Oh, hello.
I'm pretty sure you don't know me or my son, yet you seem very confident in your assertion that he keeps a phone at a friend's house.
I can appreciate that some people could find it hard to accept that there are some teens who thrive in the absence of having a smartphone, particularly if a person has seen their child's free time get dominated by a phone. Perhaps you have a teen who doesn't want to do much offline. Perhaps you know lots of teens who don't want to do much offline. Perhaps you don't personally know of any teens who do want to spend free time offline. This is of course fine. However, it does not prevent teens without smartphones from existing.
Such teens may be rare, and they may well have had to cope with some kids at school making dumb comments about their lack of a smartphone. I know my son has. But he dealt with that bit of discomfort - it actually only lasted a few days before the dumbasses got bored and moved onto something and someone else. We'd had discussions previously about the likelihood of unkind comments being made, so he wasn't surprised or taken aback by it. We'd discussed whose opinions he wanted to value, and whose he didn't want to care for. We also had discussions about how that kind of dumbassery tends to play out. He rode it out, he learned something about the dynamics of teen society and his own resilience in the process, and in the grand scheme of things that teens deal with and challenges parents help them with, it wasn't as hard or as prolonged as I thought it might have been. He's fit and athletic and has good self-confidence, and that provides some degree of protection from unwanted attention. If he was small, more obviously nerdy, or had other aspects that would likely make him a target for the bully types at school, it would no doubt have been much harder.
@Sliverofdarkness If your son isn't going to have a smartphone just yet, he and you need to be prepared for him to suffer a social price at school for a period, and you need to weigh up whether or not your son is going to be able to ride that out. Most kids suffer socially at school for some period of time for some reason(s), be it for having the wrong colour bag, wearing a coat, kids discovering a nerdy interest...whatever. He'll likely be dealing with the impacts of unkind attention one way or another at some point.)
If you want your son to reap the potentially huge benefits of not having a smartphone, you have to be prepared to pay your part of the price, and it's not small:
- Explain your reasons for considering not getting him a smartphone right now.
- Be honest about the challenges he'd likely face as a result, and what he and you can do to overcome those.
- Lay the groundwork for him to have a full offline life whilst he sees many of his peers getting sucked brain-first into their devices (I really can't emphasize this enough)
- Pay for and get him to and from extra-curricular activities which he enjoys, and ideally with mixed age communities. (We've found that older teens who are the 'doing stuff' types tend to be strongly supportive of and impressed by a younger teen who doesn't have a smartphone, and there's nothing quite so validating for our son than people he looks up to telling him that it's great that he doesn't have a smartphone.)
- Support his home-based hobbies and interests - show an interest, buy the stuff he needs to develop in those hobbies.
- Create/maintain a home environment which he enjoys spending time in
- Be available to talk through and deal with challenges.
It takes effort and resources to make a teen not having a smartphone a very positive thing. For the teen to ride out the difficult period in good shape, I think it also requires the teen to already have good levels of self-confidence, resilience, understanding of social dynamics, established hobbies and interests, intrinsic motivation, etc.