[Closed] Daughter wants a phone for her birthday....paranoid Dad content.

Personally I wouldn't. Why does she need it, she's at primary school!
Live with the tears, she'll get over it!

Well at some point she will get one - at what age will you stop feeling the need to control everything on there? FWIW my oldest son is almost a year older and still doesn't have one - I don't think many in his class do (though Y6 does seem to be when they start getting them, so it's something we have to think about, as he's now asking).

The word appropriately was never so inappropriate.

It depends on you and your daughter and your immiediate circle of friends.

Online collaboration and communication has been very positve from an early age for all my kids.

smogmonster - Member
Its my daughters 10th birthday next week. She's been asking for a phone, all her friends have one already, yada yada. I'm loath as she really doesnt need one,

and with all the horror stories out there, i'm appropriately paranoid about what might happen.

Of course you could look on the other side if you want paranoia: 1. What if she is the only friend without one, will she be ostracised? 2. She is going to be getting increasing freedom - wouldn't a phone be useful for safety from all the child snatchers? 3. Without a phone will she become over reliant on you to manage her increasing social life?

The only way she's getting one is if there is some way that i can control everything she does on it, see what shes been on, who she's been talking to etc,

The only way she's getting one is if there is some way that i can control everything she does on it, see what shes been on, who she's been talking to etc,

Times, they are a changing. She'll be fine

What horror stories? Are they real or media hype?

I know from stuff my wife, who works in a specialist school for kids so messed up that they can't handle mainstream, that they see them as a huge problem. Admittedly it's actually a combination of the impact of social media and phones but the bullying that can go on is so much worse than when I was at school as it doesn't stop when you get home anymore.

I think being aware of what your kids are doing online at this age (my sons 11) is very important. I'm with the OP in that I don't want my son to have a phone yet but a lot of his mates do. When I relent and he gets one I think the rule will be that I can request he hand it to me at any point and I will be allowed to review any content I want. Hopefully he's sensible enough anyway but the added knowledge that his mum and I could see what he's doing should keep him in line. At the very least it'll teach him about hiding his tracks and mobile security.

You can't. So don't. Problem solved

We got our kids phones when they went to secondary school (admittedly that is a year later than in the UK), had alot less of an issue with the phones than the laptops the school required them to have.

Way to build trust, there.

Lol. She's ten years old, this is the Internet we are talking about.

Good luck.

Seems appropriate to wheel this out.
http://deeprootsathome.com/child-grooming-true-story/

We've just sorted our daughter out with one. She's just moved upto high school so has a one mile walk to school every day so part of it is piece of mind that we can contact her should we need to or she can get hold of us if she needs to. My wife is with EE so know we get a good signal where we live via EE. We resisted giving her one while at primary school despite some of her mates having them.

I went in thinking we'd get her a 'cheap phone' but ended up with an iPhone 6S - it was free in terms of upfront costs. EE does a family contract so attached it to my wifes contract so we can control her monthly allowances, also IPhones and Apple really have this down to a T...she is too young to have her own email address with the likes of Google and Apple, but Apple do a kids Apple ID thing, so it is attached to my Apple ID via family sharing so I can approve all of her App requests (in-app purchases turned off and other parental controls enabled on her phone which I control) so she can't rack up any huge bills. So I think i've mitigates almost all scenario's.

At some point you've got to start relinquishing more trust onto your kids. The main worry I have are any social media things like snap chat and What's App where she might be exposed to people she doesn't really know, but we've explained about dodgy folk trying to groom kids so no different to our day when our parents used to let us go to he park on our own for the first time where there could have been dodgy people (and probably were) loitering around so the whole "don't talk to strangers" and 'Don't go off with a stranger' kind of thing. I don't think peodo's are a new phenomenon, they just use different methods these days. You can't wrap them up in bubble wrap forever, you have to start letting them go at some point.

IMO it's pretty irresponsible as a parent to turn a kid that age loose on the internet with the "can't control it so let them get on with it" attitude demonstrated by some on here. There is some pretty compelling research on the effects on mental health smartphones and web access can have on kids.

Our oldest is 9 and she is asking as "all my friends have them" etc but it's a no from us at the moment. This will likely change in the next few years but there's no easy answer

roads are very useful, but also can be dangerous. We teach our kids how to avoid the dangers.

Fire is useful but also can be dangerous. We teach our kids about that too.

