Parents push back: A town unites to give kids a phone-free childhood

By Charlotte Alter | TIME

Molly Moscatiello, age 7, started riding her bike to first grade last year. There’s a crosswalk with no crossing guard, “and I had to look both ways like five times,” she says, two grown-up teeth peeking through the gap in the front of her smile. Sometimes her parents’ friends would drive past and ask if Molly needed a ride, but she’d always wave them off. “I felt a little nervous at first,” she says. “But then after a while I felt comfortable by myself.” Soon, other kids began asking to ride their bikes to school. By the end of first grade, Molly was leading a small cohort of five or six, riding to school together in Little Silver, N.J.

Twenty years ago, this would be as unremarkable as kids eating ice cream or playing soccer. But these days, when only about one in 10 American children walk or bike to school, Molly and her friends are more than just a gaggle of kids on bikes. They’re part of a growing countermovement against the technification of American childhood. 

Molly’s mother, Holly Moscatiello, is the founder of The Balance Project, a parent-run nonprofit working to rebuild communities to encourage childhood independence and get kids off screens. “We want to make it just as easy to experience life in our community as it is to go on your phone,” Moscatiello says.

One day in July, Moscatiello drove me around Little Silver, an affluent suburb a little over an hour from New York City, to show me what she meant. It’s a small community full of elegant homes with big garages and lush lawns and streets with few sidewalks. Kids here spend much of their childhood getting shuttled around in the back of their parents’ car; even if there were places for them to go on their own, there aren’t many ways for them to get there. Because Little Silver is what Moscatiello calls a “cut-through” suburb, with county roads that the town doesn’t control, the community can’t easily construct new bike lanes. So parents from the Balance Project navigated the town on their bikes, mapped out the crossing guards, speed limits, crosswalks, and sidewalks, and then distributed maps to parents so they could determine the optimal bike routes for their kids. They’re also starting a bike-buddy program, so kids can bike to school together.

Biking is just one way that the Balance Project is aiming to make Little Silver a place where kids can be independent. At Point Road, a public elementary school, Moscatiello points to a patch of dirt near the playground. “We want to optimize that into a natural play space,” she says, adding that the group is planning to collaborate with Sticks & Sprouts, a local organization that hosts outdoor classes to encourage unstructured play. We drive to the Markham Place middle school, where she shows me a playground that looks more suited for preschoolers than preteens, with plastic dinosaurs and small slides. “Our hope is to create a plan to make it teen friendly,” she says. “A third space.” By the time her own daughters are in middle school, Moscatiello hopes they can hang out here with their friends instead of being home on their devices.

After our tour, Moscatiello takes me to an Italian restaurant with her husband Ryan and their friend Tori Finnegan, a nurse and mother of three who is also active in the Balance Project. Finnegan’s three children are 8, 6, and 3. Before the Balance Project, she says, “I never made the connection that independence leads to resilience and confidence.” Now, she has her kids make their own school lunches, ride their bikes to school and to playdates, and take care of their siblings. Soon she’ll let her 8-year-old go to the store alone. Seeing other kids being independent gives parents permission to do the same with their own children, Finnegan says: “People act like the people they surround themselves with.”

At the next table, a family is eating dinner: two parents, one small boy in a high chair. All three of them spend the meal on their phones. “Devices are such an easy tool,” says Ryan. “We’re trying to give people other parenting tools to replace them.” To that end, the Balance Project has created what it calls “Balance Boxes”—a little cardboard box full of mini cars, crayons, Rubik’s cubes, and clay that families can bring out to dinner to entertain kids in lieu of screens.

Still, Moscatiello knows no amount of bike-riding or mud play or crayons at a restaurant will be enough to combat Big Tech’s transformation of American childhood. That’s why she feels so much urgency.  “We have to do this now. While our kids are young. We can’t wait for everyone to catch up,” she says. “Because no matter how fast this moves, no matter how quickly legislation happens, it won’t be soon enough to protect my children.”

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