5yo girl with smartphone and snapchat

[SocialMediaKids]

Reasonable or unreasonable? Do feel free to share your thoughts

Absolutely ridiculous, how could anyone say otherwise?

Shit parenting. That's all.

It's a safeguarding risk is what it is. Absolutely no need.

Suffice to say I'm in the unreasonable camp myself.

This can't be real

I assure you it is.

I'm a longstanding poster, MN can verify me.

It isn't my DD obviously, but a child I know well.

Nope. Just look at the news today. Shocking but true.

"Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68838029

It's terrible parenting and very worrying!

I was about to post this, thank you.

It's mind blowing.

I have zero authority where this particular child is concerned so I can do nothing but express my opinion to parents, which I most definitely have done.

Really awful. Poor child.

Bonkers!

Also, the minimum age required to sign up to the app is 13 so whoever has made the account has lied about the age during registration.

The oldest child in the household isn't even 13.

Crazy. Surely they can barely read and write... Probably a good thing i guess if they have access to the weird cyber world out there

Indeed, for now.

I hate things like this as I was once the child given unmonitored access to the Internet at a young age by a feckless parent and I can still remember the things I saw but shouldn't have. It's infuriating.

I did see the BBC article but assumed the 5-7 year olds were mainly 7 nearly 8 year olds, which I still think is wildly inappropriate. Having said that I frequently see children in buggies with a smartphone I guess it doesn't make much difference who it actually belongs to.
I work in the world of sexual offending, DS' internet access is a very very long way away and he's five. Honestly I'd be raising this as a safeguarding concern, a five year old with snapchat!

You can set snapchat so you can't add or receive friends requests on there. Some children just use it for the silly filters that make their face into a vegetable/a dog for example. I don't think it necessarily means they are roaming the Internet unsupervised.

If they've been given their own smartphone, likelihood is they're unsupervised...

But it still remains that some children are only just 5 and have access to their own smartphone....

No five year old needs Snapchat. Whatever they're doing on it, If an adult hadn't showed them the filters they'd never even know they existed

@MyOtherCarisAVauxhallZafira

It is. Seen it so often among my kids' friends.

Unreasonable and I didn't let my own DS use snapchat until age 13.

Horrifying. Are the parents incarcerated, abroad, dead?

What a weird thing to say.

A few of my DD friend had smart phones at the age of 6. I'm not surprised.

One is as thick as two short planks and the other completely passive and goes along with whatever the other parent is OK with unfortunately.