This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
Phones for Kids
Jun
6
2019
Sticking with the theme of last week’s post about having a plan for how you child will learn how to navigate the internet, I’m posting this week about what we did with introducing phones.
It seems a lot of kids are getting phones while in elementary school. I remember a few years back, my brother-in-law was telling us how his 6th-grade daughter was complaining to him how she was the only one in her class without a phone. He thought she was being dramatic, so at the parent-teacher conferences, he asked one of the teachers if that was true. The teacher answered that yes, the daughter was the only one without a phone.
Now, just wanting to fit in with the crowd is not necessarily a good reason to get something.
We tried to wait as long as possible before getting a phone for our kids. The oldest got his first phone in 8th grade because there were a number of things he was involved in after school that he needed to call or text us when he was done and needed to be picked up at the school. Back when I was in school, I used the pay phone in the lobby to call home collect for things like that. But since there are no pay phones anymore, we decided to go ahead with the phone.
We certainly didn’t buy him a phone, as that’s a waste of money. We just went to the phone store and got a SIM card for one of our old phones that would have netted us only $30 if we traded it in when getting our new phones.
I had been looking for a cheap flip phone as a sort of learner’s permit – one that could call and text but no internet. All the flip phone still came with web browsers, so those weren’t safe. We settled on the old iPhone, which has the convenient feature of being able to disable the browser (and other features if you want). He doesn’t have the passcode to enable the browser, and he doesn’t have his own iTunes account, so we will let him search the app store for games and apps, but he has to have one of us install it. There’s a lot more flexibility on the iPhone regarding parental controls than on a flip phone.
Plus, one of the things we didn’t foresee when we got him a phone in 8th grade is that the high school classes are setup assuming the students have certain apps on their phones. I’m sure the teachers would have made arrangements if we had said he doesn’t have a phone and can’t do what you assigned. But it makes the kid’s life easier just having that there, and not being annoyed that he has to go to the teacher to get special arrangements.
Beta got his phone is 7th grade. I was trying to wait until 8th grade like we did for his brother, but with kids at the elementary, middle, and high school, our schedules were a little more packed than they were when Alpha was in middle school. He had to borrow a phone to call us to get picked up and by that time we were familiar enough with the limits we could put on the phone so it wasn’t as big a step. Gamma and Delta still have to wait until middle school activities keep them after school though, before we get phones for them.
Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature.
1 Corinthians 14:20
This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 10:13 pm and has been carefully placed in the Life category.