Phones/computers/the internet are useful but also can be dangerous / harmful. Don't refuse to allow their usefulness, teach and manage the risks instead, it's called parenting.

Whether you decide to allow one at this age, earlier, or later, that is your judgement. Likewise with setting up monitoring software, which is easy enough to do. Ours had them from younger, FWIW. We also don't 'monitor' usage as such - we have told them that we are mind - and also told them that if we find out they are on inappropriate sites, or using them nefariously then we will take them away or block usage as necessary. And being (IMHO) decent parents then we also don't let them spend hours and hours on them, and take action if they do (eg: when one was spending 'too long' we instigated a one charge per day policy, it charged overnight and that was it, if you ran out by lunchtime, tough)

Not for me either at 10. My 10 year old does not have or need one. Got my 12yr old a basic non internet phone this year for going to secondary school and we will see how it goes from there. No doubt he will want something better at some point

We held out till "big school" but then considered a phone important as she'd be walking solo and also doing after school stuff. I find both my kids rarely use the ****ing things to communicate and talking to either of them on it can be a painful affair, t'sall about the snapchat innit.
One thing I still have access to is their I tunes accounts so "in theory" I can find out where they are or at least where their phone is. Only used it once in 4 years.

My lad was 10 years old ...
Middle school was 20 miles away so as one or two have said already it ( from our point of view) was seen as a way of staying in touch ..
What I would say is that it changes kids not neccessarily for the better ..and I'm not talking about anything sinister..but childhood ends..you soon get the feeling that you are no longer the main focus in their lives as their social network continues to grow.Trying to extract boy & phone is like trying to take a bone from a ferocious dog!
Now 14 the only time we communicate properly these days is when I can drag him out for a bike ride.
In retrospect we wish that we had resisted for a while longer ..dont get me wrong my lad is a good kid ..very "streetwise"..but the innocence of youth was eroded as soon as he got his first smartphone ..
Good luck!

my daughter is 7 and we gave her her mums old iphone. it has a free payg sim in with no credit.

we were sick of our phones being clogged up with kids games, apps and their notifications etc...

she uses it for playing games, watching netflix, taking pictures, and texting (whatsapping) its still my itunes account and she doesnt have the passwords so cant go buying stuff without us knowing. she's not allowed to take it out of the house and it has to stay downstairs.

i work away during the week so love getting little messages from her. she also has grandparents in Wales, London, other relatives in South Africa and she can keep in touch with all of them.

works for us.

My children got hand-me-down iPhones shortly after they started high school. We have the 'family' setup on iOS which has worked well in terms of responsibility and app downloading.

Most of the time the iPhones are either used for YouTube or Snapchat for one child. Apple Music, spotify or PS Plus for the other.

Most important thing? get a data plan that'll support their incessant video streaming. Three do an unlimited data plan which when they stream GBs/week works well.

In terms of appropriate use they seem to have adapted well, much as they had already on laptops.

This may interest the OP:

http://ourpact.com/iphone-parental-control-app

Very useful as a leverage tool for disobedient kids too 😀

Another one for Big School. Came in handy last night when my 11 year old wasn't where she was meant to be after school open day (not her fault). I've worked on building trust to the point where she asked to add my fingerprint to unlock the phone. I do check what she's doing by asking "What are you doing? Can you show me?" rather than a high tech solution. She has come across inappropriate stuff but knows to navigate away.

The cyber bullying thing is a real worry but the genie's out of the bottle in society as a whole.

I keep reminding myself that she's got 5-7 years to learn to be independent - small steps with support seems the right approach to me.

Another one for Big School. Came in handy last night when my 11 year old wasn't where she was meant to be after school open day (not her fault). I've worked on building trust to the point where she asked to add my fingerprint to unlock the phone. I do check what she's doing by asking "What are you doing? Can you show me?" rather than a high tech solution. She has come across inappropriate stuff but knows to navigate away.

The cyber bullying thing is a real worry but the genie's out of the bottle in society as a whole.

I keep reminding myself that she's got 5-7 years to learn to be independent - small steps with support seems the right approach to me.

Sounds spot-on.

Very useful as a leverage tool for disobedient kids too

Very much this. It's sometimes the only thing that can shift my 13 year old daughter off her bed to achieve anything.

Be warned though. Phone removal is the nuclear option. There will be fallout.

