In 2023, two parents in the UK started a WhatsApp group. They wanted to find other parents at their children's school who would agree to delay giving their children smartphones. Within months, the group had become a national campaign. Within a year, it had over one million signatures. By 2025, it had cross-party parliamentary support for legislation. By 2026, Smartphone Free Childhood is the largest and fastest-growing parent-led movement in British history, and the question it is forcing parents, schools, and governments to answer, what do children do instead, has made the screen-free toy market more relevant than it has ever been.
This post covers what the Smartphone Free Childhood movement is, why it has grown so fast, what the research says about what it is responding to, and what parents who are part of it are actually doing with their children instead.
What Is the Smartphone Free Childhood Movement?
Smartphone Free Childhood was founded in 2023 by Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, two mothers who were concerned about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health, social development, and childhood experience. Their original aim was simple: to find other parents willing to delay giving their children smartphones, particularly during the primary and early secondary school years, so that the social pressure on any individual family to provide a device was reduced by collective action.
The campaign grew with extraordinary speed because it named something that millions of parents had been thinking but had not found a community or a language for. The concern was not principally about time spent on screens, though that was part of it, but about what smartphones were doing to childhood itself. The social dynamics of the playground mediated through apps. The anxiety generated by social media. The loss of unstructured, unsupervised time that previous generations had taken for granted. The replacement of physical, social, outdoor play with solitary screen consumption.
The Smartphone Free Childhood campaign received significant BBC coverage throughout 2024 and 2025, with the campaign's founders cited in multiple news reports and parliamentary debates. Cross-party MPs introduced amendments to the Online Safety Act influenced by the campaign's findings. In January 2026, the campaign was credited by multiple MPs as a direct influence on new legislative proposals around children's access to social media and smartphones in school settings.
Why the Movement Has Grown So Fast
The Smartphone Free Childhood movement grew as quickly as it did because the parental concern it expressed had been building for years without a clear outlet. Three specific factors converged in 2023 to make the moment right for a mass movement.
The first was the research. Jonathan Haidt's 2023 book The Anxious Generation, published to significant media attention on both sides of the Atlantic, marshalled a decade of research connecting smartphone adoption among adolescents with the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and poor mental health outcomes that began around 2012, precisely the point at which smartphones became ubiquitous among teenagers. The research was not new in itself, but the synthesis was clear and accessible in a way that previous academic work had not been.
The second was the lived experience. By 2023, the first cohort of children who had grown up with smartphones from early childhood were reaching their mid-teens, and the parental experience of what that looked like, the anxiety, the social comparison, the sleep disruption, the displacement of physical play, had accumulated to the point where parents were actively seeking alternatives rather than managing the status quo.
The third was collective action. The WhatsApp group model that Smartphone Free Childhood pioneered was particularly effective because it addressed the principal obstacle most individual parents face: the social pressure on their child to have a device because all their friends do. By organising collectively at school level, the campaign removed this pressure for participating families.
What the Research Says
The research underpinning the Smartphone Free Childhood movement is specific, consistent, and increasingly impossible to dismiss. The core finding, replicated across multiple independent studies, is that the years between 2012 and 2023 saw a sharp and sustained rise in anxiety, depression, loneliness, and poor mental health outcomes in adolescents across the developed world, with the rise beginning at approximately the same time as smartphone adoption became widespread in this age group.
The mechanism proposed by Haidt and supported by subsequent research has four components. Smartphones displaced the face-to-face social interaction that adolescents need for social development. They displaced the physical, outdoor, and independent play that builds emotional regulation. They provided constant access to social comparison through social media. And they disrupted sleep through late-night use. All four of these effects operate not just on adolescents but on younger children, which is why the Smartphone Free Childhood movement's focus has expanded from teenagers to include the under-tens.
We are not anti-technology. We are pro-childhood. The question is not whether screens are bad. It is whether what they replace was better. The research says it was.
Smartphone Free Childhood, campaign statementWhat Parents in the Movement Are Doing Instead
The most practically important question the Smartphone Free Childhood movement has generated is not the negative one, how do we reduce screen time, but the positive one: what do children do instead? The movement has been clear that removing screens without replacing them with something genuinely engaging produces conflict, not wellbeing. The solution is not deprivation. It is replacement with things that are actually better.
The activities and toys that parents in the movement consistently reach for fall into categories that will be familiar from any description of pre-screen British childhood: outdoor games, strategy games, physical toys that require active engagement, and time that is genuinely unstructured and allowed to be boring until children find their own way through it.
