To think parents are not teaching any independence?

[MrBlobbysNuts]

A local parent group is in uproar because their precious secondary school children are apparently "too vulnerable" to get the bus before and after school without a phone (phones have been banned from premises entirely)

How is getting a bus for 15 minutes without a phone unsafe? Back in the day we just had ourselves and we survived. Give the kids cash and teach them to stop relying on phones to get around. The world is no more dangerous than it was 40 years ago, if anything it’s much safer!

I can guarantee my parents wouldn't have got me any kind of phone. I can hear it now. "Too expensive." Meanwhile, every other kid in my class probably would have one. Story of my childhood.

And if it happens on the way in? I also got one or two calls from the school “your daughter is not in”. Explained she is on the school bus, but it broke down on the way or that it was delayed and she had to make alternative arrangements, but she’s on her way ,which I knew because she let me know. Imagine getting that call and having no way to figure out where your kid is.

I know the difference between dumb phones and smart phones.

No bus pass or timetables (public route) on the dumb phone.
No mapping apps on the dumb phone
No sharing images on the dumb phone

My two have ND and physical health issues in the equation.
I've had times where one DC's knee had given out on the walk home and he needed me to collect him.
The time that a smart phone was most valuable was during a storm when trees were blocking the bus route causing lengthy diversions, delays and congestion. Autistic DS was able to show mapping of where he was in an unfamilar neighbourhood. That precise communication kept him calm and functioning and avoided autistic shut down in a stressful situation that went very much off-routine.

It's not 1995. The pay phones in school and in public are gone. There are fewer places like corner shops and pubs to ask for help. Printed information like bus timetables have gone. I don't have the volume of small change to handle cash fares for 4x journeys per day (and it's not 30p per ride either). If they've stayed to 4:20 for an extra-curricular, the school office is shut by the time they get to the bus stop and realise there's an issue.
The world expects that the people participating in it has a smart phone and it's equipping teenagers for independent life for them to use phones as functional tools.

If school want my teenagers to put phones in pouches or hand in, that's fair play, but they do need that tool to navigate the real world in the gap between school and home.

While cyber bullying and phone addiction is very much a real problem, the solution is managing those specific behaviours, not removing tools and impairing the participation in society of people who are not a part of that problem.

As a parent I've done a lot more to build my teenagers towards independence (and at an earlier age) than DM did for me.

Yes it still is, now the attacks and fights are filmed and shared.

If schools didn't set all homework online, maybe kids wouldn't need a smartphone.

I just think this whole ban phones from school premises is over zealous. It’s like when schools ban football for everyone, just because one or two kids can’t play nicely. No mobile phones should be on at all during the school day but it does help parents to keep in touch with their child when school finishes. Yes we all used to make it home without phones, but we have the technology now to know our kids whereabouts. Roads are more dangerous now for example.

I'm a teacher and my two secondary teens WILL be taking their phones to school. Three weeks ago, the rail network suffered a day of cancellations due to a communications issue. They spent an hour at the station waiting for a train. The doors didn't open at their stop and they ended up in the next town and rang dad to pick them up. They got home at 6.45. If they didn't have their phones, we'd have NO IDEA where they were.

I would hope that they’re using a pc/laptop/tablet for their homework rather than a tiny phone screen.

Tbf that’s a bit like sneering at the parents who gave their kids a few coins to use a phone box as a back up. What if they lost the money, what if the phone didn’t work etc. That doesn’t mean that giving kids a backup curbed their independence.

My 12 and 10 year olds get the bus to school. 10 min walk to the bus stop, an hour on the bus and a 5 min walk the other side. Yes they could do it without phones… if their bus pass wasn’t on their phone.

On the way in, if the bus never showed, I'd have gone home. There we had a landline where I could have called the school or called my mother at work. I didn't really have another way of getting to school, so I guess I'd have stayed home. That never happened but the bus did break down on the regular. We stayed at the place it unloaded until the replacement bus showed up. Might be late for school but we just got a late pass from the office after explaining. We kept perspective and parents didn't get all worked up about it knowing that the bus had probably broken down. If we still hadn't got to school by lunch time, then there would be some worrying and investigation by parents.

