Elisabet García Permanyer
Parent Advocates · Adolescencia Libre de Móviles
Sparked Spain's "no smartphone until 16" family pact movement, now joined by more than 30,000 families.
Elisabet García Permanyer sparked the Adolescencia Libre de Móviles (smartphone-free adolescence) movement in Spain in 2023, organizing parents around a shared family pact not to give children smartphones until age 16. The pact works by getting enough families in a school or community to commit together, so children delaying a smartphone are not the only ones without one. The movement has grown to more than 30,000 participating families and helped put the question of children's smartphone access onto the national conversation in Spain. García Permanyer's approach mirrors similar collective-pledge campaigns organized by parents in other countries.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (7)
STUDIES
Posar fre als mòbils: famílies de Barcelona s'organitzen per endarrerir-lo fins als 16 anys
This Catalan-language piece from Barcelona's public broadcaster betevé profiles the earliest days of the Poblenou WhatsApp group Elisabet García Permanyer started in autumn 2023, days after it passed 750 members. It describes families' shared worry that giving a smartphone to a 12-year-old entering secondary school has become an unquestioned default, and reports a parallel survey of nearly 700 families in Barcelona's Gràcia district exploring the same question. García Permanyer is quoted arguing that families should not simply assume a phone arrives with secondary school, and that coordinating enough households to delay together removes the social pressure on any one child to be the odd one out. The piece frames delayed smartphone access as a coordination problem among families, not an individual parenting failure — an early snapshot of a movement that would soon spread across Spain.
Las familias se movilizan: "No es normal entregar un móvil a un niño de 12 años"
This EFE wire report, carried by Infobae, covers the rapid early growth of the Poblenou 'adolescencia libre de móviles' WhatsApp group Elisabet García Permanyer started in October 2023. Within days the group had grown to nearly 1,000 parents and educators planning awareness activities ahead of the holiday shopping season, when many Spanish families traditionally buy a child's first phone. García Permanyer, a mother of three who also runs a movement-based studio for young students, says she noticed relational friction among children with early phone access, and argues that treating age 12 as the default age for a first smartphone has become normalized without much scrutiny. The report also relays her characterization of specialists' views that younger adolescents' capacity to manage unrestricted internet access is still developing — presented as a case for caution, not a settled diagnosis.
La revuelta contra el móvil que empezó en un parque
This ARA feature by Lara Bonilla traces the origin of Elisabet García Permanyer's smartphone-delay movement to a conversation among parents waiting at school pickup in Barcelona's Poblenou, where the question of buying a child's first phone for secondary school came up. García Permanyer describes starting a WhatsApp group with modest ambitions — hoping to persuade a handful of her son's friends' families to wait — that instead grew into a Catalonia-wide Telegram network of roughly 8,000 people within a single week. The piece describes the movement organizing itself into spokespeople and working groups covering surveys, family pledge letters, and requests to lawmakers, and cites a local survey in which 70% of responding parents said they did not want to give their child a smartphone before age 16. It presents the swift, largely organic growth as evidence of parental unease about a default few had previously questioned.
Familias que se unen y pactan no dar móvil a sus hijos hasta los 16 años: "Así evitamos la presión social"
elDiario.es's Catalunya desk covers the spread of family pacts, including the one Elisabet García Permanyer organized in Barcelona's Poblenou neighborhood, in which parents commit together to delay a child's first smartphone until age 16 rather than the more typical age 12. The piece situates her WhatsApp group, which passed 1,000 members within days, alongside a comparable effort in Cardedeu involving roughly 380 families across several school associations, and cites national figures showing most Spanish children already have a smartphone well before age 16. García Permanyer is quoted arguing that 12-year-olds are better served spending their time on play, sports, friendship, and schoolwork than on unrestricted device access. The article frames these pacts as a coordination tool that lets families who want to wait do so without singling out their own child.
El grupo Adolescència Lliure de Mòbil pide una regulación "clara" a Educació para las escuelas
This Europa Press wire report, carried by Última Hora, covers a formal request that Adolescència Lliure de Mòbil — co-founded and represented by Elisabet García Permanyer — made to Catalonia's regional education department. The group asked the department to set a single, clear rule on personal smartphone use inside school buildings rather than leaving the decision to individual schools, arguing that a patchwork of local policies creates unequal conditions between students at different centers. García Permanyer is quoted saying phones do not help children concentrate in class and reiterating the group's preferred age of 16 for a first smartphone, alongside a companion message discouraging any single family from feeling pressured to give a 12-year-old a phone just because classmates have one. The report frames the request as a shift from informal family pledges toward asking government for enforceable, system-wide rules.
Así se creó el primer movimiento viral contra las pantallas
One year after Elisabet García Permanyer started a single WhatsApp group in Barcelona's Poblenou neighborhood, this retrospective by Jordi Pérez Colomé — written for El País and carried by La Nación — traces how that group grew into hundreds of local chapters and more than 30,000 participating families across Spain organized around delaying children's first smartphone to age 16. Drawing on an interview with García Permanyer, the piece recounts her account of a personal, almost accidental start — "my goal was personal, I wanted fewer teenagers to have phones" — and her acknowledgment of the irony of using phones and group chats to coordinate resistance to phones. It also notes that a French broadcaster and an independent journalist had each filmed documentary material involving the movement, unreleased at the time of writing. The article presents the coordinated family pact, rather than individual restriction, as the movement's central organizing idea.