Book Cover Reveal!

We are finally here! I am thrilled to share with you the cover of my forthcoming book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones, which is now available for pre-order.

I just have to say how much I love the cleverness of the escape key in this design! The simplicity of the cover and its minimal feel reflects the tech-minimalist message of the book and the light blue color evokes positivity and hope for the alternative lifestyle the book invites readers to enter as they leave tech behind.

What is this book about?

This book is a practical road map to free kids from the harms of digital technology and to recover the beauty, wonder, and true purpose of childhood. The beginning of the book exposes the lies parents have been sold about managing the dangers of tech through parental controls and screen-time limits, and demonstrates how these strategies are not working for parents or kids and instead another way is possible—even if your children are already using smartphones or social media, it’s never too late to exit.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with experts and with families who have gone tech-free, as well as my own work as a policy expert in this area, the book then explains how families can do a digital detox and then walks readers through five core principles of how to exit digital technologies for children over the long-term. The book concludes with a chapter to schools and a chapter to policymakers, on what they can do to support parents in giving their children a low-tech childhood.

The book is positive, practical, and possible. It is filled with anecdotes, stories, examples, and practical tools and tips of how other “Tech Exit” parents have successfully done this and how their family and children have greatly benefited from it. It shows parents how exiting digital technologies is not only possible, but also fundamentally positive - the Tech Exit is a positive no to screens, because it is a yes to so much more in life.

For any parent who has felt stuck between an awareness of the dangers of digital technology for kids and the feeling that tech is necessary and inevitable. The book’s message is simple and compelling: You and your family can be free. The life you want for your children is within reach.

My hope for the book

I hope that this book will help inspire and encourage parents to push addictive screen technologies, namely smartphones, social media, and video games, out of childhood entirely, even through the teen years until adulthood. I hope that this book will help parents come together, to find other families to exit with, to talk to parents in their neighborhood, at their school, at their church, to create social circles where their kids play together outside, ride their bikes, build forts, put on plays, use their imaginations, create art, play music, and read books instead of being on screens. I hope this book helps parents limit their own use of digital technology and build homes where screen use is minimal, purposeful, and shared together. I hope this book helps schools to remove phones from the entire school day, and to also minimize the use of other “educational” screens. And I hope this book encourages lawmakers to pass better laws to protect kids online and to provide solutions to the collective harms of digital technology in order to back parents up. And perhaps the grandest hope of all, I hope this book helps spark (or fan the flames) of a nationwide, parent-led movement to protect childhood from screens, for the sake of the next generation in our country.

How can you help?

I hope you’ll be a part of realizing the many hopes of this book and help the book reach its readers. The first thing you can do is pre-order the book. Preorders are now open for The Tech Exit and I can’t emphasize enough how much it helps writers for you to preorder your copies rather than wait for the release date. You can get it wherever books are sold, but Barnes & Noble is offering 25% OFF all preorders today until the end of the day this Friday (Feb 5-7) for members with the code PREORDER25. (And becoming a member is completely free!) And it’s a hardback, so that 25% off really helps.

And then please start telling all your friends, family members, neighbors, and any parents, teachers, church leaders, and/or policymakers you know about it. Encourage them to pre-order too. Truly, “word of mouth,” is the most powerful driver for book sales.

Thank you for following my work! Your support means so much and I can’t wait for you to read The Tech Exit in June!

-Clare