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Dear Leaders, As we skip, crawl, or perhaps drag ourselves towards the end of Term Two, those of us at Smartphone Free Childhood New Zealand have been reflecting on an issue that parents are increasingly raising with us: the use of smartphones around children in spaces that should be focused on their care, safety and development. Many of you will have seen reports from the UK of a school photograph being manipulated using artificial intelligence to create explicit deepfake im

Leaders today are judged not just by what they do, but by how clearly they think and how present they are. Constant connectivity has quietly eroded both. This post reframes smartphone habits as a leadership issue and offers a practical experiment and simple rules you can adopt to protect your attention and improve performance. The problem: fragmented attention undermines judgement Smartphones aren’t neutral tools. They’re engineered to capture attention, and that constant low

We’ll look back on kids with smartphones the way we now see smoking around them

What type of screen parent are you?

For every dumb phone sale TDT donates 5% to SFCNZ. Check out their website at www.tonedowntech.co.nz Delay kids' smartphone access as...

Vanessa McHardy, Child Wellbeing and Mental Health Specialist, explores how digital exposure fuels anxiety in kids and offers strategies.