An Irish village lifts together to free children from phones

Greystones, Ireland: Twelve-year-old Bodie Mangan Gisler says a smartphone can be quite handy. For one thing, he collects coins, and if he wants to know how much a special coin is worth or what metals it contains, he can ask his mother for her phone and get the answer.

Most 12-year-olds would demand a phone of their own. Not Bodie. "I want to live long and stay healthy," he said on a recent afternoon in his school library. But he worries that having a smart device might interfere with that. "Maybe I'll say to my mum, 'Can I download this one game?' And she'll say, 'Yeah.' And I'll get sucked in."

His friend Charlie Hess, a fellow coin collector, nods in agreement. He wants to get a smartphone when he's 15 or 16. Until then, he says, "I think I have better things to do."

The kids are a little different here in Greystones. In 2023, the Irish seaside town just south of Dublin launched a grassroots initiative led by local parents, school principals and community members to loosen the grip of technology on their younger children by adopting a voluntary "no smart devices" code and supporting it with workshops and social events.

Three years later, no one in Greystones claims to have cured the ills of modern technology. But they've learned that they can't do anything about it one child at a time. Only a townwide effort could defang the kids' "everyone else has one" argument."

"With social media, it's a collective thing," said Jennifer Whitmore, a member of Irish parliament and a Greystones mother of four. "Addressing it in a clustered manner is the way to go."

The movement, called "It Takes a Village," has since grown well beyond this small town of 22,000 residents. In a country that is home to the European headquarters of tech companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and LinkedIn, and where the average firstborn child gets a smartphone at around age 9 (younger siblings tend to get them earlier), the effort has struck a chord with everyone from local shopkeepers to national politicians.

"It was one of the first places that took collective action," said Daisy Greenwell, who co-founded Britain's Smartphone Free Childhood movement later the same year -- inspired, in part, by Greystones. "It made me think that we could shift the culture here, too."

Before he held his current position as Ireland's deputy prime minister, Simon Harris, a Greystones father, helped launch the project. "I believe we are effectively seeing the experimentation with our young people's mental health and well-being with social media," said Harris, in a recent post on Instagram. "And it just can't be allowed to continue."

The goal is to give kids time to ease into the digital future rather than drown in it, said Rachel Harper, the principal of St. Patrick's National School, who spearheads the initiative. "This is the world the children are growing up in, and we need to equip them," she said.

"It Takes a Village" was conceived as students returned to school after COVID-19 lockdowns. Harper was struck by how many tears she was seeing at the school gates. She heard similar reports from other primary school principals, teachers and parents: children struggling to sleep, refusing to come to school, downloading calorie-counting apps, or too upset by messages sent the night before to focus in class.

"If we didn't take a stand now," she said, "in five years would they be getting phones at 5 or 6?"

Eoghan Cleary, a teacher and assistant principal at Greystones' Temple Carrig secondary school, had also sounded the alarm. "'I wish I didn't have to see any more beheadings' -- that's what my students say to me the most," he said. "'I don't want to see people being killed. 'I don't want to see people being raped online.'"

After some 800 parents responded to a survey sent out by the primary schools -- more than half said their children were anxious, and many had sought mental-health assistance -- the town decided it was time to act.

"I think it was just so obvious, the damage phones were causing," said one resident, Ross McParland, who first heard about the schools' concerns over dinner at Harper's house. McParland, a retired real estate consultant, turned to the Greystones Town Team. Usually responsible for things like Christmas decorations and the St. Patrick's Day parade, Town Team volunteers were soon focused on the antianxiety project.

To kick off the project, McParland hosted a town hall in the Whale Theater, which he owned. Harris spoke, as did Stephen Donnelly, then the Irish minister of health and another Greystones father. Two weeks later, all eight primary school principals signed a letter to parents in support of a voluntary code being rolled out by the PTAs. Parents could agree not to buy their kids a smart device before secondary school, which most children start at around age 12.

Seventy percent of parents signed up, and the community united behind the cause.

The founder of a local film festival handled communications. Garrett Harte, a former editor-in-chief of "Newstalk," Ireland's nationwide talk-radio station, helped hone the initiative's message and delivery. "This was very much, 'our town needs a little bit of help navigating this new world adults have no clue about,'" Harte said.

Within a few months, Donnelly had established a national Online Health Taskforce, while Ireland's Department of Education issued guidelines for other primary-school communities that wished to follow Greystones' model.

With its tradition of volunteerism and charity work, the tight-knit town was well positioned for this kind of social experiment. It has a vibrant youth sports scene, and tweens can socialize face to face at the Youth Café, an after-school hangout. On Church Road, the old-fashioned main street, most of the stores are run by locals like Paddy Holohan, who recently sent a note to schools saying that children who need help -- say, locating a parent -- can always come to his SuperValu grocery store.

"It was just reassurance for parents, as the evenings were getting darker," said Holohan, a Greystones father whose children also were not allowed smartphones in primary school. "Everything doesn't have to be online."

These days, Greystones parents still face the familiar torrent of technology delivered to kids who know how to change their birth date by a few years to evade age restrictions. According to a 2025 study by CyberSafeKids, an online-safety group, 28% of Irish children between the ages of 8 and 12 experienced content or unsolicited contact that "bothered" them, including exposure to horror, violence, sexual material and threats; 63% of primary school-aged children said their parents couldn't see what they're doing online.

But with workshops for adults and children, podcasts on the topic (like one hosted by local twins Stephen and David Flynn, Greystones dads and lifestyle influencers), and events like a phone-free beach party, Greystones has seen a shift: Parents say the pressure to get their kids a smartphone before the end of primary school has all but vanished. Some say they feel less alone navigating new technological shoals. At St. Patrick's, one teacher said her students were more alert in the mornings.

Harper said that children are making plans in person, playing outdoors more, and "just being kids."

Interest is on the rise. Cleary, the assistant principal, hosts weekly parent talks, often in communities that want to follow in Greystones' footsteps. On a recent rainy night at a primary school in Dublin, the audience of about 100 groaned as he described how violent pornography had shaped his teenage students' ideas about sexuality, and how some tech companies were telling soon-to-be 13-year-olds how to bypass parental controls. ("Oh Jesus!" said one father).

Speaking from a decade of experience, Cleary urged the parents to set limits on screen time and lobby elected officials to demand stronger technology legislation. Rather than instituting bans, he hopes to see these technologies made safer for children.

"What Greystones has done is shown that parents and communities aren't powerless," said Cleary, who took a leave of absence last year to conduct research with Ireland's Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute. "It's temporary and imperfect, a stopgap to buy time."

Grassroots movements are just the beginning, many agree. "Enforcement of online safety legislation to hold platforms to account will play an important role," said Niamh Hodnett, Ireland's Online Safety Commissioner.

For now, though, the parents and teachers in Greystones are soldiering on.

Nina Carberry, an Irish member of European Parliament, said she was particularly impressed with a recent "It Takes a Village" project, in which 16-year-olds from Temple Carrig led mentoring workshops with younger students at two local primary schools. In an email, Carberry said she aims to push for similar models at the European Union level.

Lauren Harnett, 13, participated in a workshop last year. She found the talks with older children more informative than ones with adults, and less stressful. "They said, 'If you just use it in the right way, and if you're open with your parents, you'll be fine,'" she said.

This year, her first in secondary school, Lauren got her first smartphone. "When everyone around you has one, you want one," she said. "I could have probably waited longer."