What The Tech: How do parents feel about Ireland’s “no phone policy” for kids
BY JAMEY TUCKER, Consumer Technology Reporter
Parents in the U.S. may prefer not to give their children a smartphone, but we all understand why that’s often difficult. Just a few kids with a phone can make all the other kids want one. And many parents don’t want them to feel left out.
In Greystones, Ireland, they figured it out.
“It Takes a Village” is a pact parents of primary school children signed to keep phones out of
their hands until secondary school. It’s changed how parents raise their kids.
The initiative launched about 3 years ago, led by Principal Rachel Harper who says, it gave parents
something they didn’t have before: support.
“I think it got conversation going. You know, parents were having coffee together, or they might
be at the side of the football pitch or rugby pitch. And they were chatting “are you signing up to
this code,” says Harper.
They found, most parents were just waiting for someone else to do something.
“Now at least when there’s other parents talking about not giving the phone straight away, it’s
kind of taken the pressure off me a little bit. So he’s maybe not going to be the only one not
having a phone,” explains one parent. “We’re not fighting ‘your child is the only child who doesn’t have it. If everybody doesn’t have it, then they can’t come to you and say “well, Holly has a phone when I know she doesn’t.”
5445 parents feel the same peer pressure that kids do. But once they agreed together, the pressure
wasn’t so great.
“So they were able to play good cop, bad cop. You’ve signed up to this code in the school. We
can’t go against what the school wants us to do,” says Harper.
On the next segment of What the Tech, we’ll talk to students about what they think of the policy.
