How a group of parents in Chappaqua and Armonk are fighting against smartphones and social media for their community’s young teens
When Chappaqua resident Mark Kornblau’s oldest daughter entered fifth grade, Kornblau did what he says most parents of middle school-age children did at the time. He gave her a smartphone.
Soon, he began to struggle with managing his daughter’s relationship with the technology. He found that monitoring her smartphone and constantly negotiating over screen time limits was a tougher task than anticipated.
He then read The Anxious Generation, a 2024 bestseller by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that attributes a rise in childhood mental illness to the spread of smartphones and social media. Among Haidt’s arguments that resonated was the call for collective action, such as parents coming together and agreeing not to give their children a smartphone until a certain age.
“I’ve seen with my daughter that it is not that she wants to always be connected to her phone,” Kornblau, who also has two younger children, says. “And when she knows that her friends aren’t, it’s very easy for her to separate from it.”
Melanie Cohen, a mother in Chappaqua, was also motivated by Haidt’s book, which she read as her oldest child was in fourth grade.
“It just became this expectation for so many families that you were going to give your kids a smartphone when they are going into middle school,” she explains. “And I just felt so frustrated and angry that that is the expectation.”
It was then, in 2024, that Cohen discovered OK to Delay, a grassroots organization aimed at empowering parents to delay giving their children smartphones. Launched in 2019 by a pair of moms in Darien, Connecticut, the organization gives parents resources to organize in their communities to work collectively to hold off on giving kids smartphones.
“I felt like this was probably our best angle to bring this to our town, because we don’t have to re-invent the wheel,” Cohen recalls. “OK to Delay has all the language, they have the presentations. They have all the experience.”
Cohen connected with Kornblau through a mutual friend, and together last spring they launched a Chappaqua chapter of OK to Delay. In September, they organized their first event, where close to 100 people packed the New Castle Community Center. “It really got the ball rolling for this school year,” Cohen says. “So many people felt like, thank you so much for bringing this to our town.”
Armonk resident Brett Goldman, meanwhile, saw first-hand the perils of smartphone use in middle school when he gave his now 18-year-old daughter a phone in 2019, when she was in 6th or 7th grade.
“We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what kind of weapon we were handing her,” he recalls. “I watched what happened when I gave her a phone. It quickly became a race to maximize social media time, and I see that as, to some extent, a waste of time.”
Goldman wanted to approach things differently with his younger children, now 9 and 6 years old. Last year, he got in touch with the founder of OK to Delay and launched an Armonk chapter.
The first meeting, in September 2024, brought some 75 people to the Whippoorwill Theater at the North Castle Public Library, according to Goldman. Three months later, twice that number came to an event at the IBM Learning Center. Some signed up to volunteer, including co-chairs Jeff Sottolano and Jennifer Clark.
The aim of OK to Delay is to get as many parents as possible in a community on board to agree to delay giving their children smartphones. This way, a child without a smartphone in middle school is not an outlier, the only one of his or her friends not on Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok.
“It really is true that kids are actually happier, and they will say it themselves, to be without phones constantly,” says Kornblau. “As long as they know that they are not missing out on everybody else being on them.”
The Anxious Generation
Concerns about teen cell phone use date back to multitap texting, but the rise of both smartphones and social media has accelerated these worries over the past decade. The 2020 Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma described how social media manipulates and addicts users, spurring depression and anxiety in teenagers, particularly teen girls.
When The Anxious Generation was released in 2024, it came after more than a decade of increasing mental illness and distress among teens and adolescents. Haidt attributes this, at least in large part, to the rise of smartphones and social media, alongside otherwise overprotective parenting and the decline of traditional children’s play. Essentially, Haidt argues that parents are too risk-averse in the real world, where threats are often rare and exaggerated, and too lax in the virtual world, where children are more likely to be targeted by predators, exposed to inappropriate content, or sucked into the wormhole of social media.
Haidt is far from the first to warn of the harms of social media to children. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, warned in 2017 that smartphones and social media were creating a crisis of depression, anxiety and loneliness for teens. By 2023, the data backing this conclusion had grown more robust.
This link has also become a public policy issue. This spring, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the state would require schools from kindergarten to high school to ban smartphone use during school hours.
But the data is far from unanimous, as some research paints a nuanced picture or suggests potential benefits to smartphone use. A report published earlier this year by researchers at the University of South Florida found that smartphone use may benefit children and young teens, with 11 to 13-year-olds who owned smartphones found to be less likely to report depression and anxiety (the study was less sanguine on social media posting, finding it posed multiple harms).
Different Approaches
OK to Delay’s local chairs acknowledge multiple possible approaches to limiting middle schoolers’ access to social media. Cohen says she won’t give her children a cell phone until they are at an age when she sees the benefits as outweighing the risks. She believes that concerns about such an approach – such as not being able to track or contact your kid at all times – are overstated.
“It’s not probably going to be very dangerous for a child to walk from the middle school to Starbucks in the town of Chappaqua,” she explains. “It’s way more dangerous for them to be online and get connected to some sort of predator.”
“You’re kind of taking away from your kid the ability to build interpersonal skills and critical thinking skills,” she adds. “When we were growing up, we didn’t have a phone.”
But for parents who want to be able to reach their children without their kids having access to social media and the online world’s myriad evils, there are options like a “dumbphone” with basic functions like text messaging, a calculator, and an alarm.
Cohen, Goldman, and Kornblau all see support for their cause growing. Chappaqua’s chapter of OK to Delay has more than 400 subscribers, and Cohen believes the statewide cell phone ban has helped. The Armonk has a 1,000 person distribution list, and 110 local families have pledged to wait until at least eighth grade for social media or smartphones through the organization’s website, oktodelayarmonk.org.
“There is a good deal of momentum around this issue all around the country,” notes Kornblau. “It is very high on the list of topics of conversation among parents of kids from eight to fifteen. It’s one of the hardest things that I think our generation of parents is dealing with.”
In the longer term, the organizers hope to do more than expanding their organization. Cohen and Kornblau each have younger children still in elementary school.
“Our goal is that by the time those kids are going into middle school, they don’t even need OK to Delay anymore,” Cohen says. “This is like a topic of the past. That’s a goal for me.”
