How a group chat for parents on WhatsApp led to a movement advocating for less screen time for kids

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In early 2024, Daisy Greenwell’s eight-year-old daughter came home from school reporting that her classmates were getting smartphones.

Greenwell found herself in a position that parents across the world increasingly fear: could her daughter have a smartphone too?

Living on an 18-hectare farm in rural Suffolk in the east of England, Greenwell, a former magazine editor, enjoys time with her children blackberry picking, planting trees and rewilding the land.

It’s the type of innocent childhood that she fears her daughter would lose if she caved to her demands.

“If smartphones weren’t addictive, if they weren’t full of toxic content, if they enabled young people to connect with others and discover the world in a safe and age-appropriate way, then fine,” Greenwell told Dateline.

“But that’s not the reality.”

Worried at the prospect of her young child having a ‘supercomputer’ — as she calls it — at her fingertips, Greenwell turned to her old school friend Clare Fernyhough for advice.

Fernyhough also had an eight-year-old daughter and similar concerns around smartphones and social media, so the pair started a WhatsApp group to support each other in their resistance.

A screenshot of an Instagram post showing a photo of three young children standing next to a tree log and the text underneath it

Greenwell’s viral social media post called for parents to join her WhatsApp group and support each other in resisting giving smartphones to their young children Source: Supplied

Greenwell posted about the WhatsApp support group on social media, asking if anyone wanted to join them and expecting only a few replies.

Greenwell describes the events that followed as “the most extraordinary year” of her life.

A tornado of interest

Within a few weeks, 60,000 parents and carers across the UK had joined similar local groups.

The movement has now reached 150,000 parents or carers who have signed a ‘Parent Pact’ to agree to wait until the end of Year 9 (usually aged 14) before giving their child a smartphone.

“It was like this sort of tornado of interest and just everyone asking a million questions,” said Greenwell, who along with her husband quit her day job to channel her energy into the campaign, which they called Smartphone-Free Childhood (SFC).

A woman in pink trousers and black shirt walks through a lush green field with a man in a blue striped shirt.

Daisy Greenwell (right) founded the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign with her husband Joe Ryrie (left) and friend Clare Fernyhough in 2024. Source: Supplied

The campaign has pushed Greenwell outside her comfort zone. She has a phobia of public speaking and describes going into TV and radio studios as both “magical” and “terrifying”.

“I’ve never liked smartphones. I didn’t think that I would suddenly be spending every waking moment of my life talking about them,” she said.

The SFC campaign has now expanded internationally, with affiliated WhatsApp groups and organisations in 27 other countries as far away as Nigeria, Costa Rica and Australia.

According to Greenwell, when it comes to children and smartphones, parents’ most pressing concerns include: the opportunity cost of spending time on screens rather than in the real world, e-safety and their effects on mental health.

The link between smartphones, social media use and a decline in childhood mental health has not been definitively proven — but studies increasingly point to a correlation.

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation has become a founding document for the anti-smartphone movement and a guiding light for concerned parents, such as those in SFC chat groups.

Haidt describes a “re-wiring” of childhood between 2010 and 2015, when a ‘play-based’ childhood was replaced by a ‘phone-based childhood’ triggered by the sharp rise of smartphones, social media and high-speed internet.

Haidt links this to the doubling of diagnoses of anxiety and depression disorders in United States teenagers from 2010 to 2018.

Last year, the US surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote in an opinion essay for the New York Times that social media had contributed to a youth mental health crisis and called for warning labels like those on tobacco products.

The UK government has been under pressure to follow , world-leading legislation due to be implemented at the end of 2025, which Greenwell applauds as a “symbolic step to show the status quo can change”.

In response to Australia’s international leadership, the UK secretary of state for science, innovation and technology Peter Kyle suggested he was open to a ban, but has since rowed back his position.

A group of politicians and SFC founders stand before green chairs of a committee room.

SFC founders meet with British politicians to advise on a bill which proposes to strengthen data laws on social media and legislate a smartphone ban in schools. Source: Supplied

Meanwhile, Greenwell and SFC continue to advise MPs on a separate bill that seeks to legislate a ban on smartphones in schools and tighten data protection for teen social media users.

Greenwell said: “Ultimately, it’s only going to be solved by a combination of parents, tech companies, governments, brands and schools all coming together and pushing back on the assumption that children must have smartphones and that it’s totally fine for kids to just spend unlimited time on them.”

A global movement

Greenwell acknowledges some of the inspiration for her viral WhatsApp groups came from campaigns abroad – a mother in Madrid, who coordinated parents in her city; a headteacher in Ireland who got all the schools in her town to ban smartphones.

A US-based group called Wait Until 8th has similar aims of delaying children’s access to smartphones until 8th grade, when children are usually aged 13 or 14.

Their success inspired Wait Mate, an Australian pressure group formed at the end of last year that asks parents to pledge to “hit pause on smartphones until at least high school”.

The platform then connects the parents within a school year group so they can support each other.

Co-founder Amy Friedlander, who lives in Sydney, told Dateline that the pledge system creates strength in numbers:

“If my child’s best friends all have smartphones, then the pressure for me is very real and the social isolation for my child is very real. It’s almost impossible to hold off.”

Friedlander says her team of volunteer parents were spurred on by the success of SFC in the UK.

“Their numbers were able to skyrocket so quickly because joining a WhatsApp group is so easy. Then they had a captive audience to convert into a movement to lobby government.”

Friedlander says parents she’s connected to are pleased with Australia’s public school phone bans but says policies vary across independent schools.

“I think it’s very much going to start becoming another thing they compete on in terms of their stance on smartphones and social media and how they support families and parents.”

‘Just give up’

Back on the farm in Suffolk, Greenwell says her daughter, now aged nine, has asked for a smartphone with WhatsApp installed, but “is not too bothered about it yet”.

Greenwell’s biggest challenger has been her 12-year-old nephew, who’s “really cross” about her campaign.

“He was really questioning me hard last weekend and saying, ‘This is pointless. Just give up. Why are you doing this?'”

“So, I tried to explain to him how unfair it is that these massive companies are monetising children and taking up all their time and that kids having their brains hacked. I wanted to make it so that he could rebel against the tech companies rather than his mother.

“I don’t know if it worked, but I think that’s a good approach with kids.”