AIBU to ask what I should know before giving my 10 year old her first phone?

[BadMotorFinger]

My 10 year old is getting her first mobile phone for Christmas (aka my old iPhone).

I think she mainly plans to use it to WhatsApp her friends. I’ve already said to her that’s she’s not allowed Instagram, TikTok or other social media until she’s older. And that I’ll be taking the phone from her overnight, eg from 8pm-8am.

But I’ve got a nagging feeling there’s loads of other stuff I should be aware of and just haven’t thought about! And so, wise mumsnetters, what else do I need to do?

Are there any practical measures, eg apps, safety features I should be aware of? And in a general sense is there any advice you’d give r.e kids and phones? For one thing I’m painfully aware both me and my husband need to get better at modelling sensible mobile phone usage.

So, with the benefit of hindsight what do you wish you knew before your child got their first phone?

OP, this website is worth bookmarking and having a good read of - nationalonlinesafety.com/

I second what @Squidlydoo says. And take a look at what Billie Eilish was saying this week about seeing hardcore porn from 11.

If you don’t use the kind of social media sites that teenagers/young people do, you really haven’t got much of a sense of what’s out there, or that the kind of porn your ten year old will see is not just Babestation style tits and ass.

I use a few social media platforms for an innocuous hobby, including Discord, Tumblr etc. Porn bot and advertising profiles regularly follow or friend you to get clicks, and if you even so much as turn to the delete page to get rid of them, you’ll still see a feed of what they have on their profile popping up and you can’t do anything about it.

This can be really extreme hardcore, the kind of stuff you absolutely do not want your ten year old to see. I’m talking violence, choking, extreme anal and so on. On one occasion as I deleted a porn link a graphic video came up of what looked like an underage child, bound, gagged, and swung by a rope tied around her neck, being graphically abused by a group of around fifteen older men. I thought I was going to be sick, and I’m a fortysomething adult. What effect does that have on a 10, 12, 13, 14 year old? (Plenty of them all over those sites, unmoderated and untraceable chat functions, hidden second profiles and servers their parents can’t see or wouldn’t think to look for.)

Yes you can report stuff and have it deleted, but you’ve still seen it. Your little kid may well be looking at stuff like that. Because it pops up instantaneously on a feed on a link someone’s sent them, and you can’t block it, and no amount of parental controls can stop it, your child’s still seen some of that in just a few moments, and you can’t ever take that away again.

Those who think it’s not a problem - go and load up pornhub and take a look around some of the bdsm or incest fantasy or gang bang categories and imagine your preteen watching even a few seconds, because you can’t stop someone showing them that stuff as soon as they get online.

I think smartphones should be banned for under-16s. This is a massive experiment on children. Even if your can keep them safe, we have no idea what it is doing to their neurological development. Studies so far don't look good.

If you feel you must let your child have a phone, you should give a strict limit on usage, definitely no more than an hour a day. Many adults can't control their phone use - its unfair to give kids something massively addictive and likely very harmful and just expect them to cope.

Put parental controls on it. Either link to your iPhone and set up from there or something like Qustodio.

Set time limits and a few rules you would like her to follow.

Whatspp can be a nightmare especially when girls fall out! Dont forget to check their status' on whatsapp. Group chats can also get out of hand. Check search history on google also. Even if app store is blocked they can join insta etc via google.

I think you will get a gist of how she can manage it fairly early on. As all kids are different. Still check what she is doing on there even after you are more confident of how she keeps herself safe.

My oldest at 14 is still not safe on it even now. I still have a strict parental app as I have had to call the police multiple times re her phone issues and usage!

@cruffin

This is depressing. I have a young baby girl and social media terrifies me.

Make the most of the years before phones and social media

I have 3 dc, 7, 12 and 15 and honestly I yearn for the days before tech (the 7yo doesn't have a phone but a lot of her mates do. And she'd play roblox on the iPad all day if I allowed it - which I don't !)

@thebakeoffwasntasgoodthisyear

Make sure to keep an eye on class group chats. From experience, they can get a bit out of hand, they can egg each other on and sometimes get a bit unpleasant/inappropriate.

^^This. Seriously, WhatsApp is bad news for young children. Causes a lot of upset.

@JustLikeaJingleBell

Also remember this

No matter how close you are to your DD they will always have secrets and hold things back from you

Mine didn't tell me a boy had been pestering her for naked photos. Which she refused to send even though she was then bullied by him at school. Others were caught out and did send them.
Luckily because of Sarah Everard and the crescendo of the Me Too movement he and others were eventually punished but before that the 12 year old girls were told 'boys will be boys' and it would have carried on.

