I haven’t seen if the article covered this well but smart watches are a great bridge for kids this age where you can get everything you want as far as location tracking, but without all the addiction.
We’ve said for years that our kids will only get phones aged 14 or higher. Now we want to say 16. One can imagine how those conversations go.
Hopefully the movement to make it illegal under a certain age gathers momentum.
>Hopefully the movement to make it illegal under a certain age gathers momentum.
Same here. With tech's growing influence on everyday's life.
>> A 2021 report from the same group showed a significant rise in the number of 8- to 12-year-olds with a smartphone, from 24% in 2015 to 43% in 2021.
I am thinking if the 8 - 10 age group skew this figures. I would expect 11-12 to have a smartphone at 60+% rate. Partly because at that age it is hard to resist peer pressure that their friends all have one.
Normally I am against government making decisions for us. But this case it makes it easier. At least the government could mandate all schools to limit Smartphone usage under certain age.
We have our daughter a cellular connected Apple Watch in sixth grade because she wanted to walk home from school alone (it was about two blocks). She’s getting ready to enter high school and just told us she doesn’t see the point in getting a phone; her watch is fine.
We also don’t do social media as a family (HN being my one exception) so she is growing up without exposure to that.
I don't know if we had bad service or what, but I bought both my kids cell-connected Apple Watches and had a terrible experience. Could never get ahold of them, half the time they couldn't call us or message us, battery sometimes wouldn't last a day, and on and on. I cancelled the plan and the watches sit in a drawer now.
After much deliberation, we decided to wait to get our daughter her first phone until she started high school (9th grade, a few months after her 13th birthday). I'm very glad we did. If anything, I wish we'd waited a little longer however, the logistics of not having a phone had already been increasingly inconvenient for at least a year and starting high school pretty much forced it.
Prior to that we controlled screen time of all types pretty carefully, at least compared to some of her peers. She did have quite a bit of exposure to console gaming, PC gaming, television, tablet and did homework on a school issued Chromebook in middle school. But none of it was 'free feeding'. For things we didn't do as a family (TV / gaming), it was either limited time per day or weekends and holidays-only during the school year. We're also not a home that has a TV on most of the time or TVs all over the place. For example, we've never had TVs in bedrooms or the kitchen. Our television viewing, whether with her or not, has always been 'appointment style'. We turn it on only to watch a particular movie or DVR/streaming show and then turn it off when it's over. We think growing up this way has made it easier for her to gravitate toward better habits.
We're pretty happy with how this has worked out. Today she's almost 16. We think she's still a little too obsessed with her phone and social media but it's definitely not as bad as most of her friends who had their own phone earlier and/or had less controlled screen time much earlier. We can also confirm the studies which report social media generally tends to have more negative than positive impact, at least for teenage girls.
I haven’t seen if the article covered this well but smart watches are a great bridge for kids this age where you can get everything you want as far as location tracking, but without all the addiction.
We’ve said for years that our kids will only get phones aged 14 or higher. Now we want to say 16. One can imagine how those conversations go.
Hopefully the movement to make it illegal under a certain age gathers momentum.
>Hopefully the movement to make it illegal under a certain age gathers momentum.
Same here. With tech's growing influence on everyday's life.
>> A 2021 report from the same group showed a significant rise in the number of 8- to 12-year-olds with a smartphone, from 24% in 2015 to 43% in 2021.
I am thinking if the 8 - 10 age group skew this figures. I would expect 11-12 to have a smartphone at 60+% rate. Partly because at that age it is hard to resist peer pressure that their friends all have one.
Normally I am against government making decisions for us. But this case it makes it easier. At least the government could mandate all schools to limit Smartphone usage under certain age.
We have our daughter a cellular connected Apple Watch in sixth grade because she wanted to walk home from school alone (it was about two blocks). She’s getting ready to enter high school and just told us she doesn’t see the point in getting a phone; her watch is fine.
We also don’t do social media as a family (HN being my one exception) so she is growing up without exposure to that.
I don't know if we had bad service or what, but I bought both my kids cell-connected Apple Watches and had a terrible experience. Could never get ahold of them, half the time they couldn't call us or message us, battery sometimes wouldn't last a day, and on and on. I cancelled the plan and the watches sit in a drawer now.
I have to admit it has been a challenge at times.
Honestly, we just don't sweat it that much. We are trying to be LESS connected nowadays.
After much deliberation, we decided to wait to get our daughter her first phone until she started high school (9th grade, a few months after her 13th birthday). I'm very glad we did. If anything, I wish we'd waited a little longer however, the logistics of not having a phone had already been increasingly inconvenient for at least a year and starting high school pretty much forced it.
Prior to that we controlled screen time of all types pretty carefully, at least compared to some of her peers. She did have quite a bit of exposure to console gaming, PC gaming, television, tablet and did homework on a school issued Chromebook in middle school. But none of it was 'free feeding'. For things we didn't do as a family (TV / gaming), it was either limited time per day or weekends and holidays-only during the school year. We're also not a home that has a TV on most of the time or TVs all over the place. For example, we've never had TVs in bedrooms or the kitchen. Our television viewing, whether with her or not, has always been 'appointment style'. We turn it on only to watch a particular movie or DVR/streaming show and then turn it off when it's over. We think growing up this way has made it easier for her to gravitate toward better habits.
We're pretty happy with how this has worked out. Today she's almost 16. We think she's still a little too obsessed with her phone and social media but it's definitely not as bad as most of her friends who had their own phone earlier and/or had less controlled screen time much earlier. We can also confirm the studies which report social media generally tends to have more negative than positive impact, at least for teenage girls.
https://archive.is/4kLPV