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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.
Five year olds NEED cell phones, guys. Duh. How else are they going to handle buisness calls and stay in touch with family and friends when they go out on their own?
Easy. Anyone under the age of 18 -- with virtually no exception.
In my experience, many problems with family harmony can be either traced back to cell phone use -- or cell phones helped compound the problem.
I don't think ANYONE should have a cell phone until they are emancipated *AND* pay for the damn thing themselves.
That said: I've seen the FireFly -- and T-Mobile's new "kidconnect plan". Both look very interesting and may force me to rethink my position.
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.
Because there is no such thing as too early.
Where were you when the voynix came?
just stay the f*ck off my lawn!
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
It really depends on why you are equipping your child with a cell phone. As TFA points out, many parents are not doing it for social reasons:
If a child can hold onto the phone, this could be a nice way to keep track of children. I can think of two major caveats to tracking: the aforementioned loss issue and the fact that kidnappers will search their victims for cell phones now thus in a true emergency they will not really help.
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Who are these kids talking to? When I was 8, I would ride my bike somewhere and meet up with my friends or my parents would drop me off at their house. They definitely didn't drop me off at the mall or have me running around town thinking that the fact I had a cell phone was good enough to keep tabs on me.
Just because your kid has a cell phone doesn't mean they are protected.
If the child has not yet reached the age where they are allowed to engage in activities without parental or some other form of supervision, then they are too young to need a cell phone. Consequently, this age will probably fall somewhat in line with the legal driving age most of the time. So, ballpark figure, probably somewhere between 14 and 16 years old.
Me, personally, I didn't get one until I was 22 and moving into my own place.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
"Dude, stay in there! It's not worth it, they just dragged me out by my legs and spanked me!"
In your best Cartman voice, of course!
Where were you when the voynix came?
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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Of course, that was in Finland.
Look, CNET is running an example of Yellow journalism.
Or is it an advert for the Disney "find the kid" phone?
I'm to lazy to find out if their sponsors are fearmongering politicians or money-grubbing marketeers.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
When I was 5 years old I couldn't convince my mother to buy me a new GI Joe .... there's no flippin way I could have gotten a cell phone, even if they did exist.
;-)
What the hell does a 5 year old need with a cell phone? Call the babysitter to tell them you'll be late because you're power lunching with Billy on some cool mudpies? Call AAA if your Big Wheel breaks down? (Assuming they still make Big Wheels
Crap do I feel old now.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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".
No, I will not work for your startup
It use to be
"Give me your lunch money or I well pound you"
Now Its going to more like these
"Give me your cell phone or I well pound you"
It always nice to see even the school yard bully can evolve
In a culture that is innundated with media reports of school shootings, amber alerts and the faces of missing children plastered on milk cartons, is it any wonder that parents want to feel as if their kids are constantly connected to them? Cell phones are an extension of the leashes they attach to toddlers. As long as their kids are within "reach", even when that reach is wireless, parents feel more secure.
It's a mistaken notion, of course. But it's the one marketers are using to get cell phones into the hands of younger and younger children.
...the problem is maturity and responsibility.
I believe that, with current regulations in the United States, the recommended youngest age for owning a cell phone should be 18 (give or take a few years). Here's my reasoning behind this approximate age limit:
If you're a parent with a whiny kid who demands a cell phone, do your research. There are models out there that can be "locked in" to only allow a few phone numbers to be called. Wireless providers like Verizon can change your plan so it blocks the sending and receiving of text messages (those cost up to ten cents each!). Remember: you're basically giving your kid access to your line of credit — control your kids' spending like you control your own spending!
Considering the crap most people feed their children, the danger of a mobile phone is a minor addition.
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I'm realizing that I may never have a landline again (I havent had one for years).. So having a kid call her friends is getting a bit more complicated than back in the landline era. I'm still not sure how it will work out.....
Once they are old enough to afford a real cell phone then they can pay for it.
Storm
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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I'd say that as soon as the kid is trustworthy enough to go places without the parents, they should be given a cell phone and allowed to do as such. Of course, for some individuals, this puts the age at 18 years old when they can legally get their own, but for most, it's around the driving age.
This has been expressed many times in this thread.
