Natalie Corlett's 8-year-old son, James, draws Greek gods with chalk at a playgroup in Oceanport, NJ.
Oceanport moms Katie Babad, Malsert Liebler and Natalie Corlett are part of the Oceanport chapter of the Balance Project.
Tin Can co-founders from left, Graeme Davies, Chet Kittleson and Max Blumen.
Ryan Glubo, an Oceanport parent to an 8 and 4-year-old, says he hopes to wait until 16 to give his kids a smartphone and 18 for social media.
“If you've connected kids by a landline, kids who live within walking or bicycle distance, you have the makings of a great childhood for your child, because it's not primarily about the phones, it's primarily about childhood,” says Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Anxious Generation."

Walk into some homes in Oceanport, New Jersey, and you might think you’ve time traveled.

Landlines are tethered to playroom walls, and radios are playing music. The reading on-tap is Beverly Cleary's "Beezus and Ramona," and Friday nights are marked with TGIF TV — think "Full House" and "Family Matters" — with parents and kids sharing living room couches, watching together after dinner.

Blink, and you’ll think you’ve stepped into 1995.

But it’s about more than just nostalgia. On playgrounds in New Jersey, in living rooms in Seattle, and in text chains between moms across the country, a shift is unfolding. Some millennials parents want to raise their kids with the kind of carefree, phone-free, independent play they grew up with. And they’re doing it.

“We are in a sweet spot where we know life before, we know life after,” says millennial mom Holly Moscatiello. She’s the founder of The Balance Project, a non-profit that aims to help kids balance independence and mindful technology usage. “We had the ability to watch what happens if you go too far. Now we have the opportunity to take the step back, and we're taking it.”

It’s a shift psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been urging for years. He outlined it extensively in his book “The Anxious Generation,” where he advocates for curtailing smartphone use before 14.

These parents are listening.

“Our mentality is let's catch them before that age where it's really hard to claw back the technology once it's already in the child's hands,” says Malsert Liebler, whose children are 7 and 5. She takes her kids to The Balance Project's Oceanport phone-free play group each month.

“2025, I believe, is the tipping point,” Haidt told USA TODAY in a wide-ranging interview last month ahead of the Project Healthy Minds World Mental Health Day Festival. “This wasn't just a flash in the pan. This is a global rebellion, with laws and norms changing around the world.”

In the suburbs of New Jersey, a cacophony of noises coming from a playground jungle gym leaves little doubt.

Peals of laughter sound from the monkey bars, where several girls swing, with tie dye pink Labooboo dolls in tow. Another group of kids covers the asphalt basketball court with chalk drawings of the Greek gods Poseidon and Hades while some boys starts a pickup game of football.

Liebler helps lead the Oceanport chapter of The Balance Project. The parents running these chapters — there are now more than 100 around the country — are mainly millennial moms, the demographic Haidt credits with driving the smartphone-free childhood movement. Haidt’s website lists more than 50 aligned organizations, with names like Landline Kids, Outside Play Lab, Log OFF movement and OK to Delay.

‘We put them in these shrink wrap boxes, and they don't need that’

Before last year, many of these parents felt resigned to the fact that their kids would wind up hooked on smartphones. According to Pew Research, more than half of parents with kids 12 and younger say their child uses a smartphone in some capacity, and about four in 10 say this about a child under 2. Among teens, nearly half say they’re online constantly.

But Haidt’s book, and the movement that grew out of it, gave them permission to question that trajectory. For years, they’ve lived in a culture that celebrates vigilant parenting. From the moment their babies were born, they could track every breath, bowel movement and sleep cycle with Owlet socks, feeding apps and crib-mounted Nanit monitors.

And as much as kids’ access to the digital world has grown, they have far less freedom in real life.

A Harris Poll survey conducted with Haidt of kids ages 8 to 12 found that most respondents aren’t allowed to be in public without an adult, and more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised in their front yard.

“I miss the childhood when I was growing up,” says Oceanport parent Ryan Glubo, who has an 8- and 4-year-old. “My parents would just say, ‘OK, be back for dinner.’ That was it. You’d go outside, it would get dark, and you knew to come home.”

