Tree frogs?

[Littletreefrog]

Does anyone know anything about tree frogs. My son has wanted a pet tree frog since he was a toddler. He is now 11 and starting Secondary School in September. His grandparents who very rarely see him want to buy him a gift as they have had a little windfall (and I mean little) so they were thinking of something around the £150 mark, they don't want to send cash ithout it being earmarked for a specific purpose as they want to know it is going to be spent on something DS really wants rather than him spending it on lots of bits and bobs and most likely Xbox games.

DS has again bought up that he still wants a tree frog. Now he is older I am actually thinking about it as a possible idea for this money. Having researched different types of frogs I was thinking of a European Tree Frog as a fairly hardy beginner type frog. It seems like we need a vivarium, substrate, shallow water bowl, branches and plastic, plants, a heat mat and a light and we would feed them little cricket type things.

Does anyone have experience of them? Anything I'm not considering? Would they last on their own for a week for holidays etc or would we need a frog sitter?

I have a white Australian tree frog. Everything you have described sounds perfect, but I would recommend locusts as opposed to crickets (don’t smell and are silent). Exo terra vivs are ideal and lots of exotic pet shops will do you a starter type kit. They are fine being left for a week as long as you put the lights on a timer. Very low maintenance required.

European Green Tree Frogs (Hyla arborea) are very easy to care for BUT if you get a male he will croak / sing intermittently from 19:00 hrs to 05:00 hrs. They also dislike being handled and are very "jumpy".

You would be much better getting, to start off with, a single Australian Green [Whites] Tree Frog (Litoria caerulea). They grow much larger, tolerate / like being handled with wet hands and the call of a male is very quiet.
They come in brown, light green, grey or blue. There is also the stunning "High Snowflake" variety green with white spots - quite difficult to obtain at some times of the year, but in my opinion well worth searching for!
They do need a heat mat on a side wall to keep a constant temperature of 26ºC, a 26 watt UV lamp, a varied diet (silent crickets, wax worms, meal worms, calci-worms, earthworms & small locusts); it is also ESSENTIAL that they have calcium carbonate 5 days a week and Nutrobal 2 days a week heavily dusted on all food. Ours feed off our hands with "wriggly things".
They can live 15 years in captivity if well cared for.