While many of his peers are likely scrolling on TikTok and Snapchat, Laura Derrendinger’s teenage son uses an old rotary phone (Google it), relies on paper road maps to navigate while driving, and spends much of his spare time putting out fires as a junior volunteer for the local fire department.
The 16-year-old, who lives in rural Vermont with his parents and siblings, was raised in an entirely screen-free household and has neither an iPhone nor social media — but he is allowed to use an electric chainsaw under supervision.
“It is safer to give my kids a chainsaw than access to social media. A chainsaw is not designed to be addictive,” his mom said, and explained that her son asked for the power tool so he could use it to chop wood more efficiently for the maple syrup operation he runs with his siblings, aged 10, 12, and 14. The children also keep chickens and goats.
It’s sure not your average teenage experience, but Derrendinger is one of an increasing number of parents advocating for kids to grow up without screens and believes social media poses a grave threat to children’s well-being.
A mounting body of evidence supports that assertion. Earlier this month, a study found that teenagers in the U.S. are losing sleep by scrolling on their phones between midnight and 4 a.m., with consequences for their health and academic performance. In the U.K., a recent report by leading doctors has warned that social media is as dangerous for children as smoking.
The tide appears to be turning on tech companies after a landmark court case in California found tech giants Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, liable for a woman’s childhood social media addiction. And in New Mexico, a jury found that Meta’s social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — harmful to children’s mental health. The tech companies said they planned to appeal in both cases.
Some parents, like Derrendinger, a member of grassroots group Smartphone Free Childhood US’s leadership council, are going to great lengths to eliminate screens for their kids.
“We’ve moved at least 10 times as a family, all because of this issue of screens,” the 49-year-old public health expert told The Independent. “We do not have a TV at home and our children do not have iPads. My 16-year-old and 14-year-olds share a landline and do not use email or screen-based or Google products.”
Before becoming a mother, Derrendinger spent eight years working in war zones as a public health nurse with the global non-profit Doctors Without Borders, where she witnessed harrowing scenes.
“I spent my career before being a mom trying to prevent children from getting sick and dying in refugee camps because of pathogens like malaria,” she said. “I say now, essentially, that the research is telling us these screens effectively function like vectors of disease, the way a mosquito carries the pathogen of malaria.”
She referred to smartphones as “a mini addictive surveillance device.”
“We don’t have to call it a smartphone, we can call it what it is,” she said. “Instead of calling it ‘extreme,’ I’m saying what I’m doing is age appropriate,” Derrendinger explained.
Derrendinger and her husband decided to send their two teenagers to live with their grandparents 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. for a period so they could attend a private Waldorf school, which takes a “screen-free educational approach.”
“I couldn’t find a high school that was going to be willing to support my children the way I would need them supported, in terms of how I want them to interact with these digital online products,” she said.
Other parents told how they are taking steps to curb or cut screens from their kids’ lives, trying everything from relocating the whole family to get into a screen-free school, installing landlines and destroying the TV remote, to taking a digital detox at a remote farm.
Relocating the entire family for a screen-free education
Mom-of-three Ashley Dickson and her husband moved their family from Boston so that their boys, ages 13, 10 and 4, could attend a private Waldorf school in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dickson, 44, knew she wanted to raise her kids in a low-screen environment before they were born. “I really just didn’t see any benefit to introducing screens,” she explained. Instead of sticking her young kids in front of the TV when she needed to take a quick shower, which she acknowledged many parents at first feel is the only option to get a bit of peace, Dickson set them up to “self-entertain.”
“When my kids were little, I would get a big stack of books and a bowl of dry Cheerios and they would sit in my bed while I would shower and get ready for the day,” she said. “My kids could be engaged in the work of childhood by self-entertaining, and so there’s no need for mom or a screen to be the constant playmate.”
Apart from finding Cheerios in her bed forevermore, the benefits of avoiding screens in those early years have been “huge,” she said.
“When we’re faced with a long wait time before a flight or at a restaurant, they’re great at coming up with their own games to fill the time,” she said. “I’m always amazed on long road trips how little they need to entertain themselves — an audiobook and time spent looking out the window seem to do the trick.”
When her eldest son, Soren, started kindergarten in 2018, Dickson said she was shocked by how frequently the children were using iPads.
“I just had no idea that was going to be part of kindergarten, and they were using them for math and reading,” the mom recalled, and said she worried that her kids’ education was moving “further away from play-based learning.”
Then, during the pandemic years, screen-based learning intensified from home as schools closed.
“There was no way I was gonna put my seven-year-old in front of a laptop for hours on end when I had the bandwidth to homeschool him,” Dickson said.
After a few years of homeschooling her children, Dickson and her husband sent them back to public school, but she remained dissatisfied with the amount of screen time in class. “It was even things like the teachers would put on a show during lunchtime to keep the kids sitting still and to keep them quiet,” she recalled.
In August 2024, Dickson and her husband took the plunge and moved to Virginia after finding a private school that discouraged screen use in class and at home. Boston’s high cost of living and frigid winters also contributed to their decision to move, but above all, Dickson said the couple wanted “a different pace” of life for their children.
“I just felt really drawn to exploring something that would preserve childhood, and this seemed like a good fit,” she said of the school, which emphasizes the importance of “imagination, creativity and nature-based play,” Dickson said. “The low-tech environment really is a big part of it.”
