One of the things I am most passionate about, as a parent, is delaying smartphones for kids. I don’t talk about it enough, so I want to lay out where this comes from, because it wasn’t always where I stood.

I need to be honest about where I started, because it wasn’t here.

Where I Started

I did my master’s at Columbia in their Computing in Education program. Before I had kids, I worked as a technology teacher and integrator. I was genuinely excited about what technology could do for learning. So when we got our boys iPads years ago, I honestly didn’t think twice about it. It fit who I was.

Then came COVID and Zoom school. In Toronto, we were on it longer than almost anywhere. By the end of nearly two years of screens as school, I took my kids’ iPads and told them I never wanted to see them again. At the time it was half a joke. I had no idea how much I actually meant it.

After COVID, when my eldest was in grade 5, he developed a very specific anxiety: that I wouldn’t be there when he got off the bus. It showed up as stomach aches every afternoon as the school day wound down. We got him working with a children’s psychotherapist, which helped. But I also thought a phone might help, because if he could reach us, maybe the fear would lose its grip.

It worked. We started with a flip phone, and at some point switched to a smartphone, though I honestly don’t remember why. He barely used it. It was never really about the phone. It was about the feeling of security it gave him. There was one wild snowstorm when the bus was hours late, and he used that phone to coordinate with other parents on a new pickup spot.

I’m not in denial about that. Being able to reach your kid, or having your kid be able to reach you, genuinely makes things easier, and I don’t think that need ever fully goes away. But there’s a real difference between a smartphone and a regular phone. A flip phone gives you that same reachability without everything that comes bundled into a smartphone. It hasn’t come up for us again because what we’re doing has been working, but I’m not against going back to a flip phone if it ever becomes the right call.

The Conference

Our school later launched its own version of the U.S. Wait Until 8th program, encouraging families to delay smartphones. Families could sign the pledge if their child had a filtered phone, so I signed it. As school president, that led to an invitation to Tikvah Foundation’s Jewish Schools and Technology Summit, where more than 50 schools and 200 lay leaders and educators spent two days talking about technology’s impact on kids.

Our head of school at the time was actually invited to sit on a panel there, because we were one of the Jewish schools already leading the way on this. I felt real pride sitting in that room and hearing our school held up as an example.

Before the conference, I had a call with Caroline Bryk, a senior director at Tikvah who was organizing the conference. She asked about my personal views on technology and what we actually did with our kids. I told her our kids didn’t have iPads, except when we traveled. She asked why.

I sat there and realized I didn’t actually know.

Because if I was honest, travel iPads never stayed contained to the plane. They’d want them at the hotel too, and the trip would slowly start revolving around when they’d get screen time. Or they’d use them every night, and we’d come home needing to detox all over again. Sitting with her question, I also realized my eldest wasn’t anxious anymore. He didn’t need the phone the way he once had.

Then I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, along with his four recommendations. I went to that conference already unsettled, and I came home with real clarity. After that conversation with Caroline, and after the conference itself, my husband and I decided we’d give it a go with no personal devices in our household for our children.

Zach Rausch, one of Haidt’s research associates, presented on the book. We already know social media has been devastating for kids, especially girls, and the data on that is careful and well-documented. But that’s only half of Haidt’s argument. The other half is about us: how parenting itself has shifted over the last 40 years.

Parents have steadily insulated kids from harm. On the surface, that sounds like good parenting. But a lack of moderate stress leaves kids without resilience, and too much adult structure means they never learn to negotiate or manage challenges on their own. Combine that shift with smartphones and social media, and you get the mental health picture we’re living through now.

One statistic from that session has stuck with me since. Forty years ago, the group most likely to break a bone was boys, which tracks: sports, activity, risk-taking, all the things boyhood used to run on. Today, it’s men over 50. Boyhood has been de-risked, and it’s happened alongside a huge rise in indoor, non-social screen time. Boys aren’t experimenting, testing limits, or playing the way they need to, and it’s showing.

Dr. Leonard Sax, an American family physician, psychologist, author, and parenting expert, spoke next. He opened with a question I’ll pass along, because it’s worth sitting with before you keep reading: according to a major longitudinal study, what single input is most correlated with health, wealth, and happiness later in life?