10 was too young for my two, we gave them phones when they went to secondary. Wobbiscott has some great advice. You can pretty much lock down a phone as much or as little as you want. Ultimately though it comes down to trust. we had a very simple rule that was the phone was handed over immediately on request at any time for us to look at no if buts maybes or "hang on, 2 sec while I delete this"

and with all the horror stories out there, i'm appropriately paranoid about what might happen.

The operative word here is 'paranoid'. What on earth is it that you think 'might happen'

As the parent of a ten year old girl with an iphone (my old 5s), let me fill you in on exactly what she'll be doing on it

1. Watching youtube
2. Snapchatting with her friends
3. playing games
4. downloading yet another app to draw pictures with
5. Sending one word replies to text messages I send her
6. listening to Little Mix

There you go. That's an accurate, non-paranoid evaluation of what 10-year-old girls do with an iPhone 😀

My daughter got one when she went to high school. My older boy has just got one at age 10 in his last year of primary school. He goes off on his own on his bike, quite a long way from home on the cycle path, up to the golf club where he buys himself a cake and a brew 🙂 After he had a mechanical and had to walk home we decided to get him a phone. Its easy enough to turn off the 4G and so on, but there's still wifi, but at least there is some control of that at home. Bottom line is, none of us will be able to stop kids seeing things on the internet we'd rather they didn't, just like our parents had no control over us finding hedge porn. So I'm in favour talking to them and making them aware of the various ways they can get themselves in the shit. But I will still check his phone at my convenience, just like I did with my daughter (stopped bothering with that when she got to about 15 and wasn't a toe rag) - don't see how that undermines trust when you've told them you'll be doing it and explaining why you'll be doing it, nothing underhand about that.

So to add some paranoia to that binners:

Watching youtube

Yay - what's her favourite Jihadist beheading video? Or does she stick to the women-hating misogynists, the sexualising of young girls and the suicide videos?

Snapchatting with her friends

And sending nudes to paedos pretending to be her friend.

Sending one word replies to text messages I send her

And long replies to the 40 year old that says he is her boyfriend.

listening to Little Mix

Dear God. It's already too late for her.

Personally I wouldn't. Why does she need it, she's at primary school!
Live with the tears, she'll get over it!

Posts like this do amuse me.

I check my lads phone now and again, other than the arguing on whatsapp groups between him and his class mates there has nothing to be worried about. He was facetiming a girl out of his class last night (his bedroom door was open!) Wish I had that tech when I was a kid.

One thing I did have to have a chat about was on his internet search history he had googled "sexy Legs", I did laugh but he is curious like we all we all were at 11/12. I said get any good pictures, send them to me! 😆

My wife teaches in a primary school where lots of kids in P6 & P7 have them. The variety and extent of bullying carried out by kids via phones is horrific. All those mistakes we made as kids which happily time forgot are recorded, distributed, picked on again and again. Words in anger get written, not spoken, and kept as justification for later retribution.

P7 was where we let ours have phones, mainly because that was when they started to walk to school and wanted to arrange going to friends / wanting to invite friends home afterwards and so needed to be able to ask. Gave them rules & it seemed to work.

The Little Mix thing that worries me more than the paedos pretending to be her friend.

On a serious note, her and her 13 year old sister have both got phones, and I find it allows me to give them more independence, without needing to worry about them. So they can both walk down into town to get some lunch maybe, at the weekend. As they leave I always shout after them 'have you got your phones?"

They invariably haven't. Whoever said that kids are surgically attached to their phones is talking bollocks basically. Going off my own kids phone use, the alarmist nonsense is the same media crap that told us there were paedos lurking with bags of sweets at every park

Judge for yourself, and not on the strength of the crap peddled by the media, and just make your kids aware of the risks, while keeping that in proportion

Genuine question for the OP.....Does your daughter already have an Ipad / tablet / ipod touch / laptop / other wifi enabled devices?

If so, she's already able to do almost all of the stuff you're worrying about her doing on a phone.

Just get her one of those Nokia re-releases?

You're already uncool as you're her dad so no loss there.
She's getting a phone.
You don't need to be paranoid unless it's about premium rate numbers.

Personally I wouldn't. Why does she need it, she's at primary school!
Live with the tears, she'll get over it!

Posts like this do amuse me.

Yes, and as a teacher the amount of bullying and frankly horrible stuff that kids get up to with their phones 'amuses' me no end.

