I had my first mobile phone aged about 19, it did nothing but ring people and a later version let you play snake too! This is a world away from today’s smartphones and living in an online environment so today I share my thoughts about children’s mobile phones.
It was a great discussion around how much we should monitor young peoples usage. I have a 20, 15 and 10-year-old so have different opinions based on their ages. This discussion has since been followed up with a chat on BBC Breakfast. I enjoy sharing my opinions based on my many years working with teenagers.
Phones for Kids
As a parent of teenagers and a tween I have a long list of achievements and failings with this age range! That coupled with 12 years teaching in a secondary school, a school governor and former youth worker have led me to have many opinions on how to parent this challenging stage.
Over the years I have written about everything from bribing my children to pass their exams, whether children should attend funerals to providing strategies for revision. No topic is a no go and it is important that we discuss these issues as we raise our teens.
I parent with positivity and have built strong relationships with teens, my own and those I have taught in schools or through one to one tutoring. However, teen and tween issues are constantly changing as society moves at a fast pace.
For many of us, it is unchartered territory, the issues teenagers and tweens face are very different from when we ‘grew up’ and mobile phones and being online is just one example.
50% of Ten-Year-Olds kids have a mobile
Research suggests that 53% of ten-year-olds have a smartphone. My eldest two had phones in year six of primary school but they were not that smart. Erin has had a smartphone since she turned ten which is younger but it is easy to see why this has happened. Many of us get upgrades every two years and we then pass down our phones to our children or sell them on. This has driven down the cost of owning a smartphone and explains why some children are owning them at an earlier age.
Peer Pressure at it’s Finest
Peer pressure was one of the reasons that my tween wanted a smartphone, she felt that everyone had one apart from her. Peer pressure is huge for this age group and our children do not want to feel different from their peers.
Owning a smartphone has both advantages and disadvantages for ten-year-olds.
Why does a 10 year old need a mobile phone?
Using a mobile phone for homework
Erin uses hers for homework tasks. She uses the phone as a thesaurus, a dictionary and more. She can research history and use the information for her homework. My 15 year old can find past exams and practise ahead of his GCSE’s
News
Another way Erin uses her phone is to keep up with the news. She will often come and tell me things she has heard on the news and has a good grasp of politics and world affairs thanks to her using the phone this way. We consume the media in so many different ways and it is not all bad. She doesn’t have a TV in her room and rarely watches TV especially films. Whereas in previous decades our young people watched lots of TV todays ten-year-olds often watch less.
Apps
Apps on phones also enable Erin to practise her times’ tables or other problem solving games. These challenge her thinking and will be preparing her for lateral thinking problem-solving.
Entertainment
The smartphone also entertains young people, they can catch up with YouTube and watch their favourite shows.
Creativity
Now the one that gets raised eyebrows! My ten year old loves Tik Tok and other apps. This does have an age rating of 13 but many use it younger and my daughter is one of them. I have locked down her account to private and she can only share tik toks with a small group of friends. There have been issues as at this age they are often immature and can upset friends with silly behaviour but it also encourages their creativity. Erin loves dancing and making videos so I let her and I manage it the best I can. We talk about what is allowed and over the past few months we have agreed to some ground rules.
Disadvantages of a child having a mobile phone
There are though disadvantages of using a smartphone at a young age and that tends to be about online safety. Many worry that a phone is giving other less desirable people access to your tweens and teenagers. However, there are steps you can take to keep your children safe and the first and foremost is to monitor their use. This is easy to do at a young age. We don’t allow phones at the dinner table, in bedrooms in the evening or overnight. I check messages and delete anything I don’t like. This is easy to do with a ten-year-old and one of the easiest things is don’t put a sim in it!
My Erin’s phone has no sim which means that she can’t make calls or receive calls. She uses it like a tablet really and we are happy with that. She feels grown-up but it means that we have all the control as it can only be used in our home or when we have wifi access. It does get harder with older teenagers and Dylan (15) has much more freedom which is important as they need to learn how to use phones responsibly.
Our children, both tweens and teenagers, will be using mobile phones and technology and we need to prepare them for the technological society in which they are living. As parents and educators, we can only do our best and must remember we are learning as we go as this tech is changing so fast.
Keep talking to our young people but do not fear what we don’t fully understand.
One Response
Interesting. I don’t intend N to have a phone til he’s secondary age because he’ll be on the bus etc. But was hoping to start with a basic phone rather than smartphone. All of the reasons your 10yo has one, mine can do on his laptop (or if he’s doing maths games, he’ll sometimes borrow my phone). As he doesn’t need to call people there’s no point him having a phone to call people, or even a smartphone without a SIM. So far, only one of his friends has a no SIM phone but he never uses it anyway. They’re Year 4 so 9, or approaching 9.
I’m not too worried about policing him – I think I’m fairly savvy being a blogger and user of social media, he’s responsible with youtube which he watches, and school teach them a lot about internet safety too. So I think when he gets to phone age, I’ll be fairly confident (at the moment, no telling what happens when he hits peer pressure age and social media) that he’s responsible and aware.