The answer is self-control. And self-control is built through responsibility and delayed gratification, which a child can only learn if a parent is actually willing to hold the line. Dr. Sax’s read was blunt: many parents today have quietly given up that authority, out of fear or a misplaced sense of values.

He shared one more study that’s stayed with me. Researchers asked kids how much money they’d need to be paid to stay off social media for a month. The average answer was $50. Then researchers asked how much they’d need if all their friends were off it too. The kids said they’d pay the researchers for that. They want out. They just don’t have a way to get there alone, so they text and Snap and DM because that’s where everyone already is.

At a lay leader session that night, everyone in the room went around and shared what they wanted for their own kids. Nearly everyone said some version of the same thing: we want our children to have a childhood.

I actually went back to Tikvah the following year too, for Marom 2025: Cultivating Jewish Minds in an Age of Distraction, which focused on technology in the classroom specifically. Given my degree, that one hit close to home in a whole different way. I don’t have room to get into it here, but it might be its own post someday.

Soon after that first conference, Pesach came around, and I challenged our extended family to go tech-free over chol hamoed. Specifically, no technology at dinner, and real activities at night instead. It was only a few nights, but we did some fun things together and genuinely had a great time. Funny enough, I still pulled out my phone to document it all, which says something about how tangled up our cameras are with our phones, one more struggle in all of this. It was also a good reminder that this kind of thing doesn’t just happen. It takes real, deliberate effort to make it stick, even for a few nights.

Day to day, though, my eldest was mostly fine with the delay, and a big part of why is that he had friends in the same boat. Haidt talks about this constantly: collective action is the key. None of this works if your kid is the only one.

Near the end of 7th grade, he told us he wanted a way to talk to his friends. So we set up iMessage for him on our family computer, nothing more. That small change was enough. He was at peace waiting until after 8th grade for an actual phone.

Now he’s 13 and started high school today. And yes, he has a smartphone. But most of it is locked down. He doesn’t have internet access on it, because I still don’t think a 13-year-old needs the internet in his pocket. He also has to plug his phone in our room every night. No devices in the kids’ bedrooms overnight. My husband would extend that rule to the adults too, but I’m not there yet.

What It Looks Like Now

My kids watch a fair amount of TV, and that’s always been fine with me. What I didn’t want in the house was a personal device, something that’s theirs alone, in their hands or their pocket. TV is different. It’s shared, it’s in a common space, and it doesn’t come with them everywhere.

Travel is honestly the hardest part. Planes are tough. We lean on old-school coloring books and activities, and some flights go a lot better than others. The older two sometimes negotiate turns on my phone or my husband’s. I always hope for a flight with seatback TVs, and when we get one, I’m thrilled.

I keep coming back to the magic of Shabbat. Every single week, we get a full day where devices simply aren’t part of the picture. The kids sit, talk, play games, wander in and out of each other’s company, and are just kids together. It’s not that it makes any of this easier, exactly. It’s more that it keeps showing me why we’re doing it in the first place.

A friend told me a story that’s stayed with me. She was on a Passover program with a three-day holiday, so no devices for three days straight. During those three days, the hotel lobby was full of kids playing board games, hanging out, just being together. The night the holiday ended, that same lobby filled up with kids sitting side by side, silently staring at their phones. I get it, honestly. After a few days offline, I want to veg out and catch up too. But there’s still something heartbreaking in that shift. It’s the same magic you see at summer camp, and the same thing that happens the moment camp ends.

As for my own kids, this isn’t something every single friend of theirs is doing. But each of them has a few close friends whose families feel similarly about technology, and that’s enough to make it feel normal rather than isolating. I don’t say any of this to suggest families who make different choices are doing something wrong. This is just what has felt right for us.

Our school rebranded its program as Plug Into Life, because that’s really the point. It was never only about delaying a phone. It’s about giving kids more independence, more real responsibility, and more room to actually live their childhood instead of watching it through a screen.

My phone rules me. I know I’m addicted to it, and I also know it brings me real joy and real value. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But deep in my gut, I know the right move for my kids is to delay. When I watch my kids fully present, fully kids, still figuring things out on their own terms, I’m reminded why we made this choice in the first place, and why we’re sticking with it.