No phone for secondary school

[StillCreatingAName]

AIBU? I feel like I might be missing something obvious on this one, but honestly why do children need to take a smartphone to school? It’s baffling me as to why there appears to be parents on auto pilot buying their children smartphones (£££) now in year 6, ready for year 7 as though it’s part of a uniform policy (and then sharing their purchase on the class WhatsApp, give me strength).

Is this all just a fallout from lockdown times, people were sort of forced into screen life, so now there’s more children at secondary school with them, who may not have ordinarily had a phone until older?
I’m expecting dc to walk home with friends talking and socialising without the inclusion of a screen or mindlessly scrolling social media instead of listening to friends. I can see where a basic phone might be needed to contact home, but that doesn’t mean the phone should be out of school bag anytime during school hours should it, but maybe I’m just being naive, time will tell 🤷‍♀️?

AIBU to say children don’t need to get a £££ phone for starting secondary school? (It goes without saying they don’t need it at all for primary school, IMHO)?

If you’re not getting any luck with individual teachers or heads of dept then I would speak to the head. If no joy there then write to your MP with some of the research linked to above. I work in a system where smart phones are banned in all schools. There is absolutely no need for this and it is detrimental to children. The UK gov is consulting more on this issue at the moment. You can help make the change happen.

She is 16, will be leaving school to start an apprenticeship after her GCSEs and I hope that no longer being in the toxic environment that is school, we really help her have a healthier relationship with her phone. I hear what you’re saying but I feel she is old enough to limit her time on these apps herself. She does quite often put her phone on do not disturb so she doesn’t receive constant notifications and removes herself from group chats that she doesn’t want to be part of which I encourage as it provides her with peace that she acknowledges that she needs.

*They should be. At school, they can kick a ball, walk around or at least chat to each other. Outside of school they can walk in the woods, climb, explore, play in the river or the snow, ride bikes or skateboards…

The more we talk about this issue, the more parents will be encouraged that not “everyone else is doing it” and there is another way.*

DD and her friends do all that. When the bus isn't an abject failure, they actually get to school really early so they hang out in the library browsing books/magazines/chatting or in the cafeteria chatting,sometimes having a pastry. Playtime/Lunchtime they walk around ,chat,joke,giggle. Some days they do sporty after school clubs.

Not a lot of time to go out after school, especially with homework and not living particularly close, but they meet up a lot in half terms/weekends.

DD has organised a group meetup at ours (mix between primary and secondary friends), they went to the park, ran around, got some food ,back to the park. I'm part of it as well as the kids aren't all local so they needed parents to drop off/pick up. Other parents have different ideas about what's safe/what they're comfortable with their child doing.

Yesterday she did an impromptu bike ride with a friend in the afternoon.

She just organised to go swimming with a friend tomorrow.

Last summer she was out nearly every day on her bike/scooter or on foot or with a football.

In the woods, in the field, park, astro, skate park, tennis courts.

She arranges all this on the phone. She can keep in close contact with new friends and (particularly) old ones on the phone. It's a lot easier to do these things and you can be in contact and "be present" and build/strengthen/maintain relationships with a phone. It just is.

It's not like when I was a kid and everyone had a landline , and everyone went to the same local school anyway, and we were all out outside to begin with so there were always kids to play with. All that and Still managed to wrack up some monumental landline bills for my parents trying to keep in touch with my school friends.

And if you are in that kind of situation, an area with plenty of green space, where all the kids go outside, they all go to the local (close) secondary and know each other , then by all means crack on without a phone. It definitely makes saying no easier. But don't assume that's the case for everyone.

I got my DD a phone for her 10th birthday all her friends already had one. I did it so we could both practice how this was going to work longer term. She went to a village school with only one class per year and all the parents know each other so we all kind of went through it together. She knew that I would regularly check her phone and this was also happening with others in the class. It was easy to do it in this protective environment. Flash forward to her being in a large secondary and the boundaries have already been set. She uses her phone quite a bit, we live rurally and she needs to get a public bus too and from school. Sometimes there are after school clubs and sometimes not, but if she does a sports club she needs collecting as the bus does not run to ours at that time. They also have an app for their timetable, homework and assessment results. She is also home alone for 30minutes one day a week, and we do not have a landline. I feel we have the balance right, and it isn’t used during school. Everything has time limits and she isn’t allowed to just waste time on it when she could be doing something else.

