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Molly Moscatiello, age 7, started riding her bike to first grade last year. There’s a crosswalk with no crossing guard, “and I had to look both ways like five times,” she says, two grown-up teeth peeking through the gap in the front of her smile. Sometimes her parents’ friends would drive past and ask if Molly needed a ride, but she’d always wave them off. “I felt a little nervous at first,” she says. “But then after a while I felt comfortable by myself.” Soon, other kids began asking to ride their bikes to school. By the end of first grade, Molly was leading a small cohort of five or six, riding to school together in Little Silver, N.J.
One day in July, Moscatiello drove me around Little Silver, an affluent suburb a little over an hour from New York City, to show me what she meant. It’s a small community full of elegant homes with big garages and lush lawns and streets with few sidewalks. Kids here spend much of their childhood getting shuttled around in the back of their parents’ car; even if there were places for them to go on their own, there aren't many ways for them to get there. Because Little Silver is what Moscatiello calls a “cut-through” suburb, with county roads that the town doesn’t control, the community can’t easily construct new bike lanes. So parents from the Balance Project navigated the town on their bikes, mapped out the crossing guards, speed limits, crosswalks, and sidewalks, and then distributed maps to parents so they could determine the optimal bike routes for their kids. They’re also starting a bike-buddy program, so kids can bike to school together.
Biking is just one way that the Balance Project is aiming to make Little Silver a place where kids can be independent. At Point Road, a public elementary school, Moscatiello points to a patch of dirt near the playground. “We want to optimize that into a natural play space,” she says, adding that the group is planning to collaborate with Sticks & Sprouts, a local organization that hosts outdoor classes to encourage unstructured play. We drive to the Markham Place middle school, where she shows me a playground that looks more suited for preschoolers than preteens, with plastic dinosaurs and small slides. “Our hope is to create a plan to make it teen friendly,” she says. “A third space.” By the time her own daughters are in middle school, Moscatiello hopes they can hang out here with their friends instead of being home on their devices.
After our tour, Moscatiello takes me to an Italian restaurant with her husband Ryan and their friend Tori Finnegan, a nurse and mother of three who is also active in the Balance Project. Finnegan’s three children are 8, 6, and 3. Before the Balance Project, she says, “I never made the connection that independence leads to resilience and confidence.” Now, she has her kids make their own school lunches, ride their bikes to school and to playdates, and take care of their siblings. Soon she’ll let her 8-year-old go to the store alone. Seeing other kids being independent gives parents permission to do the same with their own children, Finnegan says: “People act like the people they surround themselves with.”
At the next table, a family is eating dinner: two parents, one small boy in a high chair. All three of them spend the meal on their phones. “Devices are such an easy tool,” says Ryan. “We’re trying to give people other parenting tools to replace them.” To that end, the Balance Project has created what it calls “Balance Boxes”—a little cardboard box full of mini cars, crayons, Rubik's cubes, and clay that families can bring out to dinner to entertain kids in lieu of screens.
Still, Moscatiello knows no amount of bike-riding or mud play or crayons at a restaurant will be enough to combat Big Tech’s transformation of American childhood. That’s why she feels so much urgency. “We have to do this now. While our kids are young. We can’t wait for everyone to catch up,” she says. “Because no matter how fast this moves, no matter how quickly legislation happens, it won’t be soon enough to protect my children.”
In Nov. 2024, Moscatiello invited six other parents in Little Silver to her home to discuss the problem. Later that month, that small group hosted a kickoff meeting for the broader community. They expected around 20 people might come. Sixty showed up. “There was a collective sense of: there’s a problem,” Moscatiello recalls, “but what do we do about it?” The answer, the parents decided, is as much cultural as it is technological. The group agreed to advocate for device-free schools, delay buying phones for their kids for as long as possible, and restrict social media until late adolescence. But they also realized they can’t raise their children in an entirely tech-free world.
So instead of railing against technology, they’re focused on making the physical world as accessible and appealing as possible. “We envision a future where a healthy balance between real life and technology is the norm,” Moscatiello says. The group believes that 25% is a kind of community tipping point: if they can get a quarter of families to reduce devices and a quarter of kids to play outside, then others will follow. Protecting her own kids, Moscatiello thinks, isn’t just about monitoring their screen time. It’s about building an analog community that can compete with the digital one.
