What do I need to know about setting up kid’s phone

[Partyonlikeyoureight]

Been trying to hold this off as long as possible as my son young for his year, but he’s now the only one in his small village school class without a phone and feeling left out as the others are whatsapping.

I have a spare iphone to be returned to factory settings, a sim attached to my EE plan.

I am a fairly simple person who is probably naive about what to do, I am only planning on giving him the phone for an hour a day to interact but realising I am fighting the tide on this one (he’s 11 and they are independent and out and about in this part of the world but all very sheltered FOR NOW).

What protections and set ups do I need to be putting on his phone? I was horrified the other day to see the chain of YouTube shorts he had been led on (I could see all five videos watched, it literally started with ‘watch me build this Lego’ to ‘wow is this the best game to play in 2024’ to ‘watch me walk up to this girl in a park and prank her’ which seemed to consist of being mean to her) - I personally would rather us all live in a hamlet doing handicrafts and weaving etc but don’t want him to be bullied as the one with dorky parents.

advice please!

Set parental controls!
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201304

Out of interest, how do you find EE? We have just switched over and are finding it pretty poor tbh.
We were with plusnet for WiFi and could also set that to turn WiFi off on certain devices at times we specified, whilst leaving adult devices still connected. See if your WiFi provider does that so you don’t end up wrestling/arguing about the hour being up maybe.

I recently trialled a variety of paid monitoring apps. Qustodio came recommended but my 11 yr old hacked the settings in under 48 hours. In the end we've gone with Safe Lagoon which is very good. Android's Family Link is also excellent (but doesn't monitor web searches or chats).