DO NOT give your kid a smartphone this Christmas

But learning money management doesn’t alter children’s brains?

It’s not really a parallel, is it.

I mean, you could argue that it’s more like getting them used to vaping, the modern way of smoking…

'Simpler chatting to friends and socialising can hardly be compared to drugs.
Imagine every single friend you knew is socialising on an app that you can’t have. They don’t communicate via any other method. Literally just think of it now. Imagine for example you have no mobile. No telephone at all. Someone comes along and says ok, you have to communicate via postal mail only with all your friends and aquatiences. You would be cut off from everyone.
It’s pretty much that.' @WhiteLily1

How are these children your friends if you have no other way of communicating with them? How strong and important or two-sided are these friendships when the people are so young, immature, learning social communication (which is much more than text)?
The whole point is that children are not mature enough and need to learn what adults before them have learned before using smart phones - finding joy in things that don't give you instant satisfaction, failing and feeling disappointed at things you can't replay/ retype/ delete, learning patience and self control, learning social cues from real interactions.
It's not just SM, there's so much more, (and you can access porn with no SM.)
Your children are not going to use the phones for what they are meant to be used for I.e. information.

My point is that grown-ups need to be in charge with this one - much more involved and restrictive than they are at the moment.
Not giving in, because all their friends have one.

Absolutely, but we don't actually have evidence this tracks solely to the impact of phone use.

I work in children's mental health and it worries me that many families become fixated on external issues like phones without really looking at all the other stressors young people experience. I guess I don't accept the answer is as simple as this, I think there are more complex issues in our society we need to look at.

Agree with all of that.

There'll come a day when these extremely sheltered kids have free rein on things like phones and social media. And they’ll have zero experience as to how to deal with it.

Similar to banking and money management. So many kids have no exposure to any form of financial information because their
parents do it all for them, then grow up and are hit with terms like APRs, interest rates, tax, NI and have no clue how to navigate it.

I don’t think complete removal is the answer at all, like you say, we can’t escape the world we live in.

My eldest DD is in year seven. She has an ‘dumb’ phone, just texts and calls, no internet. She wanted a smartphone, but there is no way in hell we’d ever give her one. And I’m staggered by the otherwise seemingly intelligent parents who do give them to their kids. DH & I both have policing backgrounds, and some of the offences we dealt with that were facilitated by kids having smartphones made my blood run cold. Not that you need a career in policing to be aware of the dangers. It’s common knowledge.

My DD was taken for an evening out last week with a friend and her family. When she came home, she said, “I’m glad you didn’t get me a phone actually. I’ve just spent all evening with [friend’s brother] and I still don’t know what he looks like!” 😆 Apparently he didn’t look up from his phone for a second.

Yes this! And being a responsible parent.

DS12 has a smart phone. He can't add any apps without my permission. Tiktok and other social media sites are blocked.

He calls his friends on it and plays games. He's currently learning Japanese on Duolingo.

We have regular conversations around e safety and I check it regularly.

I’ll just tell my 16 yr old he can’t have his because some random on the internet said he can’t

Like I said my kids don’t have social media (and neither does DH who has a brick phone). I have just asked him aka the teenager if anyone has ever mocked him and he looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said, erm no???? And he has several friends who also don’t have Snapchat and insta and what not.

So as someone living this life, this idea that my teen who has plenty of friends (in our neighbourhood, in his school and in his two major hobbies) is somehow a weird outcast is so alien to me.

Feel free to let your kids have these apps. I have no wish to influence how you parent. But don’t assume that kids without them don’t exist or are leading a miserable existence without them.

Capitalism! Right 😁

Now all you have to do is film a documentary and there'll be a MN thread in days insisting that parents are failing their children of they haven't engineered a communist eutopia.

My cousins are just a couple of years younger than me.

They grew up without a television in the house. They lived in the middle of nowhere.

It really affected them as they a) had a total disconnect with their peers because they didn't have any shared cultural knowledge. b) they had an inability to cope with normal things. Watching even PG stuff was traumatic.

I remember they didn't know who Tom and Jerry were and I remember them aged 10 and 8 getting very distressed and upset at watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon. They had very little in common with other children.

So even when I was pretty young, I understand that sometimes these things are more important than you realise in building relationships and being able to function as part of society.

This DOESN'T mean you have to be giving full unfetted access to the whole world on your smartphone either.

