To think parents are not teaching any independence?

They don't actually.

It's coming into law from September. No phones allowed in school.

DS school is dealing with it by locking the phones away in lock boxes during the day. Others are using the lockable pouches and other schools are just banning them completely.

My parents didn’t know I didn’t GO to school. Different times.

Many families do not have a laptop in the home. Even if they did - how does that work if you have 3 children all needing to do their homework every evening?

Writing a 6,000 word NEA (non examined assessment) complete with charts, images and other diagrams for a humanities A level subject would be rather tricky on a phone though.

Not impossible at all. Use a laptop/pc/tablet - most homes have at least one of these.

Not impossible at all. Use a laptop/pc/tablet - most homes have at least one of these.

I had a 40 year old member of staff on the 00s who used to get his mum to phone in sick for him. So this is not new.

Exactly.

Society is telling parents not to give their kids smartphones, whilst schools are simultaneously making it impossible for children to do school work independently without one.

Digital inequality is a real thing in some underprivileged communities.

As an aside... my parents never knew i was late home from school because they didnt get home from work until 6pm. They were in Central London, I was in the suburbs... they couldnt drive, we didnt have a car. It wasnt unusual. We had to just get on with it.

Mine were 12/13 and didn’t have phones. They managed perfectly well and certainly didn’t feel they were missing out.

They don’t need to have their own laptop! Just a device in the home available to them.

20 years ago I was 22 and definitely had a phone! I got my first mobile phone when I was 13… because my dad didn’t like the idea of me getting the bus to school without any way of contacting them if it all went wrong.

Many, many children are indeed doing their homework on a tiny phone screen.
A very large number of families can't afford a laptop for their children to do homework on.

ahem, school kids they did have phone 20 years ago.

It also depends massively on where you live - in my local area a lot of the school kids have one bus option and if they miss it, there isn't another one. This means that that 15 minute bus journey turns into an hour's walk. Not a problem as such, but if my kid took four times longer to get home than normal I'd be worried for all that time.

I agree @takealettermsjones . When DD was at school the only way to get to school was the dedicated school bus. The bus company the school had a contract with had old, under maintained buses that often broke down, and even caught fire on a couple of occasions. It wasn't really feasible for the children to walk for five miles on winding country lanes with no pavement, and therefore a phone was required. I agree with a pp that a simple non smart phone would suffice.

I think those advocating for no phone at all must live in an area with plentiful public transport.

I was smiling at a recent thread where people described how often they phone/message their undergraduate kids (many every day).

That must be so suffocating @VickyEadie
Both DD and I were ready for her to go to university. Our contact was as and when required.

It is down to us as parents to give our DC the life skills to be independent. I had always encouraged independence, as my mother did to us, and now, apart from help with the rent costs in her student accommodation DD is completely independent.

On the WIWIKAU Facebook page there are so many mothers (it is always mothers) who spent all summer sobbing at the idea of their DC going away to university. I am so tempted to tell them to get a grip. I don't of course, but being a clingy parent is not good and doesn't encourage independence.

Maybe a travel card as well as cash? Some buses are cashless.

Exactly, I used to travel 9 miles by bus to school, if there was ever an issue getting home I’d just phone my mum from the phone box across the road, if I had no money I could make a reverse charge call (I can still remember my mum taking me to a phone box when I was about 8 and teaching me how to do this). Personally I’d be all for people under 16 only being allowed a brick phone. Can call and simple text but nothing else.

It’s insufferable. My 21 year old is a ‘step parent’ and has a baby due next month. He has a house deposit saved, a job, a side hustle and is a busy and productive man. On mumsnet when his peers are all huffy or have tantrums or do something stupid every other poster says something about how hard it is, how their brains aren’t developed and gives them a free pass for their idiocy. Mine is a bit unusual in his enthusiasm for settling down but this would have once been entirely normal. My 13 year old has cooked most of his own food this hols. He cooked his gran a meal which was fab.

I teach and have seen the perils of not giving your children the confidence to crack on and do something. About half of my year 11 students have never been to the nearest city independently. It’s not far away. Mostly this is because they wouldn’t dare. It’s too big, too scary and their mum wouldn’t like it. Their college is chosen according to to proximity and their one class mate who flies home to another country every long holiday elicits something more akin to terror than admiration. This year 5 parents have been in touch about speaking and listening g assessments for English explaining that their child can’t do it. Am sympathetic to children who really can’t but most can and the message should be that they will have to do hard things in life and it will be fine.

Presumably it’s smart phones they can’t have. Lots of schools are doing this, thank god.

Exactly

Of course it's not but even those kids needed to know what else to do. What would you do if you got to the phone box and the phone was broken? That definitely happened. These options are good to have but you also have to be able to have problem solving skills for when your best laid plans come unstuck.

We just don’t do it 🤷‍♀️ I’ve explained to the teacher my primary kid doesn’t have a tablet or computer, and if they want her to do homework it’ll have to be provided in paper form.

On the way in, if the bus never showed, I'd have gone home. There we had a landline where I could have called the school or called my mother at work. I didn't really have another way of getting to school, so I guess I'd have stayed home. That never happened but the bus did break down on the regular. We stayed at the place it unloaded until the replacement bus showed up. Might be late for school but we just got a late pass from the office after explaining. We kept perspective and parents didn't get all worked up about it knowing that the bus had probably broken down. If we still hadn't got to school by lunch time, then there would be some worrying and investigation by parents.