Not having a smartphone

[aNameyName]

Thinking ahead a year or two to having a teenager: My child is already in a small minority in not yet having their own smartphone, and since reading 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt, I'm minded to hold out against giving my child a smartphone until they can get one themselves, if they want to because the massive developmental opportunity costs were shocking when laid out so plainly.

If you have teenage children with a dumb phone or no personal phone at all, what are the worst negative impacts for your teen of not having a smartphone? Has your position on smartphones affected your relationship with your child? At what age / event do you intend to give your child a smartphone, if at all? What other factors should I consider in weighing up if / when to give them a smartphone?

The school apps work better on phones 🤷 Also means they can do short homework tasks on the bus home.
(monthly bus tickets only available thru an app that they pay for their banking app)

This.
I teach teenagers- some have made the active (and mature) decision to have no social media and that's obviously absolutely fine.
All you can do is encourage them to use a smartphone judiciously.
But not letting them have one at all would effectively shut them out of the society they are growing up in.

DD knew a few kids whose parents didn't allow smartphones. They all found workarounds. A couple had secret phones that their parents knew nothing about. Others created SM accounts that they accessed on their friends' phones etc.

I knew a couple of parents who were very vocal and quite smug about their decision not to let their kids use social media. I never felt comfortable telling them that I had seen what their dc were doing on SM when monitoring my own DC's accounts.

I think this sounds a sensible approach. I have also read the Haidt book and share your concerns.

My DS is 13 and got one at the end of y6 (incredibly, this was much later than his peers!) but we are strict with limits and with what apps he can have. He is pretty good at self regulating.

My younger child is 10 and very different from his brother and I do worry he might be addicted if we got him one, and since reading the haidt book is thinking I will be even stricter when then time comes.

Don't you think supporting and coaching your children in the use of smart phones would be better than strict bans @funderama ? Imagine being really strict and then they get their own phone and have no boundaries when they are no longer under your control.

Or that they get a secret phone / access on friends phones as opposed have said (and as I've seen).

You'll find that school bus passes are often via an app now, whether it's a school contract bus or a public service bus.

School homework is also often set via a portal which works much better on smartphones and science experiments now need to be filmed/photographed using a phone.

Google classroom is also used quite a lot. Paper worksheets are uncommon now, and that's as it should be.

If they don't at least have WhatsApp then they will be unable to join in much with friends and social activities, none of which are organised by parents or by paper invitations anymore at secondary school.

Where is the advantage of smugly denying your child a necessary piece of equipment. They have to learn to use them responsibly and that won't happen if they have no access to them.

You can set parental controls on smartphones, and they have to follow the rules set by the school or face the consequences.

It honestly amazes me the knots people are tying themselves up in on here to not give their children phones that are fit for purpose.

People might come out with the old trope that we grew up without them and just used phone boxes on street corners. There are few such phone boxes around now and smartphones are used for such an array of stuff, including by schools despite their bleatings about the phone having to be off/in bag at all times. Also, stop looking at the past like it was some sort of utopia. It wasn't, and we are not going there. We're going to the future, like it or not.

It's always "smartphones" that get bad press, reality it's apps like Snapchat and ticktock that are the issue.

UK Government should raise the age for such apps to 16 and make the companies responsible for checking.

I wonder how many anti-phone people have kids with tablets or ipads, which can also be used for Snapchat and the like.

Kids with 'secret phones' how, who pays for them?

I have to assume they are acquiring 2nd hand handsets and switching the sim from the 'acceptable dumb' phone into them?

Loads of people have old spare phones lying around, esp people who buy every couple of years on contracts.

watching with interest.

On a related note, WhatsApp can be installed these days on a tablet or desktop computer (as can Signal). So, I don't think you need to have it on a phone in order to use it, I think you just need a phone number associated with the account.

So feasibly the dumb phone could work with Whatsapp on the PC if need be.

I think there are also a couple of dumb phones with just whatsapp.

Honestly we're on the stricter end of things phone wise. Was 13 when they got one. Can't go upstairs and I regularly take it and check content.
Having said all that. They would be lost without it for socialising ( all arranged through snap chat) google class room for homework and we use the location services where we can see where they are at all times which is very handy particularly if we need to pick them up from bus etc.
I think it's more important to tech regulation than an outright ban.

