Should You Keep Your Kids Waiting Until High School for a Cell Phone?
Receiving a cell phone has become something of a rite of passage into childhood. Parents often struggle with how soon it is too early: The average child now gets their first phone at age 10 and their first social media accounts by age 12.
But tech industry leaders are opposing this new norm by keeping children out of the hands of their children until adolescence.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates was one of the first to report that each of his three children was not allowed to have a phone until they were 14, and he is not the only one. James Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media , also said that his kids only get a cell phone after they start high school – and only after they show they have restraint and value personal communication .
Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired magazine , recently told the New York Times that he keeps mobile phones away from his kids until summer before they go to high school:
“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.
The technologists making these products and the writers watching the technological revolution were naive, he said.
“We thought we could control that,” said Mr. Anderson. “And it is beyond our power to control. It goes straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. It is beyond our ability, as ordinary parents, to understand. “
The fight between a parent who wants to postpone and a child who swears all his friends get phones is real. They want to match and connect with their friends; we want to prevent them from getting used to their phones, being intimidated on social media, or showing off unknowns in apps that seem harmless at first glance, but really aren’t.
As children get older and more independent, if they go home from school or take extracurricular activities on their own, giving them a cell phone can start to seem like the right thing to do, both in terms of safety and convenience.
But Athena Chavarria, who worked as an assistant manager at Facebook, takes a different view: She lives by the mantra that the last kid in class to get a phone wins.
“Other parents ask,“ Aren’t you worried that you don’t know where your children are if you cannot find them? ”Said Ms. Chavarria. “And I say, ‘No, I don’t need to know where my children are every second of the day.”
Of course, it’s hard to be a teenager without a phone when everyone (or at least the vast majority) of your friends have one, and when that’s how they all make plans and keep in touch during school holidays. For these kids, writer Anastasia Basil, who wrote the viral article ” Porn Is Not the Worst Thing on Musical.ly “, offers the following solution:
Maybe if Bill and Melinda listen, they’ll do something to change the landscape of American childhood. (Melinda wrote about this as a worried mother.) Maybe she and Bill will offer an incentive. How about this: If a child doesn’t use ALL social media – Snap, Instagram, Musical.y, KiK, etc. – until they turn 16, the Gates Foundation will write that child a check for 1600 dollars. their 16th birthday. The child can use the money the way the child wants – no forced college savings. Shopping! Advance payment! Concert tickets!
Here’s a DIY option: If you start saving $ 23 a month when your child is 10, you have $ 1,600 to pay for a hard job well done, plus $ 56 to spend on wine and savory snacks for middle-aged. aged yourself. Quite a bargain. Plus, when one of your child’s friends is all: God! You are not on Instagram! Your child can save face and say : Yes, man, and I get paid for that too.