To not allow my almost 11 yo a mobile phone

[Dottycotton86]

Back story my now 19 yo son had a phone on his first year of secondary school. This was a huge learning curve and I have decided that my daughter will not be allowed one this young. At what age do you think is suitable to have a phone. I am only see negatives with a phone and lots of positive to not having one. At the moment she doesn’t seem that bothered but I am sure this will change. Anyone on the same position how will you deal with the peer pressure once she is at school. I don’t want her to feel isolated

Exactly this. No parent will endorse succumbing to peer pressure unless it’s about something as harmful as phones. Madness!

Don’t assume she will be ostracised for not having a smart phone. Growing numbers of kids don’t, especially in the current year 6 cohort as they head off to secondary school. My daughter is in year 7, has a Nokia flip and a number of her friends have the same. As a result there hasn’t been an odd one out feeling about it. Her homework requires access to a computer and the internet, but not a smartphone. Take a look at the smartphone free childhood website to understand the issues and they provide info on a range of alternatives.

This is the most terrible logic I have heard all day. Why an earth would you bring the temptation in when the child isn’t even interested? Should the OP start buying weed, fags and vodka too and leaving porn around the house?

Its depressing that you can't say just go outside and play when there are no other kids to play with. All cooped up indoors or far away.

Fact: There are no positives to having a smart phone at this age.

I regret giving my teens phones at 11 and wish I had waited (they have all the parental controls).

I wish I had given mine basic Nokias for communication purposes only.

FWIW, one of DS12’s friends doesn’t have a phone (Year 7) and is not left out at all. The more people who do it, the more normal it will become and the more likely we are to get away from this awful scourge.

My 11yo has a smartphone but no social media/WA or internet browser. He can call and text but isn’t currently interested.

We use Google Family link so everything is very restricted up to the age of 13, so that works for us for now. Any app has to be approved by you.

I personally didn’t want to go as far as a brick phone as I didn’t want him standing out at secondary.

Or the children who are playing out are not the ones you’d want your children playing with 😬 our old area the only children our where the children of the druggies who wanted them out their hair. Ours then had to be kept in.

New area and just pretty much no children out we have a large park field football pitch I can see from my windows and it’s mostly empty all the time.

DS is 11 and gets annoyed with the amount of messages he gets on his at times, just groups with friends from school and his sports teams. It has meant that he's learned it's ok to turn it off and walk away from it, that he doesn't need to answer immediately.

There are limits and controls on there, he knows he has no privacy when it comes to having his messages checked by us so he shouldn't send anything he doesn't want anyone else to see.

He did end up sending a message with the word 'shit' in it instead of 'shot' and came to tell me straight away, which was nice of him.

This. Just because you get them a phone doesn't mean you're automatically opening the gates to Mordor. My 14 and 12 yr olds both have a smart phone. Full parental controls, timers, no access to social media or youtube, whatsapp is permitted but only groups allowed are with family members (and it's set so that they can't be auto added to any groups).

We had an interesting discussion this week around Duolingo, one of them said they liked learning a language but it was finding it too addictive so deleted it himself. I do think once they're a bit older (admittedly maybe not as young as 11) they need to learn how to manage healthy habits around tech.

DS14 (Yr10) has friends who still don't have any phone, and DS12 (Yr7) I reckon a third of his year are phone free. Any child who says "but everyone has one" is usually lying...

I’m not convinced delaying giving her a phone will have much impact on this. I struggle a lot with being glued to a phone and smartphones weren’t even in existence when I started secondary school. Your son would likely have the same issues even if you’d waited a couple of years longer.

Completely agree. That “what the hell were they thinking” moment is already happening with parents wondering why others gave their kids access to smartphones so young.

No one’s to blame. No one could foresee the shit show it would cause but the damage to kids is now clear - so it’s time to make a change.

Your daughter is generation alpha. Phones are a big part of their lives now whether you like it or not. As long as you teach her how to keep herself safe and put restrictions in place, she'll be fine.

There is a certain degree of virtue signalling in not allowing phones - an equivalent of "we don't have a tv" from not so distant past.
You can't escape tech. You need to be equipped how to deal with challenges.

There's more and more parents becoming aware of the issues around having phone too young. We are very fortunate that we are in the same mind frame as majority of the parents of our children's friends and the pressure is off for us thankfully.

@AliceMcK sorry, was just using those as generic examples not specifically what is restricted/banned for us. I agree, tiktok is a cesspit.

My DD (11) won't be getting a smart phone for a good few years. She'll get a brick when she starts secondary.

I struggle to have a healthy relationship with my phone, so it's unfair to expect my DD, with her developing brain, to manage any better. She does have a Chromebook with emails, but not social media or WhatsApp.

We have friends with similar approaches to us, so although DD feels left out, she's not the only one in this position.

I teach this age group. They have told me so many stories about how they can get around parental controls and dummy accounts and apps. If they put as much effort into their schoolwork we'd be amazing.Most of them admitted to putting false ages in sm accounts (which effects the algorithm and the people they connect you with) and a few had chatted online with strangers who said they were kids.

None of their parents knew about these things.

Virtue signalling

Making a choice on how to parent your kids is not virtue signalling, it is a genuine choice for your family.

Children’s brains are not at all adapted to cope with smartphones and all they entail. The social reward-seeking parts of the brain start to mature around the age of 10-12, but the area responsible for self-control and will-power isn’t operating on all cylinders till our mid-twenties. Throw in algorithms advanced enough to even hold adults’ attention hostage for hours at a time, and we still expect to give our children the means to access all of this yet expect them to emerge on the other side completely unscathed, and with a healthy relationship towards themselves, society, and the internet. Bonkers.

You know what’s best for your child, So go with your gut instinct.
I think after watching adolescence a lot of parents will be thinking the same as you.

This is what I've been trying to say, much less eloquently.

this is what also baffles me. i grew up with computers, there is very little my kids can do that i can't spot, i know more about these things than they do and so far, nothing they've done has got past me because 9/10 it ends up damaging the computers and they stop working.

Parents who aren't tech savvy themselves in this day and age definitely have no place handing a pre-teen a smart phone.

And just watching BBC news.. if you have any doubt, i suggest you watch the news report about the online groups aiming harm at young girls via social media.

I bet people said the same about wearing seatbelts, putting children in car seats and passive smoking. It’s just entry level responsible parenting.

what if they sneak another device in? something you didn't even know they had?