She’s fine with it. She can access the internet under supervision on my laptop at home. The only thing she feels she’s missing out on is WhatsApp and we will probably allow that when she’s 13 with strict rules around group chats

Mine have smart phones that were turned into basic phones by disabling the browser and similar functions. The first time we disabled it was at my then-13 year old's son request (his grandparents had gotten him a smartphone while he was on holiday with them for a few weeks so he could go out to the beach by himself) as he found having everything available too overwhelming and distracting even with a time lock and filters on it, preferring to use the desktop we had attached to the TV for internet.

When he was 14 we allowed Instagram because he was taking part in a local teen photography course that used it. For fairness, we then made the rule that at 14, the kids could pick one social media, which ended up interesting with my older daughter who had her friends telling her how horrible each platform was as she was getting closer to the age she gets to picked, which put her off picking any for a while, especially as her brother had dropped Instagram.

May be a regional thing, but I see plenty of kids still texting. My secondary age kids and their friends text all the time. My 14 year old will sit and plan entire weekend events with friends via texts. She and the 12 year old also use the school Microsoft accounts to send messages over Teams via PC with people they're less close to or don't have phones, the latter seems popular as it doesn't involve giving anyone their phone number and it's easier to report if someone starts acting horrible. WhatsApp has a pretty bad reputation here for scams and bullying, my oldest at 19 was a bit irritated he had to get it for a work group chat. Discord's reputation is a bit better, though still rife with scams and automation bots getting hacked if going beyond just personal messaging.

It's never been an issue at school for my younger 3 - they're at a school where KS3 and KS4 aren't allowed to use personal devices. I understand why some schools do allow personal devices - it's cheaper and helps to manage when school devices get broken again after the latest Tiktok challenge to break keyboards or other shite the tech team has to deal with - but there are major safeguarding risks like students filming others and posting it online. My oldest who attended a different school did have an issue at 15 of needing browser access on his phone during school, but we were able to discuss how to manage that with his additional needs, and I'm aware they don't do that for KS4 students anymore in large part because safeguarding issues came up. With the increase in cyber attacks and these types of safeguarding incidents, there is a lot of talk I hear in education about moving away from relying on internet-reliant devices, even heard schools running no internet days to see how resilient the systems are if they need to be pulled, but how the future will pan out is hard to tell.

You can buy a PAY-G sim card for next to nothing, all you then need is an old phone off a friend, and off you go.

The issue with PAYG sims are they all seem to want £10 a month top up minimum. Or at least they did the last time I looked for one. A contract was easier and cheaper.

I suppose the question is how easy is it for them to get the £10 without anyone noticing it. Possibly slightly easier if they deal in cash for.lunch etc.
Can you still buy the top-up cards cash in shops or do you need to pay by card over the phone?

My DDs have giffgaff SIMs... you don't need £10 a month! Thats for data packages. If the phone is connected WiFi, somewhere (and let's face it... a teenager can easily connect to home WiFi,) you can use hardly any data. I top up their phones every few months.

As I said, I wonder what her perspective would be. Not your opinion of her perspective.

I wouldn’t do it. I agree with your concerns but ultimately I feel that it would cut them off. Also it is unwise to just hand them a phone at 16 and let them off. They need to be gradually given more freedom as they understand more. My 12 year old does not have a phone - she will get one next year (in line with her group of friends) she wanted to see some tik tok person so we watched it together and I’m trying to talk more and more to her about cyberbulling/algorithms and phone addiction while she’s still open to listening to me. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing but at least I am trying.

It may well be different. But my priority is to keep her safe, not make her happy.

You may tweak that thought as she gets into teens. Mental Health often becomes a priority then.

Causing your child unhappiness by deliberately excluding them from normal life is going to create problems in itself, though.

And the two are not mutually exclusive. There are ways of keeping a child safe and happy. Some great ideas on this thread.

Of course. But PP's wording made me think she wasn't truly considering the happiness side.

My dtwins are not getting phones when they start high school September, we are also not alone in this decision and I think recently more parents are considering delaying this.

@Needanewname42

I use giffgaff, £6-10 a month, most teenagers could pay this without a parent knowing.

My oldest is first year of secondary I've just asked the question does he know anyone without a phone - nope!

I don't think people are delaying phones at all.