One Community’s Experiment With a Phone-Free Childhood

Then the parents split into a handful of “working groups.” The one I sat in on discusses the pros and cons of asking parents to sign a “phone pact.” 

“It’s a little culty,” says one mom. “Maybe there’s a different word than ‘pact?’ ‘Pledge?’ ‘Plan?’” says another. 

One mother of a 6-year-old notes her daughter was distraught at being the only one of her friends without a smartwatch. “She says, “X has it, X has it, X has it, and they’re all using it to text, and I’m being left out,” the mom says. “It was like a dagger to my heart. I was like: you’re 6.”

It’s no coincidence that most of the parents in the Balance Project have kids around Molly Moscatiello’s age: young enough that governing technology uses is still a question of prevention, not active management. The challenge, says Holly Moscatiello, is with the parents of older kids, who may have already given in. “There’s this divide between if you’ve given technology already or you haven’t,” she says. “And if you’ve already done it, there’s this guilt and anxiety.” The parents of older kids, she says, are often either “hold-outs or help-mes.”