In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from social media. The legislation passed with bipartisan support. It was not a fringe position — it reflected something parents had been feeling for years before the law caught up.
Screen time research had been building in that direction for a long time. Jean Twenge's work in the US, repeated in Australian context by researchers at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, pointed consistently in one direction: the more time children spend in front of screens — particularly social and entertainment screens — the worse the outcomes across sleep, attention, and social development.
The problem is that "phones" and "screens" have become the same thing. Every children's phone on the market in 2025 has a display. Many have internet access. Some have cameras. Even the ones marketed as "safe" or "dumb" carry a screen — and a screen is the entry point to everything else.
Parents asking for a screen-free phone are not asking for something unreasonable. They want their child to be able to call home, call a grandparent, tell mum they arrived safely at a friend's place — without handing them a portal to the internet. Until recently, that product did not exist in Australia.
The Wait Mate movement — an Australian campaign for delaying smartphone access — has given this conversation a name. Thousands of Australian families have signed pledges to keep smartphones out of their children's hands until secondary school. A screen-free WiFi home phone is the practical solution that sits between "no device at all" and "a smartphone."