DETROIT, Michigan, Oct. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 
Nicole Runyon, LLC, the coaching and speaking practice founded by psychotherapist Nicole Runyon, LMSW, today announced Beyond the Ban, a back-to-school initiative for families navigating the new cellphone restrictions now in force in a majority of U.S. states. As students return to classrooms without their phones, months after the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the harms of excessive screen use, the initiative carries Runyon’s message that the moment calls for something bigger than confiscated phones: parents stepping back into their authority.
Schools are removing the devices. Runyon’s question is what happens at 3 p.m., when the same children go home to the same screens, the same schedules, and the same family patterns that shaped their struggles in the first place.
“I have seen hundreds of children over more than two decades as a psychotherapist. What that experience taught me is that our children are the canaries in the coal mine: their behavior and their symptoms of mental illness are a reaction to their environments,” Runyon said. “Working with parents, the ones responsible for that environment, is far more powerful than treating the child in a mental health setting. When parents step into their authority and change what isn’t working, the child gets better, faster.”
Beyond the Ban brings together three of the practice’s resources for the back-to-school season: the free guide 10 Part Parenting Playbook: A Guide To Understand Your Child’s Mental Health, the weekly Parents Are the Answer podcast, and direct access to parent coaching through the Free to Fly program. All three are available now at nicolerunyon.com.
Runyon, author of the bestselling Free to Fly: The Secret to Fostering Independence in the Next Generation, spent more than two decades in psychotherapy practice with children and adolescents before turning to parent coaching. Her message is not that therapy is useless. It is that parents hold more power than they have been led to believe, and that waiting rooms are not where childhood gets repaired.
“Parents are more powerfully positioned to connect with their children than I ever could be,” she said. “A child in therapy can take months to build rapport, while a parent who implements my coaching strategies can bring immediate relief from the issues plaguing their child.”
Through the Free to Fly coaching program and keynote speaking, Runyon works with the adults who shape a child’s environment: parents, schools, and organizations. Her focus is restoring independence, boundaries, and parental leadership in an era she describes as “a culture overflowing with diagnoses.” The phone bans, in her view, are a rare opening: for the first time in years, families and schools are moving in the same direction, and parents who act now can carry that momentum home.
Runyon is available for interviews and expert commentary on school phone bans, screens and child development, childhood anxiety, independence and resilience in children, and parent coaching. She hosts the weekly Parents Are the Answer podcast, has appeared on Fox News Live and Fox 2 Detroit, and is based in the Detroit area.
About Nicole Runyon, LLC: Nicole Runyon, LLC is the Detroit-based coaching, speaking, and digital resources practice of Nicole Runyon, LMSW, a psychotherapist with more than two decades of experience working with children and adolescents, bestselling author of Free to Fly, keynote speaker, host of the Parents Are the Answer podcast, and founder of the Free to Fly parent coaching program. More at nicolerunyon.com.
Nicole Runyon: Psychotherapist, Parent Coach, Keynote Speaker Grosse Pointe Shores Michigan 48236 United States 313-634-7117 https://nicolerunyon.com/
