📵 Delaying Smartphones Together: Becca Hurley and Unplugged Canada in Kingston

“Everyone else has one 😠”

If you are raising kids right now, you have heard it. Maybe it came after a birthday party where your kid was the only one not filming. Maybe it came when a group chat swallowed the weekend plans and your kid heard about the sleepover on Monday. The words always arrive with the same quiet force, and the hardest part is that your kid is not really exaggerating.

So you say no, and it feels lonely. You wonder whether you are protecting your kid or simply making them the odd one out. The other parents at pickup seem to have made their peace with it, so you keep the worry to yourself.

A lot of them are keeping the same worry to themselves.

Becca Hurley is a Kingston elementary school teacher and parent who leads the Kingston chapter of Unplugged Canada, a national parent-led organization that asks families to delay a child's first smartphone until at least age 14. She is looking for the other Kingston parents who have quietly been saying no, and her whole pitch is that none of them should have to say it alone.

Unplugged Canada asks parents to sign a pledge promising not to give their child a smartphone until at least age 14.

What lifts it above a New Year's resolution is what happens after you sign. Parents name their child's school and grade, Hurley told Kingstonist, and once five families in the same grade at the same school have signed, the pledge activates and those parents can find one another.

Which turns a private decision into a shared one. You stop being the household that said no and become one of five, and your kid stops being the only one without a phone and becomes one of five as well.

Unplugged Canada was founded in Vancouver in 2024 by Jenny Perez, and more than 11,000 pledges have since been signed across the country. The pledge is endorsed by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario, and Unplugged Canada lists the Canadian Paediatric Society's Centre for Healthy Screen Use, the SickKids Foundation, the Canadian Medical Association and the Institute of Child Psychology among its supporters.

Kingstonist covered the Kingston chapter's launch in a thorough piece by Emily Wright, with the research behind the movement and comment from a developmental psychologist at Queen's. If you want the fuller background, start there.

Most people arguing about kids and phones are working from one vantage point. Hurley has two.

The detail that tends to stop parents cold is how young it starts. Teaching a Grade 3 class, Hurley asked how many of her seven- and eight-year-olds had a phone of their own, and roughly half the room put up a hand, she told Kingstonist. Plenty of those were hand-me-downs running on wifi with no data plan, which is exactly why the parents who passed them down did not experience it as a decision at all.

She is not out on a limb here. In June 2026, Canada's chief medical officers of health, one from every province and territory alongside the Chief Public Health Officer, jointly issued a position statement on digital culture and child and youth well-being. Their stance, in their own words:

Which is roughly where a Kingston teacher had already landed, from the front of her own classroom.

Her own turning point was a book. Hurley read Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, and she told Kingston Spotlight that as a mom of two young boys she knew she wanted to take action to create change for her kids' future. She came across Unplugged Canada in February 2026, got in touch with founder Jenny Perez about starting something in Kingston, and Perez connected her with Angie Clark, a former Kingstonian who is executive director of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, Kingstonist reported.

Becca Hurley grew up on Wolfe Island, and she told Kingston Spotlight that community and nature are two things she has valued her entire life.

Anyone who has spent time out there will recognize the shape of that childhood. The ferry sets the rhythm of the day. The place is small enough that the adults know whose kid you are before you have finished saying your name. And a good deal of what there is to do, you and your friends have to invent yourselves, outdoors, in whatever the weather happens to be doing.

Hurley is not asking Kingston parents to recreate an island childhood, which would be a tough sell on Princess Street on a Tuesday. She is after something smaller than that. She wants kids to get the years before 14 back, the boredom that turns into a fort, the friendships built in person because there is no other option, the long afternoons nobody is recording.

The pledge is trying to give parents something from that island too. Where everybody knows everybody, no one has to hold out on their own, because you can see what the other families are doing. A city does not hand you that for free. It has to be built on purpose, and building it is what Hurley has set out to do.

This is where most parents stall. Saying no is hard enough on its own. Then there are the hours it leaves behind, and those get considerably harder in February.

Hurley's own family answer is reassuringly ordinary. She told Kingston Spotlight that her family is at the Calvin Park branch of the library most weeks, and that they walk at Lemoine Point and Little Cataraqui Creek Conservation Area, where her boys like feeding the birds.

That library habit produced something small and enormous. Hurley's ten year old had a book on hold, and his first mission of independence, as she puts it, was walking in, finding it on the shelf and checking it out by himself while she waited in the car. No phone was involved, and none was needed.

None of that needs a plan, a big budget, or a free Saturday you do not have. An unplugged childhood in Kingston turns out not to be a program you sign up for. It is mostly the town you already live in, used a little more deliberately.

There is also a practical answer to the question every parent asks next, which is how their kid is supposed to reach anyone. Unplugged Canada's Operation Landline guide makes the case for bringing back the family phone, and points out you do not need copper wires to have one, since internet home phones are cheap. It comes with a pleasingly old-fashioned exercise: make a paper phone book with your child, teach them to file names alphabetically, and swap numbers with friends and family. For kids who need to reach you when they are out, the organization keeps a list of smartphone alternatives, from talk-and-text flip phones to GPS-enabled messengers.

The kids sort out most of the rest themselves. Hurley told Kingstonist that children without phones fill the space on their own, through play, creativity, hobbies, connections with the people who live nearby, and a kind of independence that has become rare.

Unplugged Canada calls the community it is building judgement-free. It has to include the parents who already said yes.

Plenty of parents reading this have already handed over a phone. Some because a grandparent turned up with one at Christmas. Some because family life runs across two houses and it was the simplest way to stay in touch. Some because they were worn down on a weeknight and did not have another no left in them. None of that disqualifies anybody. Hurley is a teacher, not a prosecutor, and the pledge is about what happens next rather than what already happened.

Mostly, what she is doing is looking for people. She described it to us as a treasure hunt, which is a cheerful way to put what is mostly reaching out to strangers and hoping. Hurley has put out a call for Kingston area parents to come and talk it over with her over coffee, with no commitment beyond turning up, and she would also like to hear from local businesses willing to host an event.

She also keeps a private Facebook group for Kingston area parents who want to follow along, ask a question, or just see who else is out there before committing to anything. Being private, you request to join rather than just walking in, which is part of why it is a comfortable place to ask the awkward questions.

If any of that sounds like you, you are exactly who she has been looking for.

We asked Becca which local places she would point a reader toward. Two came back:

Pedal Works Café & Studios sits on Princess Street and is part café, part Spinning studio, part art gallery, founded by Martha Williams, with local artwork on the walls and a corner set up for kids. The Offline Club is exactly what it sounds like. Kingston Artist Events runs a single calendar of local markets, studio sales and maker events, which is the thing that usually stops people going.

Add the library branch and the two conservation areas and a pattern turns up. Every place on Becca's list is somewhere people show up in person and end up talking to each other, which is the argument she has been making all along.