This is absolutely shocking, 12 years old?

All these people saying their kids need phones so they’re safe walking home from school! The dangers they’ll be exposed to via the phone are far, far worse than those the average UK child will encounter during a brief walk.

Have a 10 year old and no way on earth would I give her a phone, especially a smart phone. None of her friends in Y5 have them and wouldn’t make any difference to me if they did. It’s my job to parent and protect her not to win a most popular mum contest.

@foxgoosefinch bloody hell. Porn ads popped up on an app on my phone that my children were playing - was a game I had downloaded for me and one of those sort colours in a test tube things. Could not believe the advert I saw. And we have all the blocks for adult sites etc on the WiFi (which apparently are not the be all and end all…)

@JustLikeaJingleBell

Get her to disable airdrop so she doesn't get unsolicited dick picks from randoms

Sorry to side track, but I have an iPhone (for work) with air drop and never once have had an unsolicited message. Why would this happen to a child and not me? Genuine question. Do they have different settings or something?

@tootyfruitypickle

OP MN is a bit bonkers about mobiles

I and everyone I know gave phones with WhatsApp in Y6. TikTok in y7. Mine is y9 and doesn't have Instagram or Snapchat still and fine with that . TikTok has been good she follows booktok and it's really encouraged her reading massively .

Have had absolutely no problems

She uses it for music and also history podcasts while in the bath

Tik Tok is probably the worst out of the apps you mention. There is absolutely no way to control the content your child is exposed to.

Another one who thinks she’s too young, and the ‘all her friends have -insert whatever- one’ is a slippery slope.
But, as you’ve decided to go ahead, we use qustodio which is great as you can add other devices too. You can set limits on when and how they use the phone, block adult content and certain sites, and set screen time.you can see their searches etc from your phone.
So our 12 year old has no social media other than WA, which we periodically screen. No Tiktok or Insta. No YouTube on phone. No YouTube channel. Also can’t use it between 8pm and 7am other than calls and is limited to 1hr per day usage. You can up that easily on the app when you want to or set times for certain days -I.e. give her more time on weekends.
DS -any any friends on sleepovers- leave their phones downstairs overnight.
The other thing you should do is put parental blocks on your internet hub/router so that your DD can’t access porn or adult websites that way. Nor can her friends while at your house.
Be ready to have open conversations with your DD about porn the internet, scary things she may come across. Which she will. You’re giving her the internet on a private device.
We told DS he could ask us or tell us about anything without comeback or judgement and that we would always tell him the truth about sex, or whatever else. Because if you don’t then your child will get info from the internet, porn, friends and older siblings of friends.
I would also speak to her about anyone trying to contact her who she may not know- it’s taken longer than it should to get our 12 year old to realise that not everyone is who they say they are online.
Finally - CONSENT. Consent to take pics of friends, consent to take videos of friends, consent to share pics or videos. Tell her NOT to photograph and film people when they aren’t comfortable with it and NOT to send the videos around. And Tell her it’s OK to say when she doesn’t want to be filmed. I’m not talking about anything sinister but many of DS friends got phones around 10 and there was a lot of using filming to bully or threaten or tease each other which is what happens when young kids are given smart phones.
Some kids love making videos or taking pics but many don’t.
And finally - I would be wary of any class wide WA group.tell your DD to assume any message she writes may be read by a teacher or someone’s mum, so no swearing, no saying anything she would be ashamed of later if a mum or dad sees it.
Good luck! Personally I would have waited until ‘big’ school as kids mature very quickly int shy last year or so but your kid, your choice.
The consent thing though - I’d be very wary around that stuff. We had all sorts of issues around kids filming other kids and it going pear shaped.

JustLikeaJingleBell
Get her to disable airdrop so she doesn't get unsolicited dick picks from randoms
Sorry to side track, but I have an iPhone (for work) with air drop and never once have had an unsolicited message. Why would this happen to a child and not me? Genuine question. Do they have different settings or something?‘

Because some teen boys are absolute dickheads at that age. And some men are predators and much more likely to go after young girls than grown women.
You should read the latest stats on the number of girls in schools who have been sent porn or pics by boys and who have been harassed and asked for ‘nudes’.

Tiktok!!!

Perfectly safe then.

