Mobile phones and children... at what age should a child be allowed their own mobile phone and why?
My eldest daughter is 10 years old, and it has come to my attention that mostly all of her friends have a mobile phone and yet I am still adamant that she is too young to have one...yet. Is this me being cruel and mean as she suggests or am I doing the right thing?
Nobody teaches you how to raise your children, there is not a set guideline to follow, so I just seem to follow my gut instinct, and in this situation I don't feel paying out for a mobile phone is worth it.
Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of times that I have wanted her to have a phone handy, (mainly on a Saturday morning so I can text her asking if she could bring me up a coffee in bed!), and yet I still haven't budged and we have managed to get around the situation.
This whole phone epidemic has only come to fruition in the last 15 years or so, and before that I'm pretty sure we all survived without a mobile phone. Surely kids nowadays can handle it too?
We have all become far too reliant on these mobile devices, hoping that they are our children's safety nets in times of trouble. Many of them have full access to the internet, in my opinion it is far more unsafe to have a smartphone than to be without one.
It's not just mobile devices we don''t really 'do' in our house, game consoles are another no go, I'm not about to share the one television in our house with a 'gamer'. My thinking is if you don't have a game console then the children are more like to play outside in the fresh air than sit all day 'gaming'.
If your child is playing out with unlimited access to the internet on a smartphone, then there is no one to check at what they are looking at or who they are talking to.
I came from the generation of the first 'chat rooms'. I was talking to a whole range of strangers and now I look back at this I can see how dangerous it was, how the information I was giving out about where I lived and who I was could have been used against me for the worse, now technology has come so much further I want to protect my children from that for as long as possible. The media is full of stories about children being cyber bullied and I don't want this for my child.
It's not like my daughter is not given the freedom that other children with phones has, she is, she knows to call me from the house phone of a friend's when she gets there to let me know where she is, and she follows the boundaries set out for her when playing out. And guess what?, she manages all this WITHOUT the use of a mobile phone!!!!
When she plays out with friends she's not texting or googling, she's being a child and that is what she needs at 10 years old.
I'm sure there will come a day that I think she is old enough to have her own mobile phone, but for now I'm just happy she's out playing with friends and being a child.
Am I old fashioned in the way that I think? Probably!
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