From World Radio, this is Double Take.

I'm Les Sillers.

So Alessandra, you're about to start on the Postman Pledge story.

And you have come to a...

Well, you've come to me with an offer, really.

What's the offer?

To take the Postman pledge myself.

You want to take the postman pledge?

I do.

Wow.

The postman pledge has nothing to do with the post office.

The postman pledge is a promise that a small number of families around the country have been making to each other.

Essentially, they agree not to give their children smartphones and to eliminate social media

from their homes.

Alessandra offered to stop using social media along with them while she did the story.

This was not going to be easy for her.

She got her first Facebook account at age 14, and she's been a heavy user of social media ever since.

As a journalism student at Patrick Henry College, she had blocked Instagram on her computer.

But it's also very easy to, like, turn on and off the web restrictions.

So when she got bored or wanted to take a break from studying...

I would go to my computer, like, turn off the restrictions. Go on Instagram for a few minutes,

then go back and block it again, like pretend that I'm very self-controlled. It's embarrassing.

...