Smartphone Free Childhood
The parents’ movement to wait, together, before handing over a smartphone.
Our stance
Maziko has no child accounts. On purpose.
Maziko
Morning! You’re at Mum’s tonight. Swimming at 6. Dad picks you up Friday after school.
One text a day. No app to open.
We think childhood is better with fewer screens. So Maziko will never give your child an app, a login, or a feed to get pulled into. Here’s what we do instead.
We’re on the parents’ side of this.
More and more parents are holding off on smartphones, and the evidence is behind them. We’re with them. We’re not trying to win your child’s attention. We’re trying to take a job off your plate without putting a screen in their hands.
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt’s case for fewer screens, and more real childhood, for longer.
Phones out of schools
The growing move to keep the school day phone-free, here and abroad.
Age limits on social media
Countries starting to draw a legal line under a certain age.
Your child still deserves to know their week.
Especially a child living across two homes. “Where am I sleeping tonight? When do I next see Dad?” is a real, daily worry when you’re small, and not knowing is its own kind of stress. So the answer was never “children don’t get to see it.” It’s “children get to see it without a phone in their pocket.”
How your child sees their day, without an app.
A week you can stick on the fridge
Print the week as a simple, colourful sheet for the fridge or your child’s bedroom wall. The most screen-free option of all, and the one even the youngest can read at a glance.
A screen on the wall, not in a pocket
At home, Maziko can show the week on a shared screen: an old tablet on the fridge, or your family calendar on the wall. Everyone glances at it like a whiteboard, and no child needs their own login.
A text to a basic phone
If your child has one of the simple call-and-text phones so many families are choosing, Maziko can send their day as a single text each morning. You set it up, you can turn it off, and it’s only the plan: no address, no medical notes, nothing about the other parent, because a text isn’t private. It’s for your child, not for keeping tabs on them.
It grows up with them.
This isn’t all-or-nothing forever. Access grows as your child does, always at your pace.
- Up to their early teens
The morning text and the shared screen at home. Nothing personal, nothing digital.
- Around 14 to 16
If you’ve chosen to give them a phone, you can switch on a plain, read-only view of their own week.
- 16 and up
That read-only view becomes the norm, until they’re old enough to simply hold their own grown-up account.
The one rule that never changes
We will never build streaks, feeds, or notifications designed to pull your child back in. Not at 6, not at 16.
Maziko gives children the facts of their own life. It refuses to give them a habit.