DO NOT give your kid a smartphone this Christmas

I had access to phones when I was a child. They were public phone, you could use cash or card. They don't exist anymore.

Things have changed, people have to learn to cope in today's environment.

There are plenty of apps you can use to restrict their access and restrict the time they spend on them. If used properly they can have good advantages, kids can set themselves reminders and use apps to organise themselves with homework and their school timetable. Whilst at the same time restricting social media, video/reel streaming, and restricting how much time they can have on them. Better the devil you know, if you give them a brick phone they'll probably just hide things from you going forward.
A much better approach is to safeguard them from the outset

@Firey40

*Right:

”I’m an alcoholic, so I decided what is best is to make sure my children are given easy, unlimited access to alcohol, and I’m making it extra special by wrapping up a big bottle of Premium Vodka and giving it to them for Christmas! Then they’ll know how special it is ☺️

Given that my life has been made worse by alcohol, and I have suffered as a result, I feel the best course of action for my beloved children is to do exactly the same as me”*

Explains a lot. Have you already started drinking this morning?!

No, still planning on giving my ten year old a smartphone for Christmas. He's been perfectly sensible with the 'dumbphone' he's had the past year.

I will be drilling into him about internet safety, including never clicking on random links from Instagram...

Yeah which is why I said that having a brick phone for calls is fine. Why do you need to be able to log in to an app to see the precise location of your child?
And despite being “more at risk” those kids STILL didn’t get abducted or killed in anything other than minuscule numbers. So they weren’t really at risk.

Yes, sort of. But I suppose that to reach the teach addicts you have to advertise where they spend their time.

Yes they did because there was a pay phone on every corner to use on an emergency. They are gone now. And it’s not a race to the bottom those children were more at risk.

Just put limits on it. The world is tech based now. Local buses only issue passes via a phone, class homework is discussed on WhatsApp. All the kids socialise in high school via Snapchat and WhatsApp. I have no issue with tech. Just parent them and have conversations about it all.

At some point, like with alcohol or anything else they will be old enough to get their own and you won't have any control over it then. Better to introduce at an agreed upon age and guide while you still can.

I would say that it is paranoid rather than normal or sensible. The chances of anything happening to them is tiny but what you are doing, every day, is telling them that you don't think they can handle the World.

You can get watches that can make calls and also track them.

As a heavily tech household I fully agree. I remember the day before and the day after the day before I owned my first smart phone.

I have only once experience being without it since and life changed forever. For those short two days while it was being fixed it was like being unplugged from some kind of dream, everyone around me was plugged in, addicted.

I agree with the principle but so ironic that you have referenced an instagram post...

Smart Phones are incredibly dangerous for children. To the parents that don’t realise this, you will soon.
I’ve seen devastation first hand that social media has caused in many different ways, from lives lost, to extreme depression in young teens.
The stats are legit no matter the source.
Kids with constant access to smart phones will have limited attention span, limited ability to communicate or pick up a phone to make an appointment. Struggle with future jobs because they won’t know how to behave as they spent their informative years behind a screen. The next generation is going to see a worrying amount of struggles as teens transition to adult hood.
I personally wouldn’t hire someone who lacked the ability to communicate, think for themselves and excessive entitlement confidence without the capability to back it up in real life.

Why? How many incidents are there of children not turning up at school (unless it’s intentional in which case the tracker won’t help as they will likely ditch their phone)? Kids managed to get to and from school since forever without being tracked by their parents. I can understand having a phone to make calls from but genuinely not a tracker.

Air tags won’t work rurally they only work based on other phones. It’s very normal and sensible to track your children when they are travelling to and from school.

The irony of a post like this...on social media, probably posted from your own phone. Lead by example, perhaps?

Yeah. I mean as an adult I am not sensible about screen time myself and struggle with it, so the idea that an 11 yo would be is laughable.

You don’t need to be able to track your kids. Jesus. He’s not going to get lost on his way to school. If god forbid he’s one of the tiny numbers of children who get abducted by a stranger, your tracker will be of no help anyway because the abductor will get rid of his phone. It’s totally useless and you can buy a brick phone if he needs to call you.

I find it interesting that the vast majority of kids discussed here are very sensible with their phones, only need them for a bus pass and to calm their parents anxiety.........whereas most that I see in real life are screen addled morons.
It's tragic that we are doing this to our kids simply because we can't cope with them going to school etc. without us.

It's a link. Were you not allowed tech or a smartphone as a teenager?

I'm sorry I don't understand what these letters mean? It looks like random texts turned blue.

Our local town has got rid off nearly all it's pay phones. The only ones remaining are used by drug addicts. If I had a young teenager I'd rather they had a way of contacting me.

On the porn topic, I am an older millennial and remember being shown some really disgusting stuff at a friend's house involving a donkey. This was pre smartphones. The early days of the Internet were wild. If their friends have smartphone then you know you have no control over what they are seeing.

It's never going to happen you know. The genie is out of the box. Far safer and smarter to teach your kids how to use tech as part of a rounded and fulfilled life that includes sport and socialisation rather than just ban them.

My teen (16) didn't have a smartphone until they turned 16, nothing bad happened to them because of it. In fact, they didn't want one because they were baffled at what it did to their friends' lives and MH. They had a basic Nokia that they could text and call on and could access the Internet at school or on a laptop at home. They had a paper timetable in their pocket. They looked up where to go if they needed to go somewhere.
Completely disagree that children need smartphones. I worked as a clinician in children' and young people's mental health services for a long time and I saw firsthand the damage they do to children.
There were so many parents who thought they were on top of their child's phone use. Trust me, even very young kids are inventive and know far more about technology than parents think, and can can circumnavigate restrictions.
The damage they do to young minds is horrendous.

I find it crazy that parents feel the need to track their children. Our parents did not have to do this. If they need us, they will contact us. I know a parent that has induced so much paranoia in their child it’s unhealthy.

I 100% agree with you. The channel 4 documentary Swiped shows a lot of evidence and I can feel that over the next couple of years we will finally be exposed to the damages of smart phones - to adults and especially young people.

We have a generation of high mental health disorders, crazy low concentration, self esteem and poor communication - and there are studies out there showing the link between some of these issues and social media.

The phone isn’t the issue, but phone use and lack of control is.