What's a normal age for children getting their first mobile phone?

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Ds is ten. He has a friend at school who is always on at him to get a mobile. Ds says "All the children at school have one." This has never, will never, be an argument that works on me, I need to have other factors to convince me to go down this road.

Further questioning: I said, "What do they all do with them?"
Ds: "Use them to make prank calls and play games."

I said "If we got you a mobile it would be cheap and not very good, probably no games on it at all. It would be functional. It wouldn't be like mummy's phone (my one has all the bells and whistles, internet access, games etc). If I get you a phone it won't impress your friend, the boy with an I-Phone."

Ds: (mutinous expression).
Me: "Would you take your phone to school and show your friend?"
Ds: "No. It would stay at home. But my friend would ask me all about it."
Me (pragmatic to the end) "Okay so lie to your friend that you've got a HTC Desire. He will never know. Give him my number, you can borrow the phone and chat to him whatever."
Ds: "No, I want my own phone."
Me (despairing) "If you had a mobile of your own, I'd spend my life saying "No playing with the mobile, you can have it later for twenty minutes, just like all the other technology in the house."
Ds: "No I could play with it whenever I want because it would be my phone."
Me: "You're in cloud cuckoo land if you think just because it's yours I will let you play with it whenever you like."

I cannot get ds to pretend my phone is his phone, he is getting hassled all the time by his friend and here's me and daddy being all hard as nails about him owning his own mobile. I don't like small bits of technology, my children are constantly walking off buses leaving scarves, hats, cameras behind, a mobile would be no different. And NO WAY would he get to play with it all the time. So my decision at the moment is "no" to mobiles.

So what is a good age for a mobile and what is a good phone to own? I mean a really basic cheap one? Should I say no his whole life and teach him the value of refraining from materialism? Or does he need to learn just what a hollow promise phone owning is through his own experience?

Despite what we keep being told about mobiles being safe i am still something of a luddite. i have a phone, it stays in the car for emergencies. I have tried to bring my children up to think likewise but it is tough. having no phone at secondary school is viewed as child cruelty! Because we live in a rural area with bus services etc the way they are they have a phone when they start senior school. I don't like it and i ban it from family days out etc but i am an old person(apparently) and this is the way young people communicate. I grew up in a town where if i wanted to chat with my mates i went out the door and there they were. My kids all know i hate them so they do keep them out of my sight. Don't get me started on trades people who come to your house to do a job like fix your cooker or your washing machine and then spend the whole time answering their phones to other clients who are obviously more important than me

"dd is 6 but does two activities a week where I leave her and go off so it might be no bad thing for her to have one in case there's an emergency or I'm late collecting her."

Absolutley not. At this age it's the teacher's responsibility to tell you if there's an emergency and it's the teacher you should tell if you're going to be late.

Can you inagine if all the 6 year olds at ballet were telling theri parents their version of the "emergency" if the fire alarm went off~? Or passing on the message about how late you're going to be "Mum says she'll be five hours late and please could you wait for her? Or did she say 5 minutes? Maybe seconds? No - I'm sure she said hours"

"
I can't understand why anyone would buy their kids an iphone just to fit in.."

Me neither!

slarty My son has a "sim only" which does mean you need to have your own phone, but you get more minutes/texts because they don't give you a "free" phone. Virgin are doing one for a fiver I think? Also they run on a 30 day or 12 month contract,unlike a contract with a phone which normally starts at 18 months.

My children will get their first mobile phone around the age of 13. Reasons being they will be an 'official teenager' by that point if you like, so therefore to celebrate and give them a treat, that is what they will get. It won't be super expensive nor super cheap, sort of in the middle. If they break it or lose it, they will have to wait and learn to be more responsible.

I know that may seem harsh to some people. I didn't get my first mobile phone until the age of 11 almost 12. It was very cheap and it was my uncle's old one. When I became 13/14, my uncle again, gave me his old mobile phone, I loved it and it was better than my first. I've had a few mobile phones but have never broken or lost one. They have always been pay as you go.

Both of mine got their 1st phone at 11 just before secondary school.
DS2 now 13 and still has most of the original £10 credit .
DS1 has a sim only contract for £6.00 a month from Tescos. He gets unlimited texts and 60 minutes calls a month. He bought the (unlocked) phone himself from a phones R us type place.
Neither of them seem bothered or impressed by fancy phones but I think the girls in their circle are.

My DD got hers for christmas at just before her 10th birthday...I was very anti and thought I would never her get her one until she was much older...
I found out that ALL the children in her class DID have one ....and not an old brick but mostly cheaper touch screens...

I like recycling etc and don't replace things until I really need to - she got a WII for christmas the year before - before that no computer games etc...I didn't get a mobile until about 5 years ago when I 'needed' one - car trouble meant I had to keep going up and down a windy country road...3 miles from anywhere...whilst pregnant with a 5 year old...

I have come to realise that you have to give on some points ....peer pressure is one thing -and individuality is allowed - but if they have nothing in common to talk about they will feel (and be) excluded...

I got her a £50 touch screen on PAYG...(it has a camera and an MP3 player - things that she asked for too...) -she knows if she loses it/it gets broken she won't get a new one...and because I compromised she knows I mean it.

