Your school is helping children reduce their screen time. We'd like your help doing the same for parents.
Present Parent is an app that helps parents put their phone down during family time. We'd like your help getting it in front of the parents at your school.
The other half of the problem.
Schools have been at the front of the national conversation about children and phones. Phone-free classrooms. The Parent Pact. Smartphone Free Childhood. It's working, and your school is part of why.
But children learn what to do with a phone by watching the adult holding one. And on that side of the equation, almost nothing is being said.
Average daily time UK adults spend online.Ofcom, Online Nation, 2025.
How often the average UK adult checks their phone.Ofcom, Communications Market Report, 2018.
UK 11–18 year olds who have asked a parent to put their phone down.Of those, 46% say the parent didn't. 44% felt upset or ignored. Digital Awareness UK / HMC, reported by BBC News, 2017.
Children are already asking. We're asking schools to help us answer.
Reducing parental screentime can directly help your school's outcomes.
There is now more than a decade of peer-reviewed research on what researchers call "technoference" - interruptions to parent-child interaction caused by a phone. The findings cluster around four things your school already cares about.
Vocabulary is built in the moments phones interrupt.
The first years of a child's language are built on what Harvard's Center on the Developing Child calls "serve and return" - the small back-and-forth between a child and a responsive adult. Phones break those exchanges. In one experimental study, a single 30-second phone interruption was enough to reduce a toddler's ability to learn a new word. Reception teachers see the cumulative effect of those interruptions in vocabulary, listening, and attention.
Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Serve and Return. Reed, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, "Learning on Hold," Developmental Psychology, 2017.
The more a parent is interrupted by their phone, the more difficulty their child has at school.
A 2023 scoping review of 64 studies found consistent associations between parental phone interference and children's externalising behaviours - the kind that show up in classrooms as poor self-regulation, conflict with peers, and difficulty settling. The direction of the evidence is now hard to dismiss.
Komanchuk et al., Cyberpsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 2023 - scoping review of 64 technoference studies. McDaniel & Radesky, Child Development, 2018 - technoference and child externalising behaviour.
Children who repeatedly fail to get a parent's attention eventually stop trying.
The Still-Face Experiment - Tronick's classic 1970s study of infant response to an unresponsive parent - has been replicated with phones in the place of the still face. Infants react the same way: distress, then withdrawal, then self-soothing. Modern research finds that children who give up on getting a parent's attention report lower wellbeing later. Pastoral teams will recognise the pattern.
Tronick et al., J. Am. Acad. Child Psychiatry, 1978 - original still-face paradigm. Myruski et al., Developmental Science, 2018 - phone-modified still-face. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025 - perceived technoference and child wellbeing.
Distracted supervision is supervision that fails.
A naturalistic playground study observed parents of children aged 0–5 and found that mobile device use reduced supervision quality and increased child injury risk in direct proportion to how long the parent scrolled. Schools take supervision seriously. The case for parents to do the same is the same case.
Hnatiuk et al., Children, 2020 - parent mobile phone use in playgrounds. Lemish et al., J. Pediatric Psychology, 2022 - phone distraction and child injury risk.
What Present Parent is.
A mobile app. Parents set their own schedule - bedtime, dinner, the school run, weekend mornings, whatever works for their family - and choose which apps to block during those windows. When they try to open a blocked app inside a locked session, the screen says, simply:
That's it. It doesn't lecture. It doesn't shame. It removes the decision at the moment willpower is weakest.
What Present Parent isn't.
- Not a child-monitoring tool. We don't see, store, or touch children's devices.
- Not a surveillance product. The parent installs it on their own phone, for themselves.
- Not a wellness platform. It's one feature, done well: a lock.
How this fits with what your school is already doing.
If your school has signed up to Smartphone Free Childhood, taken part in the Parent Pact, adopted a phone-free policy, or built a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing, Present Parent sits comfortably alongside all of it.
Smartphone Free Childhood asks children to wait. Present Parent asks parents to model the behaviour they're asking children to learn. The same logic. The same evidence base. The same direction of travel.
The Department for Education, Anna Freud, Place2Be, NICE, and the Mentally Healthy Schools framework all identify parental engagement as a foundation of whole-school wellbeing. Pointing parents to Present Parent is one of the lowest-friction ways a school can act on that recommendation.
Please note: we are not affiliated with these organisations.
What we're asking you to do.
We've kept the ask deliberately small. Pick whichever your school is comfortable with.
- A paragraph in your next parent newsletter.
- A line on your school website, under "Useful resources" or "Wellbeing."
- A printed poster on the parent noticeboard. We provide A4 and A3 PDFs.
- A mention at the next parents' evening or curriculum night.
- A forward to your parent WhatsApp group representative.
We're not asking for an endorsement, just to let your parents know it exists.
What parents get.
- Free for three days. No card required to start.
- iOS and Android.
- A lock screen that says LOOK UP during the windows the parent has chosen.
- Block the apps that pull them in. Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, email - whatever a parent decides.
- A tangible way to break the habit of phone use.
The school pack.
Everything your office needs in one download.
- Three newsletter blurbs (short, medium, long).
- A4 and A3 poster PDFs, print-ready.
- A square social tile for the school's Instagram or Facebook.
- A one-page evidence summary for governors.
- A staff FAQ - answers to the questions parents will ask.
A note from the co-founder.
I'm Dan. I'm a dad. I built Present Parent because I'd seen too many photos of myself with my child in the frame and a phone in my hand. I'd looked up too many times to a child who had already given up trying to show me whatever it was.
This isn't a tech company in the usual sense. It's me trying to fix a problem in my own life, and a hunch that a lot of other parents are trying to fix the same one. Schools have been brave on children's phones. I'm asking you to be brave on the other side of the same problem.
If you'd like to talk before doing anything, my email is dan@presentparentapp.com. I read every one.
- Dan
Co-founder, Present Parent