It’s something Haidt attributes, in part, to a “moral panic” America underwent starting in the 1980s. Parents had a disproportionate level of concern about kidnappings and sex trafficking and simultaneously stopped trusting their neighbors, resulting in less organic play.

Social media and virtual games have filled the spaces that basketball pick-up games or mall hangouts once held.

“Frankly, we would go to the park and look for people to play with after school, and the parks would be empty,” Liebler says of life before the playgroup.

Letting go doesn’t come naturally, these parents say, but they believe it’s necessary.

Moscatiello’s daughters, Molly, 7, and Ruby, 5, bike to school with friends. Liebler keeps a first aid kit in the car during play group, but if kids argue over a ball or scrape a knee during tag, the goal is to let them work it out themselves.

“Kids are so much more capable than we think they are,” says Natalie Corlett, a 37-year-old Oceanport mom to two. “We put them in these shrink wrap boxes, and they don't need that, they are capable human beings.”

Giving kids phones − with a cord

Roughly 3,000 miles away in Seattle, a group of dads were grappling with the same issue. Their kids, now 8 and 9, wanted some independence, but they weren’t ready to hand over smartphones.

“I feel like I'm an executive assistant for my kid,” Chet Kittleson recalled one parent remarking to him at after-school pick up.

He thought back to his first social network, which came with the constraint of a curly cord and the click of rotary dials, and created a modern alternative: the Tin Can Flashback, a wired screen-free landline for kids, and a new WiFi-powered Tin Can. Both support calling other Tin Cans and 911 for free, or users can add regular phone numbers through an app for $9.99 a month. The phones allow parents to set “quiet hours” and filter out spam calls or unknown numbers.

Seattle mom Megan Timmermann got a Tin Can in October of 2024, when the organization was small enough that Kittleson was hand installing them in houses. Her elementary-aged daughters use the phone to call their grandparents, order pizza and ask their cousins what costumes to bring to playdates. When a smoke alarm went off in Timmermann’s house last month, her daughters called a neighbor for help.

“You're teaching a kid, you know, if you need something…you can dial a number and you can get it,” Kittleson says. It’s about problem-solving.

The phones have spread to 50 states, and schools have inquired about purchasing them for their entire student bodies. In neighborhoods like Oceanport, when one parent buys a Tin Can, others follow.

When Liebler’s 7-year-old received one for her birthday in October, her early conversations were stilted and full of awkward pauses. But within a few weeks, the new phone jitters were long-gone. On a call with her grandfather on Nov. 13, she confidently described her school day and shared her Christmas wish — all she wants this year is for it to snow.

Navigating a new childhood playbook

Many of the parents leading these changes have read Haidt’s book, listened to Lenore Skenazy's advice about free range parenting, and are familiar with the psychologist Peter Gray’s research on free play. But they say these shifts only work if entire communities and schools get on board.

Timmermann says her neighborhood pod quickly adopted the landlines, but other friends remain hesitant. Oceanport dad Glubo says he would like to wait until 16 to give his children phones and keep them off social media until they're 18, but he worries about them being excluded.

“I'm terrified,” says Glubo. “I'm afraid of, what are kids going to be doing with it, and does it match the values that we want our kids to have?”

There are reasons to be hopeful, though. Policy changes are making an impact: as of November, 36 states and Washington D.C. had instituted policies on K-12 cellphone usage in schools. And more than 130,000 parents nationwide have signed the Wait Until 8th pledge, which commits to delaying giving kids smartphones until at least eight grade.

Timmermann started letting her daughters, Abigail, 8, and Emily, 6, walk a quarter mile down the block to a corner store that sells Ring Pops and bread. She arms them with $5 — they recently learned what taxes are, and know that’s enough to cover the smoothies they like — and sends them off holding hands.

“I want them to have the independence and the lack of anxiety that maybe we had back then,” Timmermann says. “I don't know what's going to happen five years from now, but I want to be that ideal nostalgic parent.”

It’s a gamble she’s not sure will work — but she’s determined to try.

Rachel Hale’s role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input. Reach her at rhale@usatoday.com and @rachelleighhale on X.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No TikTok, no iPhones and retro landlines. These parents are raising kids like it’s 1995.

Reporting by Rachel Hale, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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