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Kids with Cell Phones, How Young is Too Young?
An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that the average age of a child receiving their first cell phone is continuing to drop. A report carried out last year showed that the average age of a child's first cell phone was just eight years old and is expected to drop closer to 5 years of age this year. The author raises the obligatory medical questions that have been argued about in adults for years. Just how young is too young for a cell phone?
I wonder if this survey counted those cell phones that will only call certain preprogrammed numbers, like home or Mom or some such? I would be all over those suckers if I had kids.
Like my life on the road isn't hectic enough already with soccer moms in their SUVs changing lanes without looking because they are on the phone. Now I'm going to have to worry about running over little kids stepping away from the ice cream truck with their cellphones stuck to their heads.
it means being able to track them if they go missing, and it means they can call you when they do something dumb. Concentrate on raising good kids and you won't have a problem with them abusing it anyway.
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I think that this whole cell phone culture is pretty fascinating. I mean, a few millenia ago it was pretty common for kids to live in tribal societies where they knew and had easy access to their friends in physical space. Walk to the next hut over and talk to your friend, if you're not busy doing chores.
In modern society, I think that social networking and technology are bringing people "virtually" closer together despite the fact that many of us now live orders of magnitude further away from our friends and even relatives than our ancestors did. So in a sense, the idea that a kid is "too young" for a cell phone really cuts to controlling that child's interactions with his or her peers. I mean, once they would have been able to physically play with their friends, but now they live 30 miles from their best friend.
To me, it seems like it will happen anyway - we will see kids getting phones as soon as their language skills reach the point that they can appreciate having conversations with people that they can't physically interact with. Instead of restricting the phones, though, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't phones developed which allowed parents to restrict/track contacts in the same way that parents long ago would visually keep an eye on their kids.
It's a different world, but in a way, there's nothing new under the sun again. Just technology enabling old ways of interaction to be feasible (at least in spirit) in a faster, more spread-out world.
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It made me realize that children with cell phones never get to be completly free of their parents. Who remembers, as a child, being able to get away from over-protective parents by simply walking away from a phone? Now, as children get cell phones, over-protective parents will flip out whenever the "battery dies".
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Considering the crap most people feed their children, the danger of a mobile phone is a minor addition.
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I have 4 sons, the oldest of which is 8. For my children, there is no place that they go where they are not supervised by adults. So it's not really an issue... yet. But it soon will be. Soon, I'm going to be faced with a dillemma. On the one hand, I want them to have access to a cell phone so that they can call me if they need me. It's a safety thing.
On the other hand, I really don't want them eating up 17x10^23 minutes every month. Nor do I want to worry about the frequency with which my kids tend to lose things. They lose things that aren't important to them. And if I gave them a device that limited their minutes and contacts (e.g. a firefly type device) then they'd probably lose it because it's just not that important to them.
The one thing I am absolutely certain of, however, is that I do not want to see some law come in and make the decision for me. Let me decide how old is an appropriate age for my children to have a cell phone. What might be a sensible answer for my kids might not be a sensible answer for my neighbor's kids. My neighbor is a single parent mom. Her 8 year old has a cell phone. She absolutely relies on her kids ability to have a cell phone, and it seems a sensible thing for her situation. Any law, even one that tries to think of all the contingencies, will ultimately fail to account for something. This is better left to individuals to decide for themselves and leave the legislation out of it.
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