Inside the fight for smartphone-free childhoods

This New Statesman feature by Pippa Bailey examines the rapid rise of Smartphone Free Childhood, co-founded by journalist Daisy Greenwell and psychologist Clare Fernyhough after the pair shared worries about introducing smartphones to their own children. It reports that their private WhatsApp support group hit its 1,024-member cap overnight, and that the campaign had grown to more than 70 community groups, with people in Italy, the US, Australia, and New Zealand expressing interest in starting their own chapters. The piece describes the founders' view that smartphones are designed in ways that make them hard to put down, and that children's still-developing capacity for self-control makes resisting that design especially difficult. It reports their call for shared responsibility between parents, government regulation, and technology companies, rather than placing the burden on families alone.

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