In a way, the parents in the Balance Project are on a mission to rebuild the phone-free communities they had growing up. “We had an analog childhood and a digital late-adolescence,” says Moscatiello. “We have to preserve what we had before. If we don’t do it, who will?” She says that 60 other Balance Project groups have formed around the country, everywhere from Arizona to Georgia to Oregon.
The Balance Project is lobbying their local school district to enforce their device-free policy by banning smartwatches during school. They’re pushing their school board for more outdoor recess, asking them to reduce recreational screen time at school, and want to walk back pandemic-era screen reliance during class. They’re planning to “keep showing up to board meetings and keep asking questions” says Moscatiello.
The Balance Project also draws heavily on the philosophy of Let Grow, a national non-profit promoting childhood independence. When she first pioneered the idea of “free range” parenting in 2009, Let Grow President Lenore Skenazy got fearful feedback from other parents. What if kids are abducted when they’re walking alone around the neighborhood? But in recent years, Skenazy says, something has changed. “It’s not that that fear has abated, it’s that other fears have superseded it,” she says. “And one of those is our children's mental health.”
Kids desperately want to be able to explore and play without adults micromanaging them, Skenazy says. They gravitate towards devices, she argues, because they’re not allowed to roam freely in real life. “The only place where they have freedom to meet, to play, to joke around without adults watching every move and intervening and suggesting and helping,” Skenazy says, “is online.”
In a March Harris survey of more than 500 children aged 8 to 12, most of the respondents said they used smartphones, and about half of the 10- to 12-year-olds said most or all of their friends were on social media. But fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds said they’d been down a grocery-store aisle on their own. More than a quarter said they aren’t allowed to play by themselves in their own yard.
And even if they’re spending much of their time online, kids don’t necessarily want it that way. Most prefer to play outside with their friends. Nearly half the children told researchers that unstructured play with their friends was their favorite way to spend their time, while 30% said they preferred an organized activity, like soccer practice. Only 25% said they wanted to be online. Three-quarters of kids surveyed said they would spend less time online if there were more kids to play with in their neighborhood. “If you don’t want your kids going online,” says Skenazy, “they have to go back to going outside.”
Let Grow promotes several different ways to build kids’ independence, usually through schools. The Let Grow Experience is a homework assignment requiring kids to go home and do something new on their own, with their parents’ permission but without their parents. The Let Grow Play Club is an after-school program in which schools stay open for kids of all ages, offering free play without devices. There’s an adult present, but they’re like a lifeguard; they can help if there’s a serious emergency, but they’re not there to organize games or resolve spats. Across the country, Skenazy says, roughly 1,260 schools have implemented at least one of these programs.
After our dinner at the Italian restaurant, Moscatiello drove me to a Balance Project meeting, which was held in the pool house of a luxurious home, decorated with snowshoes and taxidermy. About 30 moms (and two dads) gathered in a blur of white linen, wide-legged jeans, and woven sandals. As they waited for Moscatiello to begin the meeting, they snacked on cut fruit and chocolate-chip cookies and compared notes on which of their children had gone to play with the others, and how far they’d biked on their own. Most of them have kids under 10; almost all have so far refused to give their children their own devices.
Then the parents split into a handful of “working groups.” The one I sat in on discusses the pros and cons of asking parents to sign a “phone pact.”
“It’s a little culty,” says one mom. “Maybe there’s a different word than ‘pact?’ ‘Pledge?’ ‘Plan?’” says another.
One mother of a 6-year-old notes her daughter was distraught at being the only one of her friends without a smartwatch. “She says, “X has it, X has it, X has it, and they’re all using it to text, and I’m being left out,” the mom says. “It was like a dagger to my heart. I was like: you’re 6.”
It’s no coincidence that most of the parents in the Balance Project have kids around Molly Moscatiello’s age: young enough that governing technology uses is still a question of prevention, not active management. The challenge, says Holly Moscatiello, is with the parents of older kids, who may have already given in. “There’s this divide between if you’ve given technology already or you haven’t,” she says. “And if you’ve already done it, there’s this guilt and anxiety.” The parents of older kids, she says, are often either “hold-outs or help-mes.”
For now, Molly is happy being a free range, mostly screen-free kid. She has a library card, so sometimes she stops on the way home to pick up a new Babysitters Club book. Her next adventure will be to go to a store by herself. She wants to bike to the bagel shop, and buy herself an everything bagel with cream cheese. And when school begins again, she’ll have a new member of her bike posse; her younger sister Ruby, who will be biking to kindergarten.
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