The reason people are bonkers about mobiles is because, access to literally the whole sordid shitfest of the internet is right there, in their hands.

Contracts, agreements, rules - good lord, seriously?

We are doing similar for our 10 year old DS at Xmas (giving one of our old iPhones, an SE I think) because he needs to start walking to and from school on his own to get confident and ready for high school in September: I hate he needs a phone but I won't be confident letting him do the journey without one. Our school encouraging walking to and from school without parents from Year5, we are Year6 and I've been meeting him half way but time to let him do the test though I hate it after 6 years of school walking being our time.

Lots of stuff evades content blockers. And many sites which are not even porn but are aimed at gaming, fandom, young teenage and early twenties men, have porn / anime porn video ads playing on them. Anime porn content in particular is often used especially to get around content blockers and appeal to children and teens, I suspect.

But in general, the hardcore stuff you can have pop up at you on some of these sites even if you are doing nothing related to porn at all is astonishing. Beyond that, there are plenty of seemingly okay chat and writing platforms in which teenagers will post very graphic stuff, including fantasies and pornographic fanfic.

I mean that’s kind of funny at first compared to pornhub, but I’ve seen a lot of young people who are clearly very messed up about sex and think that extreme violence and “kink” is normal and cool. A big thing in youth online communities is “DDLG” (“Daddy Dom / little girl” - which is basically paedophile role play fantasies); BDSM, doing OnlyFans, and kink relating to gender stuff. Not to mention all the constant obsessing about gender identity. And writing pornography and watching poem is really normalised among teenagers to the point where I just don’t know how they will manage to have healthy sex lives and relationships later on.

My own students will tell me quite matter of factly at 18 that women have an innate desire to be beaten during sex, and not understand at all why I’m looking at them in absolute horror. (I teach feminist theory, before anyone wonders why they are saying stuff like that to me!)

WhatsApp now has a disappearing messages function so can function a bit like Snapchat. Not sure if you can turn it off as I am not very technologically minded but something to think about.

Put one of the chil restriction apps on it, Kidslox or Quostodio are good, they allow you to restrict apps, monitor and give time allowances. Saves a lot of arguing here!

Parental controls are NOT foolproof by any means - hence the open door policy in our house and the checking of phone regularly. But we relying on our kid actually talking to us, which he does now but who knows for the future.
We even chose a school based on their phone policy - zero tolerance inside school grounds. But that’s not stopping anything that happens outside of school.

@tootyfruitypickle

OP MN is a bit bonkers about mobiles

I and everyone I know gave phones with WhatsApp in Y6. TikTok in y7. Mine is y9 and doesn't have Instagram or Snapchat still and fine with that . TikTok has been good she follows booktok and it's really encouraged her reading massively .

Have had absolutely no problems

She uses it for music and also history podcasts while in the bath

Yeah same here.

I find some of the posters on here bonkers.

I've paid for Qustodio on my DDs so I can at least keep track of what she's doing, plus she knows I can take her phone at any time. She only had it when she started secondary though

I’d avoid Tiktok like the plague - I put it on my phone for a month and the algorithms came up with some random crap to say the least and so much stuff I would have been horrified for my kids to see. There’s no way to control what comes up - that’s the issues and for every cute puppy video there’s 10 that wouldn’t be appropriate for kids to see. When that video of the guy shooting himself in the face went up in Tiktok it took them a week to get it off and it kept popping up in ‘for you’ on Tiktok…

DD is in Year 6 and is (apparently ) pretty much the only child in her class not to have a mobile phone. She will be getting one next summer for secondary school and I have accepted that WhatsApp will probably be on there, but we have already been talking rules etc. To be honest some of the stories from other parents in the class about what their kids have 'accidentally' been exposed to have made my toes curl and they are so 'oooopsie, what can you do though' about it.

But DD will need one for secondary school and I know it sounds terrible but I don't want her to be the only one with a Nokia brick. So it will be a smartphone and we will just have to try and make sure we are as shit hot as possible with the safety features.

I also think she's too young, purely because you seem a bit clueless.

‘That you will pretty much wave goodbye to your kid as she'll prefer being on her phone to any sort of interaction with you or the family. Yes you can limit time on it of course but that will make you very unpopular.

Harsh but true !!
’

Not if you are strict with it. Our DS is limited to an hour a day, but more in weekends. Not allowed his phone in the car, visiting relatives, at the table, having lunch in pub etc.
Set the ground rules early and stick to them.