For young children, the screen-free alternatives that parents report working most reliably are open-ended wooden toys, outdoor games that can be left in the garden for spontaneous use, simple puzzles and construction sets, and small world play sets that sustain imaginative play. All of these are things that Jaques of London has been making since 1795, not as screen-free alternatives, because the concept did not exist, but as the best possible versions of what toys and games have always been.
For older children and families, the alternatives that parents consistently recommend are board games and strategy games that provide a structured reason to put phones away together: chess, draughts, and outdoor games like croquet and boules that work across ages and produce the genuine competitive engagement that holds attention without a screen.
How Jaques of London Fits the Moment
There is something historically specific about the position Jaques of London occupies in 2026. The company was founded in 1795. It invented croquet in 1851. It designed the Staunton chess piece in 1849. It has been making wooden toys, outdoor games, and strategy games continuously for 230 years, through every technological disruption and every cultural shift, without ever making a toy that required electricity.
The Smartphone Free Childhood movement, and the broader screen-free movement it represents, has arrived at the conclusion that the things Jaques has always made are the things children most need. Not as a marketing position. Not as a trend. As a documented, research-backed, parent-experienced truth about what childhood requires and what screens displace.
The Jaques of London croquet sets, the chess sets, the wooden toys for toddlers, and the outdoor games range are not products designed for a trend. They are products that have existed for over a century and that are now, for the first time in the company's history, being urgently sought by parents who understand exactly what they are for and exactly what they replace.
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For toddlers and young childrenOpen-ended wooden toys that require physical engagement and produce no stimulation independently. The alternative to a screen that developmental researchers and Smartphone Free Childhood parents reach for first. Shop Wooden Toys
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For the garden and outdoorsCroquet, boules, kubb, quoits, skittles, the outdoor games that give families a reason to be outside together without a screen between them. The same games British families have played for generations. Shop Outdoor Games
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For family game nightsChess, draughts, Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, the games that give everyone a reason to put phones down together. Not because they are forced to, but because the game is more interesting than the screen. Shop Board Games
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For building what screens erodeExecutive function, emotional regulation, the capacity to lose well, strategic thinking, physical coordination, outdoor confidence. All built through the toys and games Jaques has always made. None of them built through a screen.
The Smartphone Free Childhood movement has not invented a new idea. It has rediscovered what children have always needed and what the oldest toy maker in the world has always made.
The Screen-Free Alternative. Since 1795.
The toys and games the Smartphone Free Childhood movement is pointing parents towards. Made by the company that has always made them. No screens required.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Smartphone Free Childhood Movement
What is the Smartphone Free Childhood movement?
Smartphone Free Childhood is a UK campaign founded in 2023 by two parents, Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, aimed at encouraging parents to delay giving their children smartphones and to reduce children's screen exposure generally. The campaign grew to over one million petition signatures in 2024 and has influenced parliamentary debate and legislation around children and technology in the UK.
What do Smartphone Free Childhood parents do instead of screens?
Parents in the movement consistently report turning to outdoor physical play, open-ended toys, strategy games, and family games nights as the primary screen-free alternatives. The specific activities they recommend are almost entirely consistent with what developmental researchers recommend and with what British children did as a matter of course before screens existed: physical play, outdoor games, strategy games, and imaginative play with simple physical toys.
Is the Smartphone Free Childhood movement anti-technology?
The campaign explicitly describes itself as pro-childhood rather than anti-technology. The position is not that technology is harmful but that the displacement of childhood activities, physical play, social interaction, outdoor time, by screens produces documented negative outcomes for children's mental health and development. The goal is to protect the conditions children need to develop well, not to eliminate technology.
What does the research say about smartphones and children?
The research connecting widespread smartphone adoption among adolescents with the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and poor mental health outcomes beginning around 2012 is substantial and growing. Jonathan Haidt's 2023 synthesis in The Anxious Generation is the most widely cited, but the underlying research it draws on is extensive. The proposed mechanism involves the displacement of face-to-face social interaction and physical play, constant social comparison through social media, and sleep disruption.
The Alternative to Screens Has Been Here Since 1795.
The toys and games the Smartphone Free Childhood movement is pointing parents towards. Made by the world's oldest toy and games manufacturer. Screen-free, UKCA and CE tested, Since 1795. Free delivery on orders over £60.
Shop Jaques of London