84%
of UK parents whose child does not yet have a smartphone back a school-day phone ban.
Parentkind National Parent Survey, 2025
Issue 01 · Spring 2026
A first phone
that gives your child
back their childhood.
From Simon, the founder
I'm Simon. I'm not a parent. I run a behaviour-change communications agency in Sheffield — the NHS, councils, public-health teams. Around 2023, friends with kids started asking me the smartphone question. The same pattern as every public-health campaign I'd ever worked on. The evidence is strong enough to act on, but a family on their own feels mad. They wait for permission. They wait for a friend to go first. They wait for a script they don't have time to write.
Knock is what those forty families and I wrote together over two years of kitchen-table conversations. A phone that does calls and texts and nothing else. A SIM that already works. A printed script you can read on a Saturday morning before you sit down with your child. The phone arrives, you have the conversation, and the week after is hard, and the year after is not. That is the whole offer.
Simon
The Knock Phone, Nº 01
A phone that does the things a phone is supposed to do, and almost nothing else.
The Knock Phone is built on the Nokia 3210 (2024). Calls, texts, a torch for the walk home in winter. An FM radio and an MP3 player for the bus. Three days of battery.
What it does not have is a web browser, an app store, or a way of installing Instagram or TikTok. The phone cannot be used to scroll. That is the entire point.
£79
Shop the phone The conversation
The bit nobody tells you is that the phone is the easy part.
Every family we have spoken to says the same thing. They thought the hard bit was choosing the phone. The hard bit was the kitchen-table conversation the night before they handed it over. We did not have the script for that conversation. So we wrote one.
It is one page. Read it through twice. Pick a Saturday evening when neither of you is tired. Stop talking when they have heard you out. Twenty minutes is enough.
A page from the printed script
"We've been thinking about phones, and we want to tell you what we've decided. [pause] We are not going to get you a smartphone yet. We are going to get you a phone with the things you actually need. Calls. Texts. A torch. Music if you want it.
What it isn't going to have is Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or a browser. Not because we don't trust you. Because the apps are designed to keep you on them, and we don't want that for you yet."
Then stop talking. Wait for them to react. Don't fill the silence.
Knock Phone — page 03 of the printed script
We had been putting it off the way you put off rewiring the kitchen. The phone arrived on the Thursday. We did the conversation that night. By the second week of half-term she had stopped asking about her friends' Instagram and started doing handstands in the garden again.
Placeholder quote, written in the right shape, awaiting verified case studies.
You are not the only one. Three numbers from the UK research, in order of how often parents mention them at the school gate.
11/12
is the age UK adults now name as the right point for a first smartphone.
Ipsos polling, September 2024
30%
of UK six- and seven-year-olds already own a smartphone.
Ofcom Children & Parents Media Use, May 2025
The Knock Phone is not
the cheap version of an iPhone.
It is the considered version of a phone.
We did not start from "what if we made a smartphone with fewer features". We started from "what if we made a phone that does the things a phone is supposed to do, and almost nothing else". The Knock Phone is the second answer.
- Battery
- Three days of normal use
- Apps
- None. There is no app store.
- Social media
- Not possible
- Cost to replace
- £79
- School-day distraction
- Texts and calls only
Give them their childhood back.
The Knock Phone is £79, ships the next working day, with the conversation already written for you. Send it back inside 30 days if it doesn't work for your family.