It is awful. They are doing that, and furthermore, they are showing the videos to other kids whose internet access is restricted. Average age for first viewing porn is 12 years old now. They’re also sending round the most horrific, traumatising videos of violence like torture, terrorism, decapitation etc.

Tweens and young teens are very curious and don’t have the brain development to navigate these things. It doesn’t mean they can never learn to use a smart phone. Just when they are older and more mature and capable of navigating the dangers around it, comparable to driving a car or drinking alcohol, as PPs have pointed out.

Ds didn’t have a smartphone until he was about 14. He just wasn’t interested in them. He did, however, have a basic Nokia phone as he caught a designated school bus which was horrendously unreliable and no option for public buses back home on the many occasions it didn’t arrive (3 mile walk down a national speed limit country lane with no pavements which I wasn’t happy with him doing in the winter when it was pretty much dark). It was purely so as he could send me a text up pick up if he was stranded. He’s 18 now and still isn’t that bothered about having the “best” phone and doesn’t do social media at all, so I guess I’m lucky in that respect.

My comment was specifically in response to the poster who said that children can’t be expected to play outside after 12, and must therefore stare at a smart phone screen before school instead. It’s great your DD is still doing all that. Unfortunately most children are getting much more screen time than outdoor time these days.

I understand that we are all more worried about safety these days, and I will definitely want a way to contact my kids, and for my kids to arrange meet ups independently. But this can be done by text and calling on a dumb phone. Smart phones are the issue, not phones in general.

My child (year 7) has a smart phone. She is not allowed social media (until the correct legal age) but does use WhatsApp. WhatsApp groups are how friends communicate these days, without a smart phone they would be totally out of touch with others. My daughter rarely replies to people, but she does read what her friends send. Also as she catches a train to school she uses the app to see if it is running/cancelled or delayed. She checks her bank account so she has control of her pocket money and learn the value of money & I can track her location so if she ignores her phone I still know where she is. They are all bed, are education and unfortunately a child without one will not last long in secondary. Fact of modern life I’m afraid

We live in a differant world to the one we grew up in pre-tech. Yeah, kids should have smartphones, it's a sign of the times. What you allow them to put on thier smartphones is up to you.

My girls, 14 & 16 have to travel over an hour by bus to get yo school at 7.30 in the morning. I don't necessarily think they need a £££ phone but we have an app where I can track their location which as well as being beneficial to know they got to school ok means when they are out and about with friends I can check where they are. God forbid they were ever lost or worse abducted at least I would be able check their last known location. So a basic phone isn't good enough for that as I need the app and for them to have data for it to work. So from that perspective I say YABU. They don't all just have a smartphone for the street cred.

For us with our eldest son it was nothing to do with socialising, and only to do with logistics - he had a phone for the first time when he went to secondary school because we needed to be able to contact him if we were going to be late picking him up or if there was any sort of issue from his end (unexpected rugby match or something). We live 8 miles from his school, it’s in the countryside and there is no school bus. He is now in the 2nd year there (yr 8) and still has no social media, no games, no access to YouTube or TikTok etc. The school rules are that children cannot have phones turned on or even in sight at all at school until the end of the day when all the parents are collecting, and then the ones whose parents aren’t there can turn phones on by the steps to the main school building, to contact their parents. They all abide by this rule (it’s a pretty strict school), and so there aren’t any problems with phones at school. A nice bonus is that DS is now able to contact his school friends by phone or text and arrange to meet up as hardly any of them live near each other. He is also able to keep in touch with primary school friends who went to different schools. He also enjoys audible on it at home.

We are pretty strict about phone use and rules at home too, but it works well for us all at the moment, in comparison to lots of children we know who seem superglued to their phones and are obsessed with them and have social
media at an inappropriately young age. dS2 is 10 and all of his school friends (older and younger) have phones already. I have told him that if he wants to arrange to meet up with friends in the holidays then I will message the friends mums, and that works absolutely fine still. We don’t live in a village so he can’t just call round to friends houses. He would love to have his own phone but for now we are saying ‘no’ as he really doesn’t need one. When he does get one eventually, it will be basic and no social
media the same as his brother’s phone. Our teenage niece is completely consumed by her obsession with social media, and it has prompted several frank conversations with our sons about the idea of them not having SM until they are 18 and how by staying off it, they may decide never to have it.

so to answer your original question - yes for us a phone is necessary at secondary age, but not as a default, only in response to our specific circumstances and I think it’s a great shame when children have phones too young.

