Parents – Share your Smartphone Wisdom! What do you wish you’d known before buying your child a smartphone?

[DigitalResilience]

Hi, I'm writing from Digital Resilience. We are a non-profit organisation that helps children and young people (aged 8-18) to become smart and responsible users of digital technology.

Recently, we've been working on crowdsourcing a survival guide for parents, written by parents on this topic. We have been sharing our question on our Facebook page and our Blog.

We are trying to stretch our net of responses as wide as possible and would love to hear your advice for future parents of kids with Smartphones.

I think, so far the key advice we've picked up is:

--> establishing clear boundaries surrounding times that phones should be switched off
--> not allowing phones in the bedroom at night
--> making sure that your child knows the dangers/difficulties that can arise from using social media and messaging sites.

We want to hear your experiences, so we can create the perfect handbook, written BY parents, FOR parents! Please comment/share/like on Facebook, or just on here. That would be lovely.

I would really appreciate some thought given to those who don't have smartphones (that would be me). I don't have one, neither does 11 year old DS. It would be helpful to show that there are alternatives - no phone, old Nokia type-phone, etc. The end of the world does not come if you don't have a smartphone! You will still have friends, people will still talk to you, and your social life won't actually come to an end!

That social media is addictive and damaging to their self esteem and mental health.
That the image of the perfect life people portray online is not usually the reality.
That it’s better to connect with people in person rather than spending all of your time online.

The issues surrounding online bullying and inability to escape from it outside school hours should be covered. Good idea by the way.

How to set up parental controls and use privacy settings within apps.
Issues with regards to sexting.