One Flip Phone, Two Parents, Three Kids, and the Start of a New Idea

My husband Jonathan and I have always tried to be intentional with our technology use—especially around our three kids. Our preschoolers don’t get any screen time. We don’t use tablets-not at restaurants, not on flights, not when they wake up for the day at 5 AM and sprint into our room. When we’re truly desperate and the kids are wildly disregulated, we’ll put on Disney music rather than Cocomelon. But as we’ve learned over our years of parenting, the most difficult part isn’t setting boundaries for your children. It’s setting them for yourself.

For years, we struggled with this. I’d be spending time with our kids and start scrolling Instagram or Reddit without ever making a conscious choice to. Jonathan would get a Slack notification, reply, and fifteen minutes later find himself still staring at his screen—having wandered into the New York Times, email, or some bottomless corner of the internet. Meanwhile, we kept missing being present with our kids. We were constantly battling the pull of our own devices, even as we tried to model healthier behavior.

I tried all the solutions touted on the internet. I set screen time limits (easy to disable), deleted apps (sadly web versions of most apps exist), turned my phone to grayscale (pulled me from Instagram towards Reddit), put my phone in a drawer (hard to remember every day). Nothing worked.

Why couldn’t I, a software engineer who had worked on consumer tech products at Google, get off my phone?

Technology companies design their apps to be addictive, tapping into our brain’s dopamine system to keep us engaged. The longer we stay on their platforms, the more ads we see and data we generate, which directly fuels their revenue. Individual engineers at companies like Facebook and Google are incentivized to increase user engagement and the average time on the site via promotion processes that reward constant engagement. Even an intentional, well-meaning parent like myself just couldn’t win an uphill battle against the slot-machine mechanics that drive people to keep infinite scrolling even when they don’t want to. And my life was suffering for it.

About a year ago, I decided to try the nuclear option: I switched to a flip phone.

At first Jonathan was resistant. What if I needed to get directions to somewhere? Or look something up? Or check my calendar, or find information that only lives in my email, or… And wouldn’t that make all of our texts green??

I put my iPhone in a drawer, unsure if I’d be pulling it back out in desperation a few days later.

However within days the results were immediate. Without the constant temptation of apps, I found myself more present, more patient, and more focused on our kids. I was happier. My life felt calmer. My attention span was being rewired. I started being able to drive without calling someone in boredom. I could go on a hike without a podcast to distract me.

I’d still pull out my laptop to scroll Reddit or Instagram, but it would be a conscious choice I’d make when I wanted to be distracted for 30 minutes. I had taken back control of my own time.

But it wasn’t all easy. The limitations piled up quickly. I couldn’t get directions to the eye doctor. I couldn’t check my calendar when a friend texted about getting a meal. I couldn’t Google anything—or ask ChatGPT when I needed help. And any time someone texted me a link, I’d have to forward it to Jonathan and ask him to email it to me or summarize it for me on the spot so I could read and respond.

Eventually, we hit a point where, on busy days, we’d just switch phones. I’d take Jonathan’s smartphone, and he’d use my dumbphone. It was our workaround for surviving days with multiple appointments, logistics, or social events. The funny thing is: when Jonathan used the flip phone, he found himself enjoying it, too. He was less distracted. He felt more present. But we still needed occasional access to real-world tools: maps, search, email.

That’s what inspired SmarterDumbphone.

At first, it was just a small tool Jonathan built for us. A simple SMS interface that could help us look up directions, ask questions, or check our calendar by text. But as we started relying on it more and more, we realized it was doing something bigger: it was helping us use the smartphone less and rely on the dumbphone more.

Jonathan has started a few companies before, but this one was different. We didn’t begin with a business plan or a deck. We started with a problem in our own home. The more we used it, the more we believed it could help other people, too.

So we turned it into a product. We named it SmarterDumbphone.

Today, it helps anyone with a flip phone or feature phone get answers, look up places, check the weather, schedule events, and more—just by texting. It powers up your phone into a fully functional tool that helps you navigate the world without having any power over your time.

This is still a small project. But for us, it’s personal. We built it to help us live with fewer distractions and more intention—and we hope it can do the same for others.

If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling without meaning to, missing moments you meant to be part of, or just wishing you had a little more control over your time, we hope you’ll give it a try.