Lieutenant
New Member
I want to put this out to the community. How old is old enough to have their own cell phone. Seems like 5 and 6 year olds have smart phones now.
Kids and cell phones
- Thread starter Lieutenant
- Start date
I agree, kids these days are more techie that we were as kids - and getting younger! As for my wife and I, we don't encourage giving cellular phones to the kids until they're old enough to take care of it. My eldest is 14 and when she graduated from Middle School, that was the time we gave her a cellphone. As for my other four kids, they would have to wait.
I don't plan on giving out cellular phones to my kids until they reach high school. Even then, I wonder if they really need them. I can't think of a scenario where the school's phones would become non-functional. Then again, having a direct line to your child if something were to happen is a lot more convenient.
Victor Leigh
New Member
I gave my children handphones only when they became teenagers. Giving pre-teens hand phones do not seem like a good idea. The chances of the phone being stolen, robbed or lost is very high.
With all the new technology out there able to keep kids safer, parents often choose for their kids to have cell phones so they can phone home and stay in touch with each other. Surely, there's a phone out there somewhere that just attaches to a kid's clothing and ONLY allows parents or assigned adults to keep in touch with the child.
My wife and I didn't receive cell phones from our parents, period. Neither of us had a cell phone until we were old enough to work and pay the bill on it ourselves. We plan to treat our son the same way, so he won't have his own cell phone until he's old enough to have a job, drive by himself, etc. In the meantime, either we will be with him or he will be with someone we trust that has a phone if we need to get in contact with him or them, making it unnecessary for him to have a phone of his own.
Lieutenant
New Member
Very interested. I am tempted to wait until they are at least in 8th grade. I see the good things in them allowing me to contact them or for them to call for help; but most kids abuse the privilege of having a cell phone.
My kids have them. They are 12 and 11. My mother got them for them. I can not say I agree with it, but I never really said much about it. They hardly ever use them I can never get in touch with them via their cell phones during the week. I always have to call their mother.
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You brought up a very interesting but not often talked about topic. Our rule is, kids are old enough to have them at around the time they start learning to use them and eventually start asking for one. As for before this, they can always borrow ours. Remember, celphones don't mean the same thing now as what they meant before, as with anything. They are now more than just for calling. We all know celphones/smartphones are actually pretty handy to have and we can't protect them from technology or anything else beyond our control, so we just try our best to instill in them the value of protecting themselves. We make sure to explain a lot of the things that are good and not so good about it, rather than just having the options of either giving them what they want or not.
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