A Phone-Free Push: New Jersey Parents Rebuild Childhood Independence

Seven-year-old Molly Moscatiello began riding her bike to first grade on her own last year and, by the end of the school year, was leading a small cohort of classmates who chose to travel together without adult chauffeurs. Her experience is part of a growing, parent-led effort in Little Silver, N.J., to limit children's phone use and rebuild local infrastructure and routines that support independence.

Molly said she was nervous the first few times—“I had to look both ways like five times,” she recalled—but quickly grew comfortable riding solo, declining offers of rides from passing adults who recognized her. By the end of first grade, five or six children routinely biked together. Such scenes are striking in the contemporary United States, where only about one in 10 children walk or bike to school.

The community initiative is anchored by The Balance Project, a parent-run nonprofit founded by Molly’s mother, Holly Moscatiello. The organization describes its mission as rebuilding neighborhoods and routines to encourage childhood independence and reduce reliance on screens and phones. Its efforts reflect a broader countermovement among some parents and community organizers who say children’s daily lives have become overly technologized.

Organizers and participating families frame the work as restoring ordinary freedoms that were more common two decades ago, when walking or biking to school was typical for many children. They say the aim is not only to limit device time but also to reestablish local practices—such as independent travel and unsupervised play—that proponents link to practical skills and peer-led social development.

The movement involves local coordination among parents and neighbors to identify safe routes, create informal cohorts of children who travel together and normalize nonmotorized trips to school. Advocates emphasize gradual steps: helping younger children build confidence on short trips, coordinating consistent travel partners and relying on community awareness rather than formal supervision.

Critics and some safety advocates note that declines in child independence have multiple causes, including changes in traffic patterns, school consolidation, and parental concerns about safety. Advocates for increased independence counter that community design and social habits can be adjusted to reduce those barriers and that providing structured pathways for children to practice independent travel can be part of public- and private-sector responses.

Families involved in the Balance Project say practical outcomes have been immediate: children report increased confidence and parents report reduced screen time and fewer short car trips. Organizers characterize the effort as incremental and community-driven rather than prescriptive, emphasizing local norms and neighborhood engagement.

As the project grows in Little Silver and in other communities where similar efforts have appeared, participants say their work is aimed at small, sustainable changes to daily life—encouraging kids to navigate familiar routes on their own, to build peer networks independent of adult direction, and to moderate the place of devices in childhood routines. Whether such local experiments will prompt broader shifts in American patterns of school travel and device use remains an open question for parents, planners and policymakers.