DO NOT give your kid a smartphone this Christmas

[Firey40]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDd86TftyNT/?igsh=MTZueGVicm1udDllNw==

The evidence is overwhelming.

Their brains are only young once.

We might not have known before….. but we know now.

STOP GIVING KIDS SMARTPHONES

The 'evidence' isn't actually overwhelming at all, though.

Maybe just mind your own business and let other people parent their own kids.

You only need an apple air tag to do that, no iphone for child is required.

I agree. Ds 1 has a phone. He's in year 8. It has been very useful. Ds2 is in year 6 and has had one for his birthday in preparation for high school. Their school is a bus journey away. Plus, my eldest can ring when his after-school activities have finished, as the school bus has gone by then. For example, his activity finished early last week, so I collected him earlier. DS2 has hardly looked at his phone. Just because they have one doesn't mean they'll be obsessed with it. He's got messages and voicemails from his grandparents. I keep telling him to check it, but he doesn't. He doesn't have any social media or WhatsApp. I think that is problematic.

I've not bothered reading the link but at the end of the day we are in a different world and era now compared to the 1940s, most things are done online and I'm sick of trying to be made to feel guilty about it or live in the past. Times have changed

But he doesn't need a smartphone to do those things

I absolutely do. It’s not that she didn’t do well. She did 11 and got all 9s, 8s and a couple of 7s. But she wanted and was aiming for all 9s. But because she also spent so much time on her phone she also spent most of the rest of the time revising. She was absolutely exhausted and nearly burned out. She could have got those results with a few hours a day of “good, focussed” revision. She’s still sour about it so hopefully when it comes to Alevels she’ll have learnt a lesson!

I agree with you OP, YANBU.

My ds1 is in y5 and loads of his peers have been given smartphones for their 10th birthdays or will be getting them for Christmas.

I'm grateful that ds1 is still asking for Playmobil for Christmas 🥺 I might get him a brick phone for his birthday next year. Both him and my ds2 have refurbished, heavily locked down iPads which I do restrict access to, but I even regret getting them those. The Apple parental controls don't work properly and they are so addictive.

The secondary school they will be going to is 500 metres from home, so any risk is extremely minimal. Children are more at risk from what they see online, bullying via WhatsApp groups etc, impact on attention spans than anything happening to them when they are out and about.

Does the person teaching need an iPhone, though? I don't have an I phone, so would be no good for me?

If he doesn’t want you to know where he is he can just switch the phone off!

If he doesn’t want you to know where he is he can just switch the phone off!

Yep, or leave the phone at a friend's house when they go out. Then if anything happens when they do go out, they can't contact anyone.

I don't have children, so this topic has hardly anything to do with me, but I watched the two-parter Swiped the other day. The conclusions from the University of York study are alarming. But as a sixty something whose smartphone is her constant companion, I look at it and have a sense that the horse hasn't bolted, it's stampeded and taken its entire family with it. If I gave up my phone, my life would quickly become more difficult and harder to manage. The world I grew up in was very analogue. We took it for granted that we'd have pens and paper, a TV in the lounge, telephone boxes on street corners, address books, wall calendars, phone books physical music formats and bulky machines taking up space in our houses to play them on, that shopping and banking and going to the library meant leaving the house. The world has changed so much that oldies like me sometimes struggle to remember what it was like, let alone children who might never have played a vinyl record or have used a public phone box. (Good for them there though. Yuck!) It's impossible to imagine going back, so how does society move forward with the mental of its young people in mind?

Imagine what the consequences would be for the poor kid for doing that though, given he has the kind of parents who think it's normal to literally track his every step.

Have you considered a watch? My friends give their children a phone watch. It takes calls, it can text and it have a built in GPS so you know where they are if walking home from school. It has no access to the e internet.

I find it crazy that parents feel the need to track their children. Our parents did not have to do this. If they need us, they will contact us. I know a parent that has induced so much paranoia in their child it’s unhealthy.

I 100% agree with you. The channel 4 documentary Swiped shows a lot of evidence and I can feel that over the next couple of years we will finally be exposed to the damages of smart phones - to adults and especially young people.

We have a generation of high mental health disorders, crazy low concentration, self esteem and poor communication - and there are studies out there showing the link between some of these issues and social media.

The phone isn’t the issue, but phone use and lack of control is.

My teen (16) didn't have a smartphone until they turned 16, nothing bad happened to them because of it. In fact, they didn't want one because they were baffled at what it did to their friends' lives and MH. They had a basic Nokia that they could text and call on and could access the Internet at school or on a laptop at home. They had a paper timetable in their pocket. They looked up where to go if they needed to go somewhere.
Completely disagree that children need smartphones. I worked as a clinician in children' and young people's mental health services for a long time and I saw firsthand the damage they do to children.
There were so many parents who thought they were on top of their child's phone use. Trust me, even very young kids are inventive and know far more about technology than parents think, and can can circumnavigate restrictions.
The damage they do to young minds is horrendous.

It's never going to happen you know. The genie is out of the box. Far safer and smarter to teach your kids how to use tech as part of a rounded and fulfilled life that includes sport and socialisation rather than just ban them.

Our local town has got rid off nearly all it's pay phones. The only ones remaining are used by drug addicts. If I had a young teenager I'd rather they had a way of contacting me.

On the porn topic, I am an older millennial and remember being shown some really disgusting stuff at a friend's house involving a donkey. This was pre smartphones. The early days of the Internet were wild. If their friends have smartphone then you know you have no control over what they are seeing.

I'm sorry I don't understand what these letters mean? It looks like random texts turned blue.

It's a link. Were you not allowed tech or a smartphone as a teenager?

I find it interesting that the vast majority of kids discussed here are very sensible with their phones, only need them for a bus pass and to calm their parents anxiety.........whereas most that I see in real life are screen addled morons.
It's tragic that we are doing this to our kids simply because we can't cope with them going to school etc. without us.

You don’t need to be able to track your kids. Jesus. He’s not going to get lost on his way to school. If god forbid he’s one of the tiny numbers of children who get abducted by a stranger, your tracker will be of no help anyway because the abductor will get rid of his phone. It’s totally useless and you can buy a brick phone if he needs to call you.

Yeah. I mean as an adult I am not sensible about screen time myself and struggle with it, so the idea that an 11 yo would be is laughable.

The irony of a post like this...on social media, probably posted from your own phone. Lead by example, perhaps?

Air tags won’t work rurally they only work based on other phones. It’s very normal and sensible to track your children when they are travelling to and from school.

Why? How many incidents are there of children not turning up at school (unless it’s intentional in which case the tracker won’t help as they will likely ditch their phone)? Kids managed to get to and from school since forever without being tracked by their parents. I can understand having a phone to make calls from but genuinely not a tracker.