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No smart phone. Get a flip phone if you need to be able to call them.
Your kid doesn’t need a phone. If you want them to have a phone, then a flip phone that allows them to call you.
Dumb phone. Cheap, durable, and they work.
In all seriousness, there has been a correlation between the age that a child receives their first phone and depression.
Which was subsequently debunked like most other things related to this.
Everytime kids and tech comes up there always seems to be another wild theory about it.
Yeah, also correlation is not causation. I know its an old trope to bring up but it is true. You can find a lot of correlations in science and research, they don’t need to make sense.
The answer is simple and no one wants to admit it. It’s the parents neglecting their kids, so they occupy themselves with other stuff, usually tech. Parents want to blame something other than what they are doing.
Parents that give their kids attention and phone use don’t have the same issues, so what’s the difference? The bloody parents.
I got my kids SyncUp Kids watches recently. They allow my kids to text or call me, my wife or each other. They also have a few very simple features on there to keep them mildly entertained without being too distracting. They also give me alerts when they leave and enter certain areas like home and school, and have an easily scheduleable school mode that turns off all distracting features when they are in school. All in all, they’re pretty good.
People saying flip phones. But search for grey scale e-ink phones. Pretty sure they can only handle apps the company designed for them. Battery life is forever. And they can practice using their pocket computers.
If it runs android, it can run non eink apps but they may or may not function correctly.
Does your kid need access to the internet at all times? Do they need a camera available at all times? Are there a lot of apps that they need to have available to them? If not then probably a flip phone would be a better choice. Either that or one of those kids smart watches like a Gizmo if you want something you can track their location with.
Remember the main purpose of a smartphone is to be online all the time, and children are geniuses at figuring out how to access things that are supposedly blocked or restricted
and children are geniuses at figuring out how to access things that are supposedly blocked or restricted
I wonder if that’s still the case these days, since kids don’t need to develop skills just to use the device, they might not be developing the skills to break out of parental control walled gardens. Though if parental controls are enough to motivate kids to learn those skills, learning those skills might be more beneficial than them being able to get around parental blocks is detrimental.
Any phone, it doesn’t matter. If you want to make it kid safe, get that porn viewing alert app that Mike Johnson and his kid use so you both know when one of you is crankin it.
A dumb phone.
I got my kid a rugged smart phone. It’s pretty locked down and whatnot because he’s young but unfortunately there’s no way I’m going to send him to Public school without a phone, just in case.
What did you use to lock it down?
Honestly I use Google family link. I know people on here are against Google but it just makes monitoring the kids easier.
It just monitors well.
