Erin and Ben Napier to Help Parents Raise Children Without Social Media
By Movieguide® Contributor
HOME TOWN couple Erin and Ben Napier have been very open about their stance on social media for their two girls. Now, the two have launched a new nonprofit organization, Osprey, that is dedicated to helping other parents keep their children off social media.
In an Instagram post initiating the new organization, Erin Napier wrote, “My friends parenting smart phone-free middle schoolers have had a brutal experience of seeing their child left out, even though research tells us social media is as addictive and destructive for developing brains as any drug.”
She continued, “This made me think: my kindergartener doesn’t expect to drive a car before she’s old enough. She doesn’t expect to own a house of her own before she’s old enough. If we build a culture in our home and school now where she doesn’t expect access to the entire world in her pocket until she’s much older, we can set her up for success. When the time comes, a simple phone that can just call and text will be great: in the same way she’ll ride a bicycle before she drives a car.”
“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,” she concluded. “For the TWENTY THOUSAND parents who’ve already joined the Osprey newsletter after my post last month, we have a vision and a plan to give our kids support that starts now and takes them through high school graduation. Let’s make old school the new way.”
Last month Erin Napier posted a video on her Instagram that teased she is “up to something” but that she needed parents to sign-up for a newsletter from Osprey. Parents who were on her side about keeping their children off social media until after high school.
She wrote, “My heart is beating so fast! More info to come this summer, but for now… If you’re raising social media free kids (as little as 5 years old through high school) I want to be connected. Will you go to my profile link or instagram stories and send me your email address? We’re planning something big. #osprey.”
In May, Erin spoke with TODAY.com prior to the announcement and expressed how hard it is for for parents to keep kids off social media due to insecurity and bullying.
“We want to make sure our kids don’t feel left out when we don’t let them have social media, as kids through high school,” Erin told TODAY.com. “How do you do that? I think community is where you begin.”
It begins with building a community where no child is alone.
“‘Everybody else is doing it; We didn’t want to give them social media; We didn’t want to give them a phone, but everybody else it doing it’ … What if there is a way to create communities, small communities within schools, that hopefully become big communities within schools, where families say, ‘We’re not going to (use social media)’?” Erin stated.
“Then (the families) support each other, they kind of make a pledge together when their kids are in about fifth grade, and then they see it through and support each other, share resources,” Erin added.
Any parent interested in Osprey can visit their website and input their email address for more information.
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“I am so thankful I grew up without the crushing pressure of social media,” she continued. “As a highly sensitive artistic kid, the criticism or silence of ‘likes’ would’ve hurt me deeply. It would have shaped me into someone, something else. I read once where we should only accept the criticism of people who know us and love us well enough to deliver it gently and in a way that helps instead of hurts.”
Napier called social media “the harshest criticism of all,” as well as “a distorted and broken and misguided kind of critic who sets these young people without their fully developed emotional minds on the wrong path.”
“Is it mean to keep [my children] from communicating with smart phones? I don’t care,” Napier concluded. “I’m also keeping them from finding a distorted picture of who they think they need to be, porn, hate, the criticism of strangers. Childhood is so short. We’re gonna savor every last second of our girls’ that we can.”