Yr7s sharing dick pics anyone? Or a yr9 self harming due to comments made about them on social media - said comments posted from phones during school hours.

If you need to contact them before or after school then get them a non-smart phone.
There is no reason that they or you should need to be in contact during the actual school day. You can just ring the school you know.

Our 7 year old doesn't have a phone yet.

For games, apps, movies, Kids iPlayer etc she has a hudl 2 - suitably locked down, only apps that I approve first, no browser, YouTube access or in-app purchases.

For comms I recently bought her walkie talkies which she loves. They have enough range for her to be at the local park and still talk to me.

That said, she'll probably get a phone before she is 10, as once they start going to middle school she'll have to catch a bus by herself every day so it's be good to know she can call us if there is a problem.

One obvious advantage of a phone is that we'll turn on Find My iPhone so we can track her location.

When mines old enough she'll get my still working Nokia brick. Retro chic 😆

Yes, and as a teacher the amount of bullying and frankly horrible stuff that kids get up to with their phones 'amuses' me no end.

I'd love to go back to those halcyon, carefree childhood days before kids had phones, where bullying didn't even exist.

Nobody had even thought of it before the advent of the smartphone. Steve Jobs has a lot to answer for!

Hey, not denying that bullying took place before phones! Just that it's created new and nastier ways for kids to spread crap about each other and access stuff that no parent would want little Timmy looking at.

And I'm sorry, but giving a child a phone to keep them amused -as I see on a daily basis - is just piss poor parenting.

Our girls (8) have started asking. None of their friends have them yet but we know they too are asking so all the parents are putting on a united front and simply saying 'no, you are too young, you can have one when you start secondary school'. Clearly someone will break ranks, or one of the boys in their classes will get one (ie, someone not in our circle of friends) then the floodgates will open but we are going to stand firm and wait - due to the location of the primary school we will need to take them right through to the end but the secondary school is within walking distance so it would be good to make sure they are contactable.

Yes, and as a teacher the amount of bullying and frankly horrible stuff that kids get up to with their phones 'amuses' me no end.

Yr7s sharing dick pics anyone? Or a yr9 self harming due to comments made about them on social media - said comments posted from phones during school hours.

If you need to contact them before or after school then get them a non-smart phone.
There is no reason that they or you should need to be in contact during the actual school day. You can just ring the school you know.

Bullying has been around waay before smartphones. My lads school has a strict no phones to be on in school hours policy.

And I'm sorry, but giving a child a phone to keep them amused -as I see on a daily basis - is just piss poor parenting.

Wow.

Bullying has been around waay before smartphones. My lads school has a strict no phones to be on in school hours policy.

Yup, see my second post. But why add to their problems!

Wors - why? I see kids in prams with tablets and phones. What's wrong with interacting or talking with your child?

We was talking about 10 year olds with phones, not toddlers.

Shouldn't you be teaching, instead of calling people shit parents on the interweb 😉

You seem to be

a) very angry
b) looking at very simplistic answers to complex problems

Shit parents will be shit parents with or without the aid of smartphones
Bullies will be bullies with or without the aid of smartphones

I miss the days when everything was the fault of 'video games'

I'm currently on paternity leave. So sat here with a snoring newborn on my shoulder!

Sorry, maybe the shit parent thing was too much, but I see lots of problems on a daily basis caused by these little bits of technology.

Mostly I'm posting through a fog of sleep deprivation 😉

I'm also probably paranoid and a bit scared about what the future holds for this little bundle on my lap.

Mostly I'm posting through a fog of sleep deprivation

In that case, you have my deepest sympathies. 😀

Ah... I remember that semi-hallucinatory world well ajantom

Its ok. When they get to ten you'll just be able to take them to the pub, and give them a phone to play with while you get pissed 😉

I overheard my 10 year olds friend telling him how to delete his history on the browser. He's a sneaky little b*gg*r who has his mother wrapped round his little finger ( the friend that is)
Needless to say he was warned that if his history was deleted then his phone will be gone.
When I bought the subject up with the mother she just responded with "oh, I'm not allowed to touch his phone"

Worrying

I miss the days when everything was the fault of 'video games'

...I miss the days when everything was the fault of playing Black Sabbath records backwards!

Needless to say he was warned that if his history was deleted then his phone will be gone.

There is nothing more suspicious than an empty internet history.

