In every child’s life there are certain indelible rites of
passage. Her first bike. Her first baseball mitt or roller skates or guitar.
Her first car.
Yet none of these is more fraught
with uncertainty, dread, and potential bankruptcy for you than her first mobile
phone. OK, maybe the car; it’s hard to wrap your phone around a tree or get
arrested for texting under the influence. But the hazards your kids will be
facing on the information superhighway are just as real as those they’ll
encounter on the road, if not quite as lethal.
You may also end up spending more for your kid’s data plan than
you do on her first car. According to Scratch Wireless, a provider of
inexpensive mobiles for teens, parents fork out an average of nearly $10,500 for one child’s phone service between
the ages of 12 and 22. In a word, ouch!
A survey by AT&T reveals that the average child
receives her first cell phone a smidge past her 12th birthday—and a third
of those are smartphones. When should you give your child her first phone? How
should you do it? What can you do to minimize the cost and/or pain? Is there
any way of getting out of it? The answer to that last question is probably not.
Here are the answers to the others.
Training wheels
Nothing says “consumerism gone wild” like the sight of
9-year-olds carrying iPhones. Yet, in the more affluent parts of the country,
fourth-graders can be seen carrying digital hand-me-downs from their parents,
who reflexively upgrade to the latest Apple or Android handset and think
nothing of passing a massively powerful handheld computer to the little squibs.
That’s like putting a Porsche
Carrera in the hands of a student driver, says Caroline Jones Knorr, parenting
editor for Common Sense Media.
“I think parents often put too
much technology in the hands of kids before they’re able to fully understand
the consequences of using it,” she says. “And then the kids treat these things
as status symbols, instead of tools for communicating with their parents.”
So give younger kids a dumb
phone. A simplified feature phone that lets you talk to them and get their
location is more than enough for most pre-tweens. Like training wheels on a
bike, dumb phones are an excellent way to teach kids how to communicate through
technology.
We gave our daughter a Firefly
Mobile phone when she was 8. It had two big buttons on it—one dialed Mom, and
the other called Dad—plus a third for emergencies. We could control not only
whom she called, but also who was allowed to call her. It was cute and
colorful, and she lost it within a week.
You can still get a Firefly
Mobile Glowphone for $50, then
add a pay-as-you-go service plan. A better idea? FiLIP makes a kid-friendly wristwatch that functions as both a location
finder and a very basic phone (really). The $200 rubber-coated device is
designed for tykes as young as 4. (Look for a review of it coming soon to
Modern Family.)
If you do decide to hand your old
smartphone to your youngins, be sure to use the phone’s settings to turn off features
you don’t want them to access, Knorr suggests. She adds that it’s also a
good idea to teach your children how to
make a phone call. Because, left literally to their own devices,
most kids never would. They need to learn that sometimes the best way to
resolve conflicts is to get on the horn and chat about them.
I remember teaching my kids to
say hello when the phone rings, goodbye before they hang up, and to leave their
numbers when they reach voice mail. I can’t remember my parents ever teaching
me these things. It appears to be a lost art.
Smart phones, smarter parents
So what is the right age to get your kids a smartphone?
I’ve asked a lot of people this
question lately, and the consensus seems to be middle school. That’s when
mobile phones become a necessity—often more for the parents than for the kids.
Kids’ schools are farther away, they often have after-school activities, and
it’s nice to be able to call or text to say you’ll be late picking them up from
soccer practice.
You can get away with a dumb
phone here, too, and endure the unending wrath of your teen. (“You’re ruining
my life—I hate you!”) Or you can succumb to their smartphone desires and deal
with excessive texting, sexting, Snapchatting, cyberbullying, video game
addiction, and all the other things that turn parents’ hair gray.
Seattle family therapist Jo
Langford says you shouldn’t buy your teen a mobile phone—you should buy her two mobile phones. One is the smartphone
she wants, the other is a cheap feature phone. Then you hand her a contract
that lays out the rules if she wants to keep the smartphone—like, for example,
Mom or Dad must have all the passwords to the device and may check it at any
time. (Langford offers detailed sample guidelines on his site.) If she blows it, she
gets the dumb phone for a while. That gives her the basic safety features you
want, without all the digital goodies she craves.
Or you can get a smartphone with parentalcontrols built in.
Kajeet sells a line of smartphones
that let you set time limits, filter websites, and block numbers. You can also bring your old hand-me-down Android or iPhone
handsets and sign up for Kajeet Wireless service (provided via the Sprint
network) for $5 to $50 a month.
This is your phone on crack
Buying the phone is only half the battle. Now you need to keep
your kids from bankrupting you with overage charges. Nobody wants to drop 10
large just so the kids can watch YouTube on their phones all night long.
A prepaid calling card may be
cheaper over the long haul than adding your text-crazed teens to your family
plan. When they run out of minutes, SMS messages, or data, they’re done—end of
story. Or you can opt for a smartphone from Scratch
Wireless or Republic Wireless, which use available
WiFi connections to place calls for free. If you’re not near a hotspot, then
you can purchase minutes from a traditional cell carrier.
You also need to protect your
investment in modern communications before your progeny lose it, sit on it, or
drop it in the toilet.
Hey, no one ever said having kids
was cheap or easy. That goes double for managing their digital lives. Think of
it as your own rite of passage.
By Dan Tynan
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