Its a bit like a bad workman blaming his tools for cutting off his right arm.

Hitting 16 and THEN getting a smartphone without learning how its not always good and not learning moderation is potentially a hazard in its own right for various reasons.

You can't escape the world you live in. You can try, but it doesn't work.

My cousins are doing ok now - one lives in buttfuck nowhere in New Zealand with sheep for company and the one lives in buttfuck nowhere in the Highlands of Scotland. Both have struggled with society throughout their lives. Its limited them in its own way.

Yep, because using Snapchat is indeed the same as using heroin.

By all means, let your child be outcast and laughed at. You’re kidding yourself if you think that any of their peers will give them an easy time on things like this.

I think it's capitalism actually.

They very much can both be true. It really depends on area, your friendship group and demographics of where you live.
One of my children go to school in an area where parents are strict on social media generally so not having it doesn’t create a problem. Kids use what’s app.
Another of mine is fairly far away in a different school and if she didn’t have snap chat she wouldn’t be chatting with any friends at all.

Yeah, everyone watched swiped and thinks phones are the devil. Months before that it was the horror of ultra-processed foods. In between we've had mnetters on red alert for ww3, new pandemics, the surge of the far right and, of course, climate change catastrophe.

Do you ever think that it might be us driving kids crazy?

Yes DH and I are very tech savvy. We keep a close eye on our child’s phone. We restrict screen time heavily. He doesn’t have it overnight. His screen time usage is very heavily restricted. We know what apps he has. We monitor his usage. There is no social media of any kind. Our kids read a lot. They spend a lot of time outdoors. They play music. They are doing exceptionally well academically. And most importantly sans any Snapchat, insta and TikTok they have friends and a social life.

Our approach to this is also guided by our approach to screen time in general. We are very very low screen and this means that we are not doing the thing that my friend is: she’s smug that her kid doesn’t have a smartphone but he games for multiple hours a day, and is hooked to a screen at all hours. It’s just not a smartphone.

Indeed my son was in DKA on diagnosis it very nearly killed him and it was terrifying this,was two years ago and we were very lucky that he had a Dexcom,fitted within a few weeks
Before that I was getting up several times a night checking on him and he was 16 imagine it's even harder the younger your child is
This technology give ,s us both peace of mind.

This 100x

10! So irresponsibly

Simpler chatting to friends and socialising can hardly be compared to drugs.
Imagine every single friend you knew is socialising on an app that you can’t have. They don’t communicate via any other method. Literally just think of it now. Imagine for example you have no mobile. No telephone at all. Someone comes along and says ok, you have to communicate via postal mail only with all your friends and aquatiences. You would be cut off from everyone.
It’s pretty much that.

It absolutely is NOT the same and I have never, nor would I ever, use the same argument about dangerous dog breeds.

Phones are inanimate objects that can only access what you ask them to. Therefore teaching a child to NOT use certain apps, to NOT accept unknown friend requests and the kind of things that are NOT acceptable to search for negates the danger people are blaming smartphones for.

Using your logic, incredibly clever people have invented heroin and made it addictive. Do you use it? Just because someone invented it? Or were you brought up to know the stuff is bad for you and to not use it? It is addictive if tried, there is no doubting it and there are reasons people end up addicted to it. But the drug itself is not inherently at fault as it is only a problem if a person is involved in the decision making to take it.

Careful now. Someone's headmight explode at knowing the difference between the two.

OP I honestly don’t know why this is such a problem.
Smart phones can be made as dumb as you want them. You can have a tracker, a text message app and the bus app for example and literally no other apps.
It’s just completely down to parental ignorance. Winds me up so so much.
Parents - if you are giving your kid a smart phone, LEARN TECH. Learn how to put restrictions on. Learn how kids might get around that and stay one step ahead.
Have your kids phone downstairs and night and check it thoroughly.
Honestly it’s really not that hard for anyone with even a moderate IQ. - just requires some time and actual parenting
Sorry to sound harsh but I just don’t get why parents don’t take full control of the phones- then you can have all the tracking and school apps and all the rest of it without the nasties.

This website is a great resource for choosing a phone like that.

Smartphone Free Childhood

If parents keep standing back and just let children influence children, peer pressure determine the rules and the values, what next?
We are not going to try and stop our dc from using drugs because his/ her friends will bully them?