Any sensible covert onanist has a second browser installed.

When I bought the subject up with the mother she just responded with "oh, I'm not allowed to touch his phone"

She's an idiot!

I'm also probably paranoid and a bit scared about what the future holds for this little bundle on my lap.

Plenty of good times to be had before technology starts to interfere..

Sorry, maybe the shit parent thing was too much, but I see lots of problems on a daily basis caused by these little bits of technology.

Ah I remember that new parent feeling of how I was going to be better than all the other parents 😀

My son got a phone this summer (11y/o) as he was starting secondary school. He doesn't use it much, listens to music, sends the odd text to us and his friends, generally about what bus they are getting and homework related stuff. I got him an iPhone SE as I can use the find my friends app to see where he is. It seems to spend most of the time left at the bottom of his bag. It's amazing how long the battery lasts when you're not constantly checking emails, facebook etc.

The easy way around this is to use Google's T&C..

The minimum age for someone to have a Google account is 13. Any child younger than that with an Android phone is either not signed in to an account (which I think means that they can't use the play store), or is signed in using a parent's account (no way I'd be giving a child that kind of access to my account!) or has lied about their age when registering.

I feel that Google has actually got this right and that 13 is an appropriate age for children to have smartphones (with parental checking). If being able to communicate with parents is required, then a non-smart phone works rather well.

Plenty of good times to be had before technology starts to interfere

Yeah I know 🙂 and our 4 year old is doing fine. No devices yet!

Being serious and rational(ish) for a sec.....there's no way the technological genie is going back in the lamp with phones, and I do see they can have a genuine use for kids and even education.
The problem is that as even as adults we have so little self control over our use of them (myself included) we waste so much time fiddling with them.
Now look at how kids use them - they have few social filters, they have less self control - what they have in their hands is a device that gives them power over others and the ability to anonymously dive into the 'adult' world. I have no answers here, but I see the problems this causes on a daily basis.

My daughter wanted a tablet for Christmas, Santa left her a bag of tablet in her stocking.

The local high school has a problem with kids using their phones in class and they have said that they are not able to do anything about it, this is the problem.

The local high school has a problem with kids using their phones in class and they have said that they are not able to do anything about it, this is the problem.

The problem is a mixture of poor school leadership and lazy parenting.

School should instigate a policy of confiscation for use in class - 24 hours, and parents have to pick up. Worked at my old school.

Patents need to make sure there offspring have boundaries - phone use is a privilege not a right. If it gets misused then it's gone.

We had a situation in school with inappropriate pics doing the rounds. About 20 phones confiscated and police called. Parents seemed to be more annoyed that their phones had been taken than the fact they were texting nude photos of each other around!

Does she want a phone or the connectivity/apps/entertainment? Personally, at that age I'd get her an ipod or ipad mini instead, then lock it down with access control (as mentioned above). Then it provides the fun and connection, within the constrains of wifi land.

When she needs a phone for communication - get her a Nokia 😉

sat here with a snoring newborn on my shoulder

You need to get it used to sleeping in a cot or moses basket otherwise you'll be doing that for ever.

Shocking parenting 😉

Hold off as long as you can. Kids have the rest of the lives to gawp at a screen.

I miss the days when everything was the fault of 'video games'

I miss the days when everything was the fault of radiograms.

Bad patent here, but our 11 year old got an iPhone this year when he went to high school with a 10 mile daily bus journey.

We’re both on iPhones, so the family features are switched on, the phone tracking is switched on and my wife has access to his email etc.

He’s not daft and he needs to learn to use one safely sometime.

On the other hand he has had to use it to get one of us to get him sorted once already so maybe he is daft in other ways.

It's interesting that the views of those in education are much more negative about the impacts phones and social media.

I know my other half works in a very specialist educational establishment so sees the worst of it but the stories she shares with me when she's offloading are horrific. She's had pupils top themselves because of the on going online victimisation. Even after they have left the school where the bullying started they are still getting harassed online.

Once a video or picture is made and shared it's out there forever and no matter how perfect a parent you are young teenagers are impulsive and make mistakes. In our day that mistake was laughed about for a bit and then hopefully was forgotten. Now it's online forever for all and sundry to see.

Given what a **** I was as a teenager I'm so glad there's no permenant record of it.

Nobody had even thought of it before the advent of the smartphone. Steve Jobs has a lot to answer for!