This town is raising kids like it’s 1996, and they’ve never been happier

In Kiama, a seaside town on the New South Wales coast, an unusual experiment in community life is gathering pace. It isn’t powered by apps, dashboards, or public grants. It’s powered by people—parents, shopkeepers, teens, and grandparents—who show up to shared spaces and put their phones away. The initiative is called Kiama Unplugged, and its premise is deliberately simple: host regular, phone-free gatherings for kids and adults, supply low-tech ways to connect—pianos, board games, craft tables, outdoor play—and let culture, not lectures, do the heavy lifting.

The catalyst was a familiar worry. Jane Bourne and her partner, Ian Harvey-George, watched smartphones bleed into every corner of childhood and asked if a town could make opting out easy. Their answer began with a handful of community events and a clear expectation at the door: pocket the phone. Kiama Unplugged’s “About” page states the purpose plainly—give children and teens “a childhood back,” prioritizing free play and real-world connection over endless scroll.

Local reporting captured the early response: parents cried with relief at the first sessions; tweens who arrived skeptical stayed longer than planned; businesses offered venues; and momentum built. Region Illawarra’s coverage described it as an effort to help families “disconnect to reconnect,” sparked by mounting concerns over social media and youth mental health. The piece also placed names and faces to the movement, detailing how Bourne and Harvey-George structured the early gatherings and why the tone was deliberately invitational rather than punitive.

The rhythm of Kiama Unplugged is now visible across the town’s public listings: weekend afternoons where kids drift between art tables and outdoor games; board-game sessions hosted in a café; and a community piano placed to invite anyone to play. The group also runs Unplugged After Dark—phone-free evenings for adults—to normalize presence for the grown-ups who model these habits. Event pages and local outlets show the dates, hosts, and the small fee structure that keeps the lights on. The Bugle reported on the debut After Dark night at Cin Cin Wine Bar; an Eventbrite listing shows how the experiment moved from one-off novelty to a repeating fixture on Kiama’s social calendar.

National media eventually took notice. The Daily Telegraph profiled Kiama as a town “taking kids back to the 90s,” spotlighting the phone-free gatherings and the back-to-basics activities that make the concept feel less like a crackdown and more like a community invitation. The hook is nostalgia, but the implementation details—recurring times, mixed-age play, a piano anyone can touch—explain why families return.

Behind the feel-good scenes sits a serious debate that extends far beyond one town: what does the science say about early smartphone ownership? Here, the most relevant root source isn’t an opinion piece or a compilation of small studies—it’s a peer-reviewed paper published in Pediatrics on December 1, 2025. Researchers analyzed data from 10,588 U.S. participants in the NIH-funded Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study and found that owning a smartphone at age 12 was associated with higher odds of depression, obesity, and insufficient sleep in early adolescence. Importantly, these associations held even after accounting for other device ownership, suggesting a unique risk profile for smartphones. The median age of first phone was 11. The study is correlational, not causal, but it directly addresses the question many families ask: does when a child gets a phone matter? The authors’ answer: earlier seems riskier.

Professional summaries from health institutions reinforce the key points. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ news arm highlighted the same associations and cautions, framing smartphones as gateways to digital environments for which many preteens may not be developmentally ready. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—home to the study’s lead author—issued its own explainer underscoring that earlier age of acquisition tracked with additional risks for obesity and poor sleep among those who already owned phones. These roundups do not replace the paper; they translate it for parents and policymakers.

With that scientific context, Kiama Unplugged reads less like a nostalgia project and more like a community-level implementation strategy. It doesn’t vilify technology; it builds frictionless alternatives—places where kids want to be and where parents feel supported in holding the line. If the Pediatrics data suggest that delaying smartphone ownership and protecting sleep are prudent, Kiama offers a practical “how”: fill afternoons and evenings with offline options, make the norms social, and repeat them until they’re expected.

The local press has been meticulous in recording the civic texture behind the scenes. The Bugle described how the founders’ longstanding community ties helped knit together venues and volunteers, turning small steps into a “region-wide movement to create a wider sense of community connection.” Coverage also notes that the programming extends beyond kids: adults get their own phone-free nights, which matters because attention is modeled as much as it’s taught. A Region Illawarra feature, meanwhile, documented parents’ emotional reactions to spaces where the “everybody else has a phone” pressure disappears at the door.

Critically, the Kiama story is not an outlier. Other communities have sought structural ways to reduce the social cost of opting out. In Greystones, Ireland, a coalition of primary schools and parent associations created a voluntary “no-smartphone” code for primary-age children in 2023; Irish national guidance later encouraged similar delays. The tactic is different—a pledge rather than a program—but the logic is the same: shrink the fear of social exclusion by moving together. Those precedents help explain why a town like Kiama could gain traction quickly; families elsewhere have already signaled demand for collective guardrails.

What makes Kiama’s approach feel “like it’s 1996” isn’t a fetish for the past; it’s the restoration of ingredients that once came standard: unstructured time, mixed-age play, and adults who are mentally present. The community piano symbolizes this perfectly. When a public instrument sits in a shared space, passersby become participants; a shy child can work out a two-hand piece in the open; strangers duet; a toddler dances off-beat; a teenager teaches a chord progression. Those micro-moments don’t announce themselves as developmental milestones, but they stitch together the social fabric that screens often fray. Kiama Unplugged’s events calendar shows these opportunities appearing with the regularity that habits require.

For parents weighing practicalities, two themes recur in both the research and reporting. First, sleep: the Pediatrics study emphasizes insufficient sleep as a key association with earlier phone ownership. Families don’t need a lab to know that phones in bedrooms compete with rest; community-led programming that fills the evening helps keep devices out of reach when it matters. Second, belonging: kids accept constraints more readily when peers share them. At Kiama events, no one is the “only one” without a phone out, because the norm is collective. That social reframing may be the most potent intervention of all.

A small personal note: more than tactics or headlines, the most compelling detail is how ordinary the scenes sound—card decks shuffling at a café table, a clatter of chess pieces, a wrong note on a public piano followed by giggles and another try. The moments are forgettable on their own and transformative in aggregate. They are what people mean when they say they want a bigger childhood for their kids: not necessarily less technology, but more of everything else that anchors a young life.

There are, of course, limits to what a grassroots project can prove in its first year. Kiama Unplugged is not a clinical trial, and no one is claiming causation between unplugged afternoons and mental-health outcomes. What it offers is verification of feasibility and demand: families will show up for phone-free spaces if those spaces feel welcoming and repeatable. That, paired with the best-available evidence on age of acquisition and sleep, is a meaningful data point for any town weighing next steps.

The invitation travels well. Any community with a library room, a hall, a café, or a park can copy the Kiama template tomorrow: set a phone-free expectation, offer low-tech activities, and repeat on a predictable cadence so it becomes ambient culture. It helps to add an adult night—presence begets presence—and a visible anchor like a community piano. What looks like nostalgia is really design: removing frictions to help families choose what they already say they want. The joy isn’t in rejecting 2026; it’s in building a version of it where attention is a shared resource and childhood feels spacious again.