child's first phone - what do I need to know

[thewalrus]

After some advice. DD is in Y6 and will soon be getting her first mobile phone. What would people who've been there/done that advise me to do/avoid in terms of: PAYG/contract, parental controls, boundaries around usage etc?

Thanks for any thoughts1

She’ll be wedded to it all day. Make sure you set the boundaries in advance!

If you want a contract then id mobile do one for £3.99 a month which is 500mg of data, 150 mins and unlimited texts. That’s more than enough for ds as he’s not allowed to use the data outside of home.

He’s got an oldish iPhone as that’s what most of the kids seems to have - presumably parents old ones. I like it as it’s easy to restrict what he has access too ie he’s not got Safari so can’t be googling anything unsupervised.

I’d advise against Whatsapp - they seem to like it as it’s free texts if they’re on WiFi but aside from the fact it’s meant for 16+ now, it quickly gets them screenshotting each other’s messages, taking the mick out of pics of one another and joining uncontrollable sized groups.

Ds doesn’t have any social media and I’m hoping to keep it that way for a while. He mainly uses his phone to arrange football at the park and playing games.

Oh and the parental controls aka restrictions are very easy to set up on an iPhone. I’ve no idea how an Android compares.

DD, 11 in July, has iphone 6, hand-me-down from DH when he upgraded.

We have a plusnet monthly contract, we can change/cancel it on a monthly basis and for the moment that is sufficient.

She is not allowed social media despite "everybody has snapshat and instragram" and only does Facetime with girls we know. We also told her that we will check texts if we feel there is a problem.

When she moves to secondary in September we won't be able to avoid WhatsApp. Again, we told her we will review restrictions without her loosing out as it is virtually THE WAY to talk to each other.

Yes to Safari restriction and no password knowledge for the app store.

Thanks all, very useful. Lots to think about. I'm on android so will do some research into how their parental controls etc compare.

I'm with Sky and I was able to take out a second sim only contract for DS10 and we gave him DH old iPhone 6 when he upgraded.

It's £5pm unlimited call and texts and 500mb data, but Sky have this neat feature where any unused data at the end of each month goes into a "piggy bank" and I can allocate it to any of the numbers on my account.

I have 5gb on my contract and use around 3.5/4gb so I'm always banking some each month. Every now and again if DS has used his data for the month (usually during school holidays) I just top his account up from the piggy bank.

We also set rules from day 1 - phone is not for games it's for contact reasons when he's out and about, it goes off at 8pm (or bedtime at weekends), parental controls are set to restrict web browsing to age appropriate content and he cannot add apps. Basically he already has an Apple account for his iPad so by linking it to his phone the settings were mirrored. When he adds an app to either device I get a notification on my phone and have to approve it before the app will download.

Also no social media with the exception being WhatsApp.....

From the word go establish that you have the right to check texts and log onto all social media accounts then there is no bleating about privacy further down the line. No matter how much you think you trust your child and how sensible they are, online bullying and grooming is a real danger and can happen to anyone.

Establish a firm rule of no phones in bedrooms at night.