Do you check your kids phones?

[DoYaKnowTheFiveLamps]

Buying my soon to be 12 year old one for her birthday.

My daughter’s friends were almost all on Snapchat from
p6 or so. She’s very much the outlier.

All parents have the moral obligation to check their kids phones on a daily basis.

My son came to me when he was 14 & showed me some messages n a group he and some schoolfriends were on that was a blatant attempt at grooming. None of his friends would believe it and so he came to me & I contacted school.

I had a thread on here to help me decide about a phone for Y7- and actually couldn’t believe the stories I was hearing about secondary, I hadn’t even considered a phone at primary. OP @DoYaKnowTheFiveLamps stick to a Nokia and then you don’t even have to check it, unless you want a nosey at text messages which can’t even have emojis in 🤣 the thing I did learn is, no child who’s involved in anything lets you see the real messages and their real accounts. Have you seen the private chat and disappearing messages feature on WhatsApp, for example? For all the daily checking you do, especially on their social media, there’s potentially a whole other account running that you can’t see or access…

But if you trust your child with a smartphone, you should either let them use it or consider it not safe enough for them to have one, surely that’s where the moral judgement comes in and responsibility as a parent?

I trust my child to walk home alone from secondary school, I don’t retrace their steps to see what harm they could have got up to and quite frankly, if they were walking home whilst using a smartphone I’d worry more about that as they have access to everything. Why not spend the time chatting to your child that you would have spent checking their phone 🤷‍♀️?

It's not a case of trusting or not trusting them. It's a learning process where they can use one supervised then over the years you gradually reduce the level of supervision up to the ago of about 16/17 when hopefully they can be trusted.

I check both dd's phones. Dd1 is 14 and I generally check hers less now. Dd2 is 12 and is checked regularly. I don't read full conversations but just check there's nothing sinister. They have WhatsApp and YouTube with certain controls on. I'm almost certain they see tiktok via friends, but don't have it on their own phones.

We have no phones in rooms apart from on a group chat or call. So they have some privacy, but I'm comfortable that they are just chatting and it's not that often. I can see from WhatsApp that a lot of their friends seem to have unrestricted access, and have phones in rooms at bedtime and late at night.

Yes. Most days/

Oh and to answer - I don't check everything but I have a scan now and again to see if she's added any aps, who she's chatting to and if there's anything surprising. I don't read things unless she asks me to or I'm concerned about something. But she doesn't have snapchat, insta, etc and that seems like the place for most of the drama I hear about from her friends.

Yes you should thoroughly and frequently. My sd was groomed. Her life as it stands is ruined right now, at 19 she’s a mess.
one parent checked it and one didn’t. She slipped through. There phones need checking until there left school in my experience

Yes I do, and I’m very glad I do as recently ds (13) had a friend send a porn video to a group chat.
what a sodding pantomime that was to deal with.

Yes, until they're 16. They're currently 12 and 13.

I do 'spot checks' so no warning, but they have to give me the phone there and then so I can scan through. They're not allowed to delete stuff either so I can check history

But they can delete without you knowing and delete history 🤷‍♀️ My 10yoDN created a fake account for his 8yo brother on Snapchat, yet their parents were checking phones every night- they only discovered the account because the 8yo wasn’t mature enough to not mention it to his friends and it was their parents who alerted my DB. They literally had no idea and thought their spot checks were sufficient. Nothing stopping your kids deleting anything or hiding chats and apps.