A PA Unplugged Public Health Announcement

Slow Tech Your Life

Five steps to take back your family's time, attention, and connection.

Step 1 · You

It starts with technoference

Technoference:when technology gets in the way of crucial interpersonal relations and engagement. The buzz mid-conversation. The scroll at the playground. The email at dinner. It's real enough that the term appears in the glossary of the 2026 U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on the harms of screen use.

Kids feel it, and now research measures it. A 2026 study of 600 U.S. adolescents, “Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?”, found that the more device-distracted teens perceived their parents to be, the less secure their attachment to those parents — the bond that carries kids through adolescence.

Slow tech starts with the adult in the room, because kids do what we do, not what we say. We know how hard it is for usto manage our phones — they're addictive by design — so no willpower lecture here. Instead: audit yourself. Check your screen time report. Notice the moments your phone pulls you out of. Then work the next four steps, for yourself first and your kids second.

Step 2 · Your Device

Make it boring, then unpack it

Three settings changes today:

Turn off notifications and vibrations for everything that isn't a human.
Grayscale. A phone without color is a tool, not a slot machine.
Delete ALL social media, games, and gambling. If it's engineered to keep you, it goes.

Need reinforcements? App blockers with teeth: Brick physically locks apps behind a device on your wall, and Opal and Foqos schedule access so the decision is made once, not two hundred times a day.

Then unpack your phone. Tech companies spent two decades packing every tool you own into one glowing rectangle. Take them back out and fill your home with analog alternatives — each one does its job and lets you go:

Unpack your phone: a smartphone showing 'nothing to see here' surrounded by its analog replacements — wall clock, alarm clock, records and CDs, landline, camera, atlas and maps, wallet, reference books, print, day planner, and calculator. — Tap to view full size

Read the list as text

Wall clock
Glance up in any room and just know the time. No unlocking, no notifications, no twenty minutes gone.
Alarm clock
The old-school kind wakes you up without also handing you the entire internet at 6 a.m.
Records & CDs
The stereo, a stack of records and that old MP3 player play a whole album start to finish. No buffering.
Landline
Start a landline pod with the neighbors. Rings once, connects instantly, follows you nowhere.
Camera
That digital camera in the drawer is cool again. Point, shoot, and it won't ping you once.
Atlas & maps
A map, a globe and an atlas show you the whole world — and you'll actually remember the way.
Reference books
A dictionary, thesaurus and a shelf of nonfiction answer almost anything. No rabbit hole attached.
Print
Subscribe to a magazine or the paper. It arrives, you read it, it ends. Imagine that.
Day planner
A paper or dry-erase calendar keeps the whole week in view, right where you left it.
Calculator
Split the check, do the math and drop it back in the drawer. The battery lasts about a decade.
Wallet
Cash, cards and the important little things ride in one slim place that never needs charging.

Step 3 · Your Setting

Decide where devices live

Rules about places beat rules about minutes. Pick your device-free spaces and times, write them down, and apply them to everyone — parents included. A charging station by the front door does more than any willpower:

Device-free bedrooms
Device-free meals
Device-free zones
Device-free viewing
Device use in common areas only
Device hours of operation
Device-free kid playdates
Device-free tween & teen hangouts

The two with the biggest payoff: bedrooms (sleep is the foundation of everything else) and meals (the most reliable daily dose of conversation a family gets).

Step 4 · Your Surroundings

Reclaim the in-between moments

The phone's favorite territory is the in-between: the wait, the ride, the line. Those moments used to hold daydreaming, small talk, and watching your kid's whole game. Take them back, phone in pocket or better yet in the car:

In the car
Waiting rooms
The bathroom
Exercise
Family walks & outings
Your kids' games and activities

Step 5 · Your Actions

Fill the space with real life

Slow tech isn't about subtraction — it's about what the empty space fills up with. This is the payoff step, and for kids it's non-negotiable: no iPad kids. A tablet is the lowest-friction babysitter ever invented, and every hour on it is an hour not spent here:

Imagination

Free play, boredom, and made-up games. Boredom is not an emergency — it's where imagination comes from.

Outdoors

Be outside. No screen competes well with a creek.

Responsibility

Chores, cooking, errands, a paper route. Real jobs build real confidence.

Conversation

Talk at the table, in the car, before bed. The skill of childhood is learned by doing.

Reading

Paper books, library cards, magazines. Deep reading is the original slow tech.

All five steps on one page

Print it, stick it on the fridge, hand it to a friend. The Surgeon General's advisory recommends the same playbook — its "5 Ds" (Discuss, Do, Delay, Divert, Disconnect) map right onto these steps.

Download the one-pager (PDF)

The Big One

Delay smartphones

The single biggest slow-tech decision a family makes is when the smartphone arrives. By age 11, most American kids already have one. Many are exposed to adult content by middle school, and teens receive up to 200 notifications a day. The 2026 Surgeon General's advisory reports that children who got their first smartphone between ages 12 and 13 were more likely to show clinically significant mental health problems by 13 than peers who didn't yet have one. Four reasons more and more families are choosing to wait:

Brain Development

The prefrontal cortex — responsible for impulse control, decision-making, and long-term thinking — doesn't fully develop until the mid-twenties. Smartphones flood young brains with dopamine-driven stimuli during critical developmental years.

Mental Health

Research from Sapien Labs found that the later a child receives a smartphone, the better their mental health is as a young adult.

Social Development

Kids need face-to-face interaction to develop empathy, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. Smartphones replace real-world social learning with curated, filtered, often toxic digital interactions.

Safety

Smartphones give children unfiltered access to the entire internet — predatory contact, explicit content, cyberbullying, and addictive apps. A basic phone keeps kids reachable without these risks.

The number one reason parents give in? "All the other kids have one." It's a collective action problem, and that's exactly why the PA Unplugged Commitment exists: delay smartphones until at least 9th grade and social media until at least 16, together. It takes just a handful of families to create a new default. And staying reachable doesn't require a smartphone — basic phones, smartwatches, and kid-friendly landlines like PA-born Ring Ring Club and MyPhone by Ooma keep kids connected without the internet in their pocket. See Alternative Devices and the Gift Guide.

Talking About It

How to talk to your kids (and other parents)

With your child. Keep the tone kind and clear. Let them know they're not alone. You might say something like:

"Phones are designed to be addictive, even for adults. My brain is fully developed, and I still struggle to put mine down. Your brain is still growing, and I want to protect it. This isn't just about you — it's true for every kid. I love you too much to give you something I know could harm you right now."

With other parents.You don't need to convince anyone. Just be honest about what your family is doing and why. Many parents are relieved to hear they're not the only ones thinking about this. A simple "We decided to wait — want to hear why?" can open the door to a real conversation.

Beyond Your Front Door