UK Parents Make ‘No Phone’ Pacts to Keep Children Off Smartphones

Parents across the UK are increasingly taking matters into their own hands when it comes to smartphones, including making collective pledges to promise to not buy phones for their children until a set age.

Today’s mothers and fathers say they feel like the first generation forced to confront this challenge.

While younger children can be persuaded to wait, many parents say the real pressure begins at about ages 10 to 11, when peer influence at school makes resistance far harder.

According to regulator Ofcom, nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they reach age 11.

Parents are joining no-smartphone pledges designed to remove the argument that “everyone else has one” and to ease the peer pressure children face.

The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed into law in 2023 and coming into full effect in 2025, mandates that online platforms and apps protect children from harmful content by using age-assurance tech to block access to pornography, illegal material, and content that encourages self-harm.

300,000 Parents

Will Orr-Ewing, a father and founder of Keystone Tutors, is seeking a judicial review of government guidance as part of a campaign to get smartphones banned in schools.

Orr-Ewing told The Epoch Times that he supports grassroots campaigns, such as Smartphone Free Childhood, which began with two mothers and school friends Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell earlier this year.

Smartphone Free Childhood is a fast-growing parent network built around WhatsApp subgroups in which parents share articles and research. It also involves a collective voluntary pledge to wait until their kids are at least 14 before giving them smartphones.

Greenwell told The Guardian in 2024 that an alternative solution could be a “brick phone” that allows texts and calls only.

“The peer pressure instantly dissolves if your child knows there are 10 children in their class who are getting a brick phone as well—and not a smartphone,” she said.

Orr-Ewing said that like those behind Smartphone Free Childhood, he was driven by a parental “protective instinct” that smartphones are pretty dangerous to children.

“They set up a WhatsApp group themselves,” Orr-Ewing said. “They posted about it, saying, ‘If anyone wants to kind of come at this issue, take some collective action, please join our subgroup.’ They had 1,000 people join in the first 24 hours, 2,000 in 48 hours, and they’re now up to over 300,000.

“I think that speaks to a kind of … parental instinct to protect their children in that group. People have lots of different motivations and thoughts, but … I think there’s a sort of central, kind of uniting factor of what it’s like to be a parent today.”

Orr-Ewing has also been working with schools to highlight the risks posed by smartphones on premises.

He said that while parents can protect their children at home, schools pose a distinct threat: Despite that every school has a duty of care, it is hard for them to police smartphones on sports fields or in the restrooms.

He said this means that “basically, wherever there’s not a teacher sort of looking directly at them, they’re accessing their smartphone.”

Parents have reported children being shown graphic videos of everything from violent fights to pornography on their very first day of secondary school. Yet only about 10 percent of schools have a strict no-phone policy, Orr-Ewing said.

‘We’re the 1st Generation’

Linzi Meaden, a mother and regional lead for Smartphone Free Childhood Kent, told The Epoch Times that she has never allowed her primary school-aged twins to have free access to any tablets or devices at home.

“We’ve all been put in a position that nobody, no generation, has had to go through before,” Meaden said. “We’re the first generation of parents having to go through this and navigate it.”

She said it is not easy at first to convince some parents to join. But once they are informed, it is a different story.

“When they actually see statistics and data and the real-life stories and lived experiences, they change their mind and they say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to sign the pact,'” she said.

“Both my husband and I, we’re trauma therapists, and we see day in, day out, young adults, 18, early 20s, people who are struggling with high levels of stress. … Overwhelmed with the addictiveness of their smartphone, they feel that they can’t switch off.

“Smartphones are for adults. They weren’t designed for children. So why would you give a child a device that’s actually aimed at adults? Social media is not for children.”

Lucy Marsh of the Family Education Trust, which researches the causes and consequences of family breakdown, said she believes that parents need to take responsibility for their child’s mobile phone use and work with other parents to ensure that children can communicate with their friends without needing smartphones.

“For example, within a year, parents could commit to just getting a ‘brick’ phone or even reverting back to landlines,” she told The Epoch Times via email.

She said modern technology means that mobile phone providers can provide safe phones for children without social media access. This should be the norm in cases in which parents feel that their child needs a phone for safety reasons.

“But parents also need to model good habits themselves—it’s no good telling children that smartphones are harmful while spending hours on screens themselves,” she said.

Behavior Changes

Zoe Willis, a Catholic home education blogger and mother of five, told The Epoch Times that she observes smartphones changing children’s behavior in groups.

“You can just see the children are playing well with these groups, with these families,” she said. “As soon as you get a mobile phone or somebody has a Nintendo Switch, as soon as that comes into the mix, playing just isn’t nice anymore, which means really, nobody’s actually having fun. Everybody’s bickering.”

She said Catholic home education groups gravitate toward extra levels of vigilance.

“When you start meeting with other Catholics, they are much more aware of what’s out in the world,” she said.

Willis said she has been “hyperaware” of the problems caused by devices for more than a decade.

She said after one family had a “horrific” experience with their teenage daughter when smartphones first became common, they cut her usage down.

“They said, ‘No, we don’t care what anyone else is doing,'” she said. “‘You may use our smartphone 20 minutes a night. You may use our laptop for half an hour.’ It was really, really restrictive. The words they said were so powerful: ‘We got our daughter back.'”

Willis follows a Catholic home education curriculum called Mother of Divine Grace, created by Laura Berquist, who framed homeschooling in civilizational terms.

“She said something really powerful, and was one of the reasons I was convinced to do this course curriculum for the children,” Willis said. “And she said, ‘Listen, as homeschoolers, we are the new monasteries.’

“Things are unraveling, yet the homeschoolers are going to be like the monasteries with the little lights of education and Christianity.”

Kim Isherwood from Public Child Protection Wales, who is advocating for the rights of children in schools, warned that not every parent is clued up on smartphones.

She said there are many examples of “pedophile stings,” incidents in which self-styled “pedophile hunters” snare criminals by posing as children online.

But she said she faces resistance when she tells people on Facebook that the best way to keep children shielded from predators is to keep them offline.

Tech-Heavy Schools

Nicola Burkinshaw, an educator and mother, said she and her husband policed phones with their 13-year-old son, who has autism.

“There is a school WhatsApp group of parents who are trying to do this,” she told The Epoch Times. “But in the year group he’s in, I’m only aware of one other parent who’s fantastic.

“And I think one of the problems is that school is so tech-heavy. My son does read. He loves reading, it’s his wind-down.”

Her son has a basic flip phone rather than a smartphone.

“So it means that when he [sits] on the bus, he’s staring out the window, and actually that’s really important for him, because of his autism, because his school is quite stressful,” she said. “This is a period when he can just shut his brain off.

“And if he’s sat there scrolling through social media, doing his homework, whatever, he doesn’t have that opportunity to just stare.”

She said she thinks that it is much harder with girls.

“I think that the social aspect of not being involved is really difficult to navigate,” Burkinshaw said. “And yes, I would, I would definitely get in touch with her, her friend’s parents, and try and negotiate something there.”

Alex, who did not want to give his real name, has a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.

He said his daughter asks about getting a smartphone because her friends at school have them.

“I’d like to keep her a child for as long as possible. … She doesn’t need to be seeing … the news yesterday,” he said, referring to the Sept. 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was widely shared on social media.

“She doesn’t need to know about a man being murdered. It’s got no relevance to her life, particularly at this stage, and there’s no easy context that I can give her.”