We want our kids to be reachable. We want them to navigate safely, be able to communicate with their friends, call home, listen to music, and when old enough, catch an Uber when necessary. What we don’t want is to hand them a slot machine connected to the entire internet.

For a long time, I assumed there was no way to achieve this without constant policing, complicated parental controls or endless fights about screen time. Then I discovered there was.

Two years ago I read an article by Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic about the impact of smartphones on childhood. I was stunned by the research he had gathered and blown away by how clearly he explained a problem many of us have felt in our bones but struggled to articulate.

Since then, I’ve become increasingly intentional about low phone use within our family, our friendship circles, and our kids’ schools. Not because I’m anti-technology. Quite the opposite.

I love technology. I build technology companies and I appreciate how useful modern devices can be. But I’ve also become convinced that social media and frictionless internet access during childhood does far more bad than it does good.

Why Friction Matters

One of the great problems with modern technology is not simply what it allows, but how frictionless it has become. Every temptation is one tap away, every moment of boredom is solved by stimulation, every parental boundary is designed to be negotiated, bypassed, or disabled.

We tend to think convenience is always good. But when it comes to childhood and technology, convenience is often the problem. I’ve come to believe that good childhood environments should contain intentional friction.

Friction slows things down and creates pauses. Friction gives values time to surface before impulses take over.

The modern smartphone ecosystem is engineered to remove friction. What I discovered is that Apple accidentally created a way to put some of it back.

Bringing Back the Home Phone

Some time back, I started chatting with a friend about reintroducing a home phone.

We thought: wouldn’t it be great to have a simple family phone again? A phone where our kids could call their grandparents and their friends, build the confidence to say, “Hi Mrs Grey, please may I speak to Ben?”, and rediscover the art of actual conversation.

There was something socially healthy about the old home phone. Kids had to speak to adults. They had to introduce themselves, tolerate awkwardness and they had to learn to wait. Modern communication has removed almost all of that friction.

About a year ago, we tried reviving the idea by buying a Nokia 3310.

It lay unused in a drawer, ran out of battery, disappeared under papers somewhere in the house, and when we eventually found it again, none of us could remember how to load airtime. Our dumb phone experiment went nowhere.

The truth is that while many of us are uneasy about smartphones, we’ve also become deeply dependent on the genuinely useful tools they provide like maps, messaging, music, transport, navigation.

We didn’t want to go backwards. We wanted something more intentional.

Discovering a Middle Ground

Then I read a blog post by a developer in the US who was trying to reduce his own distractions.

He started by buying a dumb phone but soon realised he still wanted some modern conveniences like Uber, Google Maps, Spotify and Strava.

What he didn’t want was the infinite pull of the internet. Not because he lacked self-control, but because modern systems are explicitly designed to erode it.

Even if you don’t install social media apps, they remain permanently nearby with many accessible through Safari and all re-installable from the App Store during moments of weakness.

That’s when he discovered something surprising. Buried inside Apple’s ecosystem is a tool called Apple Configurator. It’s the software Apple uses to manage their display devices in their stores and the tool companies use to manage their company-owned iPhones and iPads.

And hidden inside it is the ability to decide exactly how you want to configure your iPhone, remove or restrict the web browser, remove the app store and then lock it down with no need for parental controls. When I realised this was possible, it felt like a breakthrough.

Giving my kids an iPhone that allows them access to the tools I'm happy for them to use without needing to police their device use and without the risk of them taking an offramp into the bowels of the internet, I realised, might finally be the middle ground many parents have been searching for.

A Smartphone Without access to the whole Internet

Using Apple Configurator, you can create an iPhone that still behaves like a useful modern device without behaving like an always-open portal to the internet.

For example, you could allow calls, messages, Spotify, Uber, Google Maps, WhatsApp… and nothing else. No infinite scroll. No algorithmic rabbit holes. No “just one more thing”. You can even disable the camera if you feel that's important — something I know a number of boarding school principals wish for.

One of my favourite examples is how we configured Google access for our son. He likes checking football and Formula 1 results, so we allow access to Google search itself. He can look things up, check scores, and satisfy his curiosity.

But the internet effectively dead-ends there. Every external link goes nowhere and he is unable to follow links down the endless internet rabbit holes we have all found ourselves in.

His curiosity remains, but his compulsion to click the next thing does not.

Why This Feels Different

Even as a fairly technical person, I’ve always found traditional parental controls exhausting. Most parental controls feel like temporary fences around a system fundamentally designed to defeat us.

There are passcodes, loopholes, “just five more minutes”, requests to install apps, hidden browsers, reinstall cycles and endless negotiations that turn us into referees instead of parents. The whole parental control thing starts to feel adversarial.

This solution strikes me as fundamentally different. Instead of constantly policing behaviour, you simplify the environment itself, helping reduce the temptation and changing the relationship our kids have with the device.

The Unexpected Power of Inconvenience

Ironically, the best thing about this setup is that it’s inconvenient.

If someone wants to install a new app, they can’t simply tap a button and ask mom. The phone has to be physically connected to a Mac. Settings need to be changed deliberately. Restrictions need to be removed and then reapplied. And that friction is precisely what makes this system powerful.

There is no quick override, no impulsive “fine, just this once” response and no quick four digit code to give in to our kids' requests.

The setup introduces deliberate pauses into a system otherwise designed for instant gratification. And in our family, this has turned out to be a feature rather than a flaw.

I’ve come to think that many of the problems surrounding kids and technology are actually problems of frictionless design. The internet never ends, the algorithms never tire and the entertainment never pauses. There is no natural stopping point. Much of the modern internet is built around capturing and retaining attention.

Perhaps what children need is not complete technological abstinence, but digital environments with natural stopping points built into them, stopping points that are not enforced by timers, parental policing, or endless negotiations, but by the environment itself.

Final Thoughts

What I like most about this setup is that it changes the role the phone plays in our family. The phone stops behaving like an endless destination in itself and starts behaving more like a useful tool. It's a way to communicate, organise, navigate or listen to music.

The internet no longer sits in the centre of every spare moment, constantly pulling our kids towards the next thing.

And in a world increasingly designed to remove every form of friction in order to keep us engaged and scrolling, I’ve come to believe that introducing a little friction back into our kids’ childhoods may be exactly what we should be introducing into their lives so they put down their devices and go outside to play, together.

Remember, the friction is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Here are the steps to setup your own iPhone in this way.