No phone for secondary school

Everyone here talking about the dangers of mobile phones has been scrolling MN on their smartphone for hours 🤣

The majority of Mumsnet users are adults. The damaging effects of social media are largely impacting children and teens, whose brains are still developing.

I would recommend reading 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt.

100%.

I agree with everything you’ve just said!!!

It's not ALL kids by any stretch. Not all kids are watching porn and decapitation videos.
Like I said previously, my son doesn't use his a lot but when he does it's to watch marvel clips, parodies etc. He actually loves Pinterest which NONE of his friends have even heard of. He has zero lnterest in tic tok or fortnight or Facebook etc.

It's a lot more to do with how you engage with your kids than the fact they're accessing a phone.
We watch the news, he knows current affairs etc. We have discussions on drugs, county lines, war, social media, everything any anything and nothing is off limits.
I'd never say 'that won't happen to my kid' re social media and mental health etc but a lot of these issues are down to parents not engaging with their kids on these issues and letting the phone entertain them so they dont have to.

I've worked in schools and specialist behaviour settings. Parenting is a lot more to blame than social media is unfortunately.

We probably roll a little differently though... I'm very open with him. It's just me and him so we have a pretty mature relationship.
He's also had a few alcoholic drinks with family meals at the ripe old age of 12.

Still none of it is as bad as I was doing unsupervised at his age. Sneaking places I shouldn't be, necking mixtures of alcohol snuck from a mates parents cabinet etc.

Phones are a worry, social media is a worry, but I worry more about the growing knife culture amongst young boys. Yes this is perpetuated by social media videos often etc but again, parents need to be more involved and not just saying 'oh I didn't know what he was looking at'.

Educate the parents to educate the kids and you don't need to remove the phones from the kids.

Parents need to return to being 'incharge' and not scared of their own children. I see it way too often in schooling. Parents saying 'but i don't know how to say no or take it off them'

Empowering parents and teachers would be better than banning phones for kids in my opinion

Same here, and that was 7+ years ago! A device was required for all lessons. Previously you could rent a laptop, but by the time she started they stopped that scheme and wanted them to have a phone or tablet.

Showing off in a WhatsApp group is not on, but seriously, they're all going to need a phone for Y7.

Also note on iMessage you can restore deleted messages and no option for single view / timed out photos.

You will be surprised at how much they grow up from finishing primary school. I felt like my child was too young to have a phone and be walking himself to school etc but after a couple of terms at secondary school he seemed to have aged about 5 years!

In contrast we don't have any gaming consoles and i could throw all kinds of data and studies at you about how and why they are harmful. Would that make me a better parent? A more caring parent? A smarter parent? A more thoughtful parent?

Or should I just assume that you made a (hopefully) well informed decision about what works best for you,your children and your circumstances and that's that?

Jinx or snap or whatever it’s called 🤣

Every generation has access to things the previous generation didn’t.
The problems are similar - kids being excluded for this that and the other. Or seeing things they shouldn’t. My mother used to be up in arms about this teen magazine I used to read that every month had a “your body and what all the changes mean” feature. 🤣 It was actually really informative.
I grew up in Germany. No school uniform. I went to what’s the equivalent to a grammar school over here for senior school. I was relentlessly mocked because my parents were earning heaps less than the average pupil’s parents there. They couldn’t keep up with all the latest Esprit, Benetton, whatever brand was on trend.
I’m pretty certain had mobile phones been a thing I wouldn’t have been allowed one or been told they couldn’t afford it.
So, I don’t want my boy experiencing this for me avoidable situation (though he gets taken the mickey out of because he loves a Pokèmon t-shirt still, not the big name stuff some of his class mates are into, but he insists a trio of starters on a t-shirt’s better than a plain one with a logo 🙈😂 He’s not bothered by the “wrong” opinions of others). But while I allow the phone, I do check it frequently. He knows this is not to catch him out, but to protect him. He’s actually left a WhatsApp group the other day his mates added him to and someone used the word “crap”. Well, he didn’t stand for the swearing and left. 🙈🤣🤣 I have all the parental controls and filters in place that prevent downloading of apps without my consent. He can’t view adult content etc.