Dickson doesn’t adhere to a total screen ban, though, and the family will sometimes watch a movie together on Friday nights.
“It’s not like we are so extreme that we don’t use tech at home,” she said. “But I really feel strongly about the benefits of a screen-free childhood.”
The mom is a member of a screen-free parenting group on Facebook that has gained more than 250,000 members worldwide. It is a space for parents to swap tips and advice about reducing screen time, with some sharing how they have taken the batteries out of TV remotes and locked iPads away in a drawer.
Others have taken more extreme action. One anonymous parent told how she was forced to take her sons on a two-week digital detox to a farm in a desperate effort to help them kick an online gaming addiction.
‘They were addicts’ — How single mom of 5 weaned kids off phones
Price is a single mom of five who knows that social media addiction is real. She said that her children, ages 20, 15, 12, and 7-year-old twins, have undergone a transformation since she dramatically reduced their screen time earlier this year. While her eldest daughter was never hooked on her device, the mom was becoming increasingly concerned about her other children’s behavior.
Before her intervention, the children used to have unlimited access to their own iPhones, iPads and the TV, which Price described as having them in “a trance.”
“They all were addicts,” the 39-year-old mom from Jacksonville, Florida, told The Independent. “I’m embarrassed to say, but I feel like they were on there all day when they weren’t eating or sleeping. My son’s teacher would tell me that he was sleeping a lot in class, even though he would keep up with his work,” Price added. “He was always very tired. The daycare told me that the twins were cranky.”
Parents also need to look at their own habits, Price said. That moment of realization struck while the mom, who is divorced, was on a date.
“He told me that I had an addiction…it hurt my feelings that he said that to me,” she recalled. “And then I started to notice my own patterns, and I’m like, oh my gosh, my kids got it from me,” she recalled. “They see me on my phone all the time; they picked up the habit from watching me.”
Price, a social media and marketing director, wanted to make changes, but it wasn’t as simple as locking up her kids’ devices. “I had to replace the time that the screens were filling,” she said.
Now, her children are only allowed their devices for a couple of hours on weekends.
“The first three to four weeks, it was extremely hard,” she said. “They cried, they wanted to move out and move in with their dad. It was a lot. I cried too, because I kept questioning, like, am I being a good parent? Am I taking something from them that they need?”
After a few weeks, Price noticed changes in her kids’ behavior and even the atmosphere at home.
“My kids started being creative again, they were reading, drawing, painting, talking to each other, talking to me,” she said. “It wasn’t overnight, but it felt real. And the biggest change wasn’t even their behavior. It was the energy of our home. It just felt calmer, and we feel more connected now.”
Mom of 7 and sleep expert Rachel Mitchell mostly works with parents who have young children. Like the American Academy of Pediatrics, she discourages screen use for children under 2.
“You’d be surprised at how many parents have their toddlers even on screens consistently, and don’t even realize that it’s affecting sleep,” she said. “When your toddler is on screens in the evening, that’s suppressing their melatonin, and that’s going to create a bedtime battle.”
“With teenagers and older kids—even 10-year-olds have phones now—it seems like those screens in their bedroom are absolutely just killing their sleep quality,” she adds. “Not only does it affect melatonin, but it can increase cortisol and adrenaline, and it’s causing just poor sleep.”
Rise of parents joining the screen-free movement
Parents across the U.S. are joining the screen-free childhood movement in response to how technology is negatively impacting children.
Emily Boddy is the co-lead of Smartphone Free Childhood US, a grassroots group that has helped usher in phone-free schools laws in a dozen states, including Florida, New York, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. as part of its Distraction Free Schools Policy Project with the Becca Schmill Foundation.
Boddy, a mom of two, often speaks with lawmakers, public health experts, and parents to change the narrative and reliance on smartphones. She has installed a landline for her own children, aged 12 and 9, in their Boston home.
“I hope that delaying smartphones or foregoing smartphones for kids altogether is really the new norm,” Boddy told The Independent of her ambitions for the next decade. “You still see a lot of young kids with smartphones, and I’m hoping that we can really move away from this. I know we’re not going back to 1990 but there’s space for parents to embrace simple phones that get the internet out of kids’ pockets.”
It is vital that parents of all backgrounds are brought into the conversation, Boddy said, acknowledging the divide between wealthier families whose children have greater access to safe, outdoor spaces and can afford to send their kids to screen-free private schools, and low-income parents who cannot.
“One of the worries that I have is if we can’t bring the conversation across demographics, if we can’t make major change in norms at the legislative level while everyone is still affected by this…I’m worried that the conversation starts getting quieter and quieter before all children and families have access to information that can help them make better decisions,” she said.
Virginia mom Emily Harrison, a member of Fairplay’s Screen Time Action Network, has similar hopes for the future.
Fairplay, which campaigns to end “exploitative and harmful business practices” of Big Tech, recently helped pass a bill in Virginia to stop schools from solely using social media to communicate with students about extracurricular activities.
The group has also launched a campaign urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the online gaming platform Roblox, accusing the company of “exposing children to harmful people and content.” Roblox has previously pushed back on the allegations amid growing backlash and insisted it has “rigorous safety measures” in place.
“It requires more people voicing their concerns and asking for change, and once that starts happening, if there’s more kids outside playing because they’re not inside on screens, there’s more friends for my children,” Harrison said.
“This is just good for everybody.”