I'm of mixed opinion about fully-qualified vs. feature-limited phones for younger people who are using them, though. How many people is Joe Twelve going to be actually calling? Sure, he might call his friends who also have cell phones, but it's unlikely he'd make very much use of the gadget if he does have it. Additionally, every single cell phone I've seen (kid-marketed or not) does have the ability to restrict various settings. I had a Qualcomm Kyocera phone that had security options such as restrict outgoing calls to numbers in the address book only, disable adding new entries to the address book, and disable the window where the phone told you its own phone number so you couldn't give it to people and tell them to call you. My Nokia has something similar, I'm pretty sure, although I haven't looked.
These features allow you to easily cripple any phone and turn it into something akin to the LG Verizon MiGi device, except with the ability to, say, re-enable the blocked features if the owner is going away somewhere they need them. Out, for instance, with grandparents, or a friend or friend's family, where they might need to dial other people for a while.
It would also allow the phone to be "unlocked" as the kid got older or got more responsible, or both.
More and more people I know don't maintain landline service, or have that service in the sense that they have wires running out to their house but lines are so poor it's nearly never used. These people have cell phones as their only method of communication, and people tend to not like sharing with other people. I think it's perfectly acceptable to give a kid a feature-limited line on a family talk plan or something in these situations, at a very early age. For others, not so much.
Quite a few accidents are caused by cellphone use however :/
No. They are not.
Quite a few accidents are caused by people being poor drivers, or by allowing themselves to act like poor drivers because they're doing something that's distracting them (putting on makeup, eating a sandwich, looking at the cows in the next field that will be their next sandwich, fiddling with their iPod, yelling at the kids in the back seat, smoking, digging through their briefcase - whatever). Cell phones don't cause accidents, people do.
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The problem is, with the rise of cel phones, there are no more pay phones. At least, hardly any. I've tried to find one once or twice, and it's hard. As such, any teen who wants to contact their parents either has to have a cel phone or borrow a friend's. You can't even guarantee that if they're at a friend's house, there will be a landline for them to call on (or for you to call them on)! I'd definitely want my teen to have one, just because these days there is a serious lack of other options.
That said, I agree with other posters that until the kid is old enough to be doing this kind of stuff on their own, they probably don't need one. Although the ones people have mentioned that will only call parents or emergency #s sound like they might not be a bad idea, as long as the kid knows when and how to use it responsibly.
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I started using a cell phone at 16. The reason, in case you haven't guessed, has to do with driving. My parents were more comfortable with me driving if I had a phone to call for help from (NOT to use while driving).
Why an 8 year old needs a cell phone is beyond me, but if the parents want it then it's their (possibly ill informed) choice to provide it.
I know adults who have no need for a cell phone and 14 year olds who would benefit from having one available, so a specific age is not so important (unless somebody can prove damaging effects from radiation).
-Tim Louden
Five year olds need cellphones so they can call their lawyers when RIAA sues them for filesharing. Duh.
The car thing seems arbitrary, though the 16 year old driving age seems arbitrary to me too. You should be able to (drive|drink|vote) when you can prove you are responsible and capable enough to handle it. I think the same should go for cell phone ownership. When you are responsible enough and capable of paying for your phone, you are old enough to have one. Until then you aren't. They are a luxury device, and no matter what anybody says, nobody *needs* one.
As for the 'medical concerns', I'm convinced that this crap is only ever brought up by people who find phones objectionable for other reasons, and they're just trying to find some way to get everybody else to hate them too.
Back in my day, during the summer, the neighbourhood kids would all leave the house early in the morning (riding our bikes with no helmets) to go play with GIJoe or Star Wars figures in somebody's back yard, go to the comic book store (tended by an eerily similar fella as the one in The Simpsons), go play (and pirate) C64 games at somebody's house, and just be all over the place, including woods and construction sites and our parents had no idea where we were all day, nobody could reach us. Only rule is we'd have to be home by the time it was dark. I don't recall ever having someone we knew go missing or of anything awful happening to anybody, maybe we were just lucky (middle class suburbs of Chicago), but then again we weren't stupid either, we knew not to get into cars with strangers and what not. Anyway, those were the days, no worries, no responsibility, pure independence, all day.
Give a kid a cell phone and you make them trade that experience for your own peace of mind, all of a sudden you burden them with something there. It's tough though, if I were a parent I'd be too fretful to let my kids run about like I did. Parenting must be a totally different experience now with the internet and cell phones, you're not sure who your kids are associating