Kids and phones.

[Ludinous]

Just trying to figure something out really. I've been following another thread about mobile phones at sleepovers and there seems to be a lot of people out there who's 10/11 year olds do not have mobile phones, and whose parents seem incredulous that someone might allow their DC to have one.
Is this normal? Am I the bad parent? My DD has one and so do all her friends and cousin. I can only think of 2 main outcomes of this...either these parents are letting their children walk to or home from school, or stay in the house while nipping to the shops or whatever, without a means of contacting each other in an emergency. Or these kids aren't allowed to be anywhere or go anywhere without adult supervision yet which I find just as odd.
Just wondering what everyone else does?

As I said, my daughter doesn't have access to social media or anything like that so there's no reason for her to be glued to it. She uses it to talk to her friends, play Spotify and take and edit pictures and videos so we don't really need any time restriction on it.

Spotify has absolutely loads of social media content on it. Last year or so they have allowed videos to be posted and there are loads if you look for video content - mostly copied directly from Tiktok or Youtube.

Many video editing and picture editing apps also contain lots of social media style content, they call it “inspo” for making your own video but obviously it’s perfectly possible to sit and scroll it and not make your own video.

WhatsApp also now has social media in the form of channels which are basically Instagram lite.

It is insanely difficult to allow a smartphone and be confident that your restrictions are working. The apps keep changing and the kids are great at working out ways around restrictions (and sharing these workarounds).

I think my 10yo is safer walking to school without a phone than with one. The most likely dangers to her are being run over - more likely if she is looking at a phone- or being mugged, for her phone.

I think this might depend where you are in the country. Where we are in London almost all of the schools are now smartphone free (including smart watches) and there's no 'need' to have one- bus passes are physical. The phone wave seems mostly to have passed and kids have Nokia flips etc. There are of course kids who will have smartphones- I'm a school governor and they're heavily linked to a lot of our safeguarding incidents and bullying, because some kids will access them out of school. But I don't think it's the case that 'everyone' has them at all.

Like a Pp says, they need to be able to solve basic problems like the bus stop being closed.

Like others say, the dangers inside the phone are much, much, greater than those outside.