By signing the Pledge, you are committing to the basic Unplugged Bialik premise. You are joining a community of parents who feel the same way and want to create a better childhood for their kids by delaying smartphones until an appropriate age and keeping children off social media until they are developmentally ready.

Signing the pledge does not mean perfection, but if a critical mass of families sign up and start talking about the issues, it will be much easier to do. If an entire grade of parents works together to delay giving their children smartphones, you’ll never have to hear your child say, “But I’m the only one without a smartphone!”

We are guided by Dr. Jonathan Haidt's four norms but we know that parenting is a journey with decisions to be made daily, hourly and by the minute.

Unplugged Bialik recommends being mindful about screen use and giving your children opportunities for real-world play and independence.

We are not advocating for no screens, ever. Getting on board with intentional unplugging in your home does not mean your family should not have any screens or that your child can't ever play on an iPad. We all lead busy lives, our kids need downtime, and this sometimes means iPads. But, it could also be non-screen games or outdoor play.

We all want to keep our kids safe and be able to stay in touch with them.

We recommend that families don't default to a full-on smartphone with no parental controls. Parents can investigate the many options and alternatives to smartphones that are now available.

We don't want to stop you from getting a device that helps you keep in touch with your child.

We've done research on a range of smartphone alternatives and there has been a lot of interest from parents in getting non-smartphones (that often look just like smartphones) and offer this information on our website.

Our basic premise: Research shows that kids today are more anxious than ever, more depressed than ever, more risk-averse, lonelier and less social than ever. But we know we don't want this for our kids!

Unplugged Bialik was launched by Bialik parents who were concerned about what smartphones and social media were doing to our kids' well-being. We want to educate ourselves and find ways to address these issues.

We are not here to judge you or tell you what to do.

While it may be easier to just go with the flow, give our kids the devices they want and let them go onto social media (especially Snapchat) at a young age, we want to address the growing mental health and social crisis that will affect our children.

We aim to create a community — at Bialik and in the broader groups our children are part of — to support each other in protecting our children from what we know are the harms of social media and smartphones.

We are not trying to isolate your children because they don’t have social media.

If more people in our community are on the same page, it will become easier to parent with less use of devices.