I think that’s where it goes wrong. I see his mates texting at 12am, long after he’s in bed - boys and girls. More than half of them have TikTok accounts and other socials. I don’t see anything wrong with the devices themselves, because you can put everything in place to stop them accessing the stuff that takes up all the time. But in my experience with parents in his class it’s specifically the ones that share shit about kids being at risk and how awful, bemoan the fact that the kids spend too much time on drivel and go on and on about how me must protect them, who put ZERO effort into setting up those devices because it’s too much like hard work or because they want to avoid conflict because “Georgie is allowed Instagram”.

And there it is. iMessage (connected to wifi) is exactly like WhatsApp. They can be added to group chats and facetime calls with anyone. They can be sent pics and other media and links. There's a like feature and you can forward/screenshot messages and more. Some obviously will work even without wifi.

An ipad with iMessage without tight restrictions/no internet(that the kid can't circumvent) is no different to a kid have WhatsApp. In fact, it's worse, because kids that are a lot younger have access to that ipad than an 11/12 yo with WhatsApp.

The ignorance is the scary part. Your kid has a device, any device you need to check it, put restrictions on and put the work in. Regardless of ipad,smartphone or dumb phone.

Assigning some things as evil and some as safe, it's where kids fall through the cracks. Something is not safe just because it's not whatsapp or tik tok or facebook. You need to put the work in and KNOW what they're doing, what the apps are ,what can happen etc.

@StillCreatingAName define a normal messaging service.

Ours had an old smartphone so we could contact them when they walked home

Not less obvious, just different. A lot of the issues can happen on a dumb phone, albeit on a much smaller scale. You still need to check who your kids are talking to, what are they talking about etc.

Or exactly the same on a device connected to the internet that has messaging abilities. For example Imessage.

I used to think WhatsApp is harmless, not really social media, just for messaging. But I’ve now heard so many stories from friends about how it is used by children in a way that has caused major issues because they aren’t mature enough to handle the group aspect or the ease of sharing online content or images - kids being excluded from groups, inappropriate content being shared, private images being forwarded and saved, pressure of constant being online to respond to messages on the chat or you aren’t a real friend.

It’s all very well to say bullying doesn’t just happen online. But in real life, if someone makes a mean comment about you or takes a humiliating photo it isn’t simultaneously shared with your whole year group and saved indefinitely. In real life if other kids exclude you from their outing you aren’t constantly being bombarded with pictures of the great time they’re having without you. And in real life you have a chance to get away from your peer group problems at home - there is no respite if every time you pick up your phone it has dozens of new upsetting messages.

I think the issues with WhatsApp are just less obvious than Tiktok etc.

Except that in nations where young teens are allowed a small glass of wine with a meal or special occasion, their binge drinking stats are much lower. So they obviously can handle it. I was brought up in a similar way, small glass of wine or maybe half a low alcohol alcopop from about 12-13 at sit down birthday meals and new years etc or a small glass of champagne and orange juice at Christmas, and because alcohol wasn’t treated as some out of bounds taboo, I didn’t find myself drinking cider in fields at 14,15,16 or binge drinking at the weekends at 18 like an awful lot of my peers.

Technology isn’t going anywhere and like I said upthread, I think it is important that children and teens get the opportunity to learn how to use smartphones etc responsibly in a safe, low-risk environment, where that use can be built upon with age, rather than just be thrown into it at 16-18 and then be expected to be fully aware of risks and responsibilities. It’s the same reason we have to have driving lessons and pass a test before being allowed to drive solo, or how we teach children to cook by learning the basics a step at a time rather than expecting them to make a Michelin star meal without any prior experience.

I hear this all the time. So many of our issues at school are WhatsApp issues outside of school which we then have to deal with. I don't know why some parents think that WhatsApp isn't social media.

@StillCreatingAName that's because WhatsApp is a messaging app like imessage ,normal messages, skype etc. not technically a social media platform.
Not a lot of content creation or sharing. The aim is to communicate. Can you share a meme or a link to a video? Sure. That is not their main use /aim. You can do the same on email. Is email social media? Or text messages on a dumb phone/any phone?

Surely you can see the difference between WhatsApp and facebook, tik tok, twitter ,instagram etc. mainly content creation and sharing, with the added option to message. Messaging is not their primary use /aim.

No secret, he’s just an antisocial little fella 🤣