We just don’t do it 🤷‍♀️ I’ve explained to the teacher my primary kid doesn’t have a tablet or computer, and if they want her to do homework it’ll have to be provided in paper form.

Of course it's not but even those kids needed to know what else to do. What would you do if you got to the phone box and the phone was broken? That definitely happened. These options are good to have but you also have to be able to have problem solving skills for when your best laid plans come unstuck.

Exactly

Presumably it’s smart phones they can’t have. Lots of schools are doing this, thank god.

It’s insufferable. My 21 year old is a ‘step parent’ and has a baby due next month. He has a house deposit saved, a job, a side hustle and is a busy and productive man. On mumsnet when his peers are all huffy or have tantrums or do something stupid every other poster says something about how hard it is, how their brains aren’t developed and gives them a free pass for their idiocy. Mine is a bit unusual in his enthusiasm for settling down but this would have once been entirely normal. My 13 year old has cooked most of his own food this hols. He cooked his gran a meal which was fab.

I teach and have seen the perils of not giving your children the confidence to crack on and do something. About half of my year 11 students have never been to the nearest city independently. It’s not far away. Mostly this is because they wouldn’t dare. It’s too big, too scary and their mum wouldn’t like it. Their college is chosen according to to proximity and their one class mate who flies home to another country every long holiday elicits something more akin to terror than admiration. This year 5 parents have been in touch about speaking and listening g assessments for English explaining that their child can’t do it. Am sympathetic to children who really can’t but most can and the message should be that they will have to do hard things in life and it will be fine.

Exactly, I used to travel 9 miles by bus to school, if there was ever an issue getting home I’d just phone my mum from the phone box across the road, if I had no money I could make a reverse charge call (I can still remember my mum taking me to a phone box when I was about 8 and teaching me how to do this). Personally I’d be all for people under 16 only being allowed a brick phone. Can call and simple text but nothing else.

Maybe a travel card as well as cash? Some buses are cashless.

It also depends massively on where you live - in my local area a lot of the school kids have one bus option and if they miss it, there isn't another one. This means that that 15 minute bus journey turns into an hour's walk. Not a problem as such, but if my kid took four times longer to get home than normal I'd be worried for all that time.

I agree @takealettermsjones . When DD was at school the only way to get to school was the dedicated school bus. The bus company the school had a contract with had old, under maintained buses that often broke down, and even caught fire on a couple of occasions. It wasn't really feasible for the children to walk for five miles on winding country lanes with no pavement, and therefore a phone was required. I agree with a pp that a simple non smart phone would suffice.

I think those advocating for no phone at all must live in an area with plentiful public transport.

I was smiling at a recent thread where people described how often they phone/message their undergraduate kids (many every day).

That must be so suffocating @VickyEadie
Both DD and I were ready for her to go to university. Our contact was as and when required.

It is down to us as parents to give our DC the life skills to be independent. I had always encouraged independence, as my mother did to us, and now, apart from help with the rent costs in her student accommodation DD is completely independent.

On the WIWIKAU Facebook page there are so many mothers (it is always mothers) who spent all summer sobbing at the idea of their DC going away to university. I am so tempted to tell them to get a grip. I don't of course, but being a clingy parent is not good and doesn't encourage independence.

ahem, school kids they did have phone 20 years ago.

Many, many children are indeed doing their homework on a tiny phone screen.
A very large number of families can't afford a laptop for their children to do homework on.

20 years ago I was 22 and definitely had a phone! I got my first mobile phone when I was 13… because my dad didn’t like the idea of me getting the bus to school without any way of contacting them if it all went wrong.

They don’t need to have their own laptop! Just a device in the home available to them.

Mine were 12/13 and didn’t have phones. They managed perfectly well and certainly didn’t feel they were missing out.

As an aside... my parents never knew i was late home from school because they didnt get home from work until 6pm. They were in Central London, I was in the suburbs... they couldnt drive, we didnt have a car. It wasnt unusual. We had to just get on with it.