October 2026
People often ask me some version of this, usually with one eyebrow raised: "Hang on. You treat smartphone addiction. Why are you on the founding team of a phone company?"
Fair question. If you'd told me 16 years ago, when I started treating kids for gaming and smartphone addiction, that I'd one day be involved with a phone company, I would have laughed. I'm a scientist. I like data, peer review and a strong flat white. Hardware was not on the five-year plan. (Don't panic, I'm still not the one designing it.)
The honest answer is that I spent years cleaning up after products that were never built with children in mind. Eventually I got tired of waiting for the people who built them to fix it.
The year parents stopped trusting big tech
For a long time, kids and screens was framed as a parenting problem. Set better limits. Use the parental controls. If your child struggled, the unspoken message was that you'd done something wrong.
2026 changed that. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the case of a young woman who said she became hooked on their platforms as a child. The case wasn't about bad content. It was about design: infinite scroll, autoplay and features built to keep a young brain on the screen. (Read the AP coverage here.) A day earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay US$375 million over the safety of its platforms for kids. In August, Meta reached a multi-billion dollar settlement with attorneys general from 52 US states and territories over teen mental health.
Both companies are appealing, as is their right. But for the parents I talk to, the question has shifted from "How do I manage my child's screen time?" to "Why was I ever expected to do this on my own?" That's a reasonable question.
What the clinic taught me
In my work at the Screens and Gaming Disorder Clinic, the stories rhyme. A child gets a phone "just for emergencies". The parents switch on every control they can find. Within months, the controls have been bypassed, reset or worn down by a hundred small negotiations. Sleep goes, mood goes, and the parents sitting in front of me feel like they've failed.
They haven't. We were trying to bolt safety onto products designed to do the opposite. It's like buying a car with no brakes and handing the driver a really good brochure on stopping distances. Every time a tech company announces a new round of parental controls (here's my slightly grumpy take on Apple's latest), I ask the same thing. If a device needs this many locks to be safe for a child, was it ever designed for one?
So what is safety by design?
Instead of building a product to grab as much attention as possible and adding safety later, you start with the child and build out from there. We already do this everywhere else. Car seats aren't regular seats with a warning label. Kids' medicine comes with childproof lids from the factory. Nobody calls that overprotective.
Applied to a phone, a few rules fall out quickly:
If a feature exists to keep kids scrolling, it doesn't go in.
If strangers can reach a child, the design has failed.
If the business makes money from a child's attention or data, the incentives are wrong.
Parents shouldn't need a computer science degree to keep their kid safe.
None of that is radical. The radical bit is that, for 15 years, the products in our kids' pockets were built on the opposite rules. My book Busy Idiots looks at how persuasive design gets under our skin as adults. For a developing brain, the pull is even stronger.
Why I joined Waffle
That thinking led me to Waffle. I wanted to stop just telling parents what to avoid and help bring something better into the world.
To be clear about my part: I don't design circuit boards, and trust me, nobody wants me to. Waffle was built by parents who have spent their careers taking consumer hardware from sketch to shelf, with backgrounds at places like Dyson, IBM and Telstra. My role was to pressure-test the problem from a clinical and developmental angle. What does a child genuinely need from a first phone, and what do they definitely not need?
The result is a phone for kids aged roughly 5 to 12 with no apps, no internet and no social media. Just calls and voice notes with people parents approve. There's the Waffle Home for home and the Waffle Go for out and about, at JB Hi-Fi in Australia and Target, Walmart and Best Buy in the US. Waffle also promises never to sell a family's data or put ads in front of kids. Kids should never be the product. You can see how Waffle works here.
I'm part of the founding team, so I'm not neutral. But the problem Waffle sets out to solve is the same one I see in my clinic every week.
What this means for your family
This isn't a "tech is evil" post. My clinic runs entirely on video calls. Screens aren't the enemy, and balance is always the goal. But if you've felt like you were losing a battle you were supposed to win, you weren't imagining it. The playing field was tilted, and courts are now starting to say so.
You're allowed to choose products that are on your side. You're allowed to say "not yet" to a smartphone. And you're allowed to ask for help when things have already gone off the rails:
Screens & Gaming Disorder Clinic: online video sessions for children, teens and young adults living in Australia.
Parent coaching: one-on-one help for parents and individuals anywhere in the world, whether you're deciding on a first phone or winding back years of habits.
Big tech had a 15-year head start on our kids. The good news is that parents are catching up fast.