My comment was specifically in response to the poster who said that children can’t be expected to play outside after 12,

Oh, completely fair enough then. I might've misunderstood. I completely agree with that. They can and they should.

You might find it odd from someone that has given their kid a smartphone, but I'm a firm believer in kids being kids (in age appropriate ways).

You need to let us all in on the secret to achieving this!

No secret, he’s just an antisocial little fella 🤣

I keep seeing this over and over- not allowed social media, but needs and has WhatsApp to talk to friends 😵‍💫

@StillCreatingAName that's because WhatsApp is a messaging app like imessage ,normal messages, skype etc. not technically a social media platform.
Not a lot of content creation or sharing. The aim is to communicate. Can you share a meme or a link to a video? Sure. That is not their main use /aim. You can do the same on email. Is email social media? Or text messages on a dumb phone/any phone?

Surely you can see the difference between WhatsApp and facebook, tik tok, twitter ,instagram etc. mainly content creation and sharing, with the added option to message. Messaging is not their primary use /aim.

I hear this all the time. So many of our issues at school are WhatsApp issues outside of school which we then have to deal with. I don't know why some parents think that WhatsApp isn't social media.

Except that in nations where young teens are allowed a small glass of wine with a meal or special occasion, their binge drinking stats are much lower. So they obviously can handle it. I was brought up in a similar way, small glass of wine or maybe half a low alcohol alcopop from about 12-13 at sit down birthday meals and new years etc or a small glass of champagne and orange juice at Christmas, and because alcohol wasn’t treated as some out of bounds taboo, I didn’t find myself drinking cider in fields at 14,15,16 or binge drinking at the weekends at 18 like an awful lot of my peers.

Technology isn’t going anywhere and like I said upthread, I think it is important that children and teens get the opportunity to learn how to use smartphones etc responsibly in a safe, low-risk environment, where that use can be built upon with age, rather than just be thrown into it at 16-18 and then be expected to be fully aware of risks and responsibilities. It’s the same reason we have to have driving lessons and pass a test before being allowed to drive solo, or how we teach children to cook by learning the basics a step at a time rather than expecting them to make a Michelin star meal without any prior experience.

I used to think WhatsApp is harmless, not really social media, just for messaging. But I’ve now heard so many stories from friends about how it is used by children in a way that has caused major issues because they aren’t mature enough to handle the group aspect or the ease of sharing online content or images - kids being excluded from groups, inappropriate content being shared, private images being forwarded and saved, pressure of constant being online to respond to messages on the chat or you aren’t a real friend.

It’s all very well to say bullying doesn’t just happen online. But in real life, if someone makes a mean comment about you or takes a humiliating photo it isn’t simultaneously shared with your whole year group and saved indefinitely. In real life if other kids exclude you from their outing you aren’t constantly being bombarded with pictures of the great time they’re having without you. And in real life you have a chance to get away from your peer group problems at home - there is no respite if every time you pick up your phone it has dozens of new upsetting messages.

I think the issues with WhatsApp are just less obvious than Tiktok etc.

Not less obvious, just different. A lot of the issues can happen on a dumb phone, albeit on a much smaller scale. You still need to check who your kids are talking to, what are they talking about etc.

Or exactly the same on a device connected to the internet that has messaging abilities. For example Imessage.

Ours had an old smartphone so we could contact them when they walked home

I don’t agree it’s just a message app- it has all the functionality of social media, including people liking, forwarding messages etc. in fact, something like Facebook (owned by the same company) actually enables more privacy in groups from what I know. I can’t just join community groups on Facebook without answering questions from an admin, etc.

kids can easily make arrangements on normal messaging service, it’s ridiculous to suggest they need to use WhatsApp which is an app, not just a message service and it has 13+ age guidance- ask yourself why a simple messaging service needs that?

Interesting points @Feralgremlin

Except that in nations where young teens are allowed a small glass of wine with a meal or special occasion, their binge drinking stats are much lower.

I said much further up thread we have devices in our home and if we didn’t, I think my dc would be looking to go on them elsewhere, when I couldn’t manage what they’re on and for how long they are using, for example, a gaming console. The smartphone feels a whole different parenting decision.

@StillCreatingAName define a normal messaging service.

As in use iMessage or regular texts if not on a smartphone, only have their friends in their contacts, can’t be added to any group chats. Of course they can be sent links on messenger- but on a basic phone those links won’t go anywhere. Not even emojis work on a Nokia.