After the initial appeal now it is mainly left at home...
but it has been useful...
eg (after much soul searching) I let her cycle to her jazz classes (1.5 mile each way) - because she texts me to tell me she got there and has to text me when she leaves on the way back - and I know if she falls off etc she can call me...(and we are a small community - a lot of people will know her and if anyone saw her in trouble/doing something silly they would help her out/tell me ..;-)
Good for me - it really was a pain to take and collect her....but good for her - giving her more responsibility/freedom has made her more responsible...

i think it is ridiculous children having mobile phones at all. We never had them when we were at school as they weren't invented!

all kids do with mobiles is play tricks on each other, engage in material one-upmanship, and fight over them. and they are expensive.

theres a lot more fun to be had as a kid rather than just playing on a mobile phone.

theinet - the 1980s are that way < ---

I bought DD a cheap pay as you go when she started year 6. Most of her friends were getting them at that age so it seemed like a right of passage. She has moved onto a blackberry which she pays for out of her allowance.

As someone who runs an activity for children it is absolutely MY responsibility to have parents contact details and to call them in the case of illness or other emergency. Any phones that are brought in to class have to be left in the coffee bar area at their own risk and switched off.

To answer seeker's question on the previous page, the phone lets me know who DD is with because she uses it to tell me and I trust her. If she's going to the park or into somebody's house/garden I like to know and for the moment doing it this way works for us.

2 of my dd's 7 and 9 have cheap payg mobiles. They play out with their friends and i can keep in touch with them. Non of their friends have expensive ones. Mine were £20 each they are pink and have text camera and video.

Seeker, I hope they are joking too. My aim in life has been to teach my kids not to mind if they're 'different' from the crowd. Tribalism shouldn't be actively encouraged even if we do all have some of it in us. There's another point too, which has just occurred to me and I don't recall seeing it in the thread but forgive me if it's there: what if you simply can't or don't want to spend money on a phone that you don't really think your child needs? My kids never seem to have a problem with that. We are not poor but we're not rich either and it simply isn't true that you'll have no friends if you're not 'the same' as everyone else.

I am shocked that so many children have mobiles because they need to ..TEXT their friends! Whatever happened to landlines? And this is ONLY if the they DO NEED to phone their friends.

It is called moving with the times ninani.

< Points at Grandma in the corner >

DS got one a week or so before he started secondary school. Basic Nokia type, texts and calls and does nothing else. When he'd had the basic phone a few months without breaking or losing it he was given a better phone (I am on a very limited budget and can't afford to keep replacing things, so responsible phone ownership had to be proven before I'd fork out for a decent one). It's mostly for him to keep in contact with me re delays/changes in plan on way home from school, or out with friends, and my exP texts a "have a good day" kind of thing to he and my dd on it each morning and calls them each evening on it. He occasionally texts friends but not a massive amount.

I'll do the exact same thing with DD when she starts in September.

Have not read the whole thread, but the Dc got theirs when they started to walk to school/ be left at home etc on their own, so Dc1 was 9, Dc2 was 10.
The catalyst for DS1 was when a friend found him in tears outside the school one moening as it was a day he was going on a school trip and I had forgotten and sent him to school without a packed lunch. Luckily my kind friend called me and I was able to rush round with a hastily packed lunch Very useful the other day when DS2 forgot his keys and was able to phone DS1 who was at a nearby friend's house to come home and let him... in....

They need to start with a brick. So they don't use the camera which would get it confiscated at school. And so everyone knows they don't have a trendy one and it doesn't get stolen, so they don't lose it in the first week.

But then I feel very proud that my kids don't have to have a wardrobe bought from JAck Wills or wherever, have friends who don't judge tem on possessions etc.
DD got one at 10 because she needed one, otherwise its secondary school. But their primary allows them to use the school phones if they need to phone home.

I bought my son a really cheap one for his 9th birthday last year. I bought it for practical reasons - he wanted to go out to play with his friends and would be out of my sight. With two other children I didn't want to spend my time out looking for him when it was time to come home so it was for my benefit as much as his.

I've now upgraded him slightly to my old Nokia but it's still a fairly basic one with no real bells and whistles.

He uses it to call home and I use it to call him home!

For games I allow him to use mine HTC Desire - usually he and his brother fight over it.

tbh he's not really been that bothered by what his friends have. Some have more fancy phones, other mums are more like me and look at it from a practical point of view.

Now, expensive trainers, on the other hand..................

My DS is 6 (nearly 7) and mentions having a phone intermitedly. My friends DD.s have them at 5 & 7 and so its usually because he's seen them with theirs or been out to the park (opposite my house) and seen the teens with theirs. 11 seems to be the average age around here and DS has been told when he starts Secondary school - he's 11 2 weeks before he does.

However DS has allergies and previous analyphalatic reaction - he wears a medic alert bracelet with my mobile number on - but I am thinking when he starts to go out of my sight him having a mobile might be better as I can't rely on someone else having one to call me (adult or child).

How far he goes will depend on how he can manage his allergy should something happen - eg if he can't manage epi-pen then he will stay close with mobile. Hopefully as he gets older things will improve.