
Christian parents will hear something familiar in that line. Boredom isn’t a problem to solve — it’s the doorway to wonder, imagination and the kind of unhurried childhood Scripture seems to assume.
HGTV HOME TOWN stars Erin and Ben Napier got out ahead of this conversation when they launched Osprey Kids in August 2023. The organization’s full name — Old School Parents Raising Engaged Youths — does most of the explaining, and more than 27,000 families have committed to keeping their kids off social media until graduation.
“27,000 homes swimming against the current. But it’s not just us!” Erin Napier, the HGTV designer and Osprey Kids co-founder, wrote in her Substack newsletter. “You’re no longer the weird family, you’re becoming the louder, rational voice in an international conversation.”
Movieguide® has tracked the Napiers’ movement since its launch, including Erin Napier’s strategies for keeping her two daughters — Helen and Mae — off devices during the school day. She’s been candid that the whole project is as much about parents’ habits as it is about their kids’.
“I’ve been working harder at spending my time offline, ‘modeling’ behavior for our kids that we wish for them to mimic in an effort to slow down time,” Napier wrote on Substack. “If we can be present and off these dang devices, we might not feel like we missed so much of their very fleeting little childhoods.”
The broader Smartphone Free Childhood folks agree the answer isn’t a Luddite retreat. Both Boddy and Greenwell stress that watching a movie together, gaming with friends or using a laptop in a shared family space all still count as healthy tech.
The trouble, Greenwell said, is kids having “24/7 access to a highly addictive, personalized supercomputer” in their pockets before they can drive a car or hold a job.
For Christian families weighing whether to swim against the current, the Napiers offer one piece of strategic advice — don’t try it alone.
“Forming a circle of families and friends who are in this together when your kids are little, linking arms and doing what it takes to give your kids the gift of a social media free adolescence is the only way we change the culture,” Napier told TODAY in 2023.
Numbers like 27,000 and 1,000 don’t sound like a culture shift, but trends rarely arrive marching. They show up at the school pickup line, in the living room without a tablet, in the kid who hangs out at a friend’s house because there’s nothing to scroll. For Christian parents who’ve long suspected the smartphone wasn’t the answer, the rest of the country is finally catching up.
Read Next: Actor Slams Schools for Sending Children Home with Ed Tech
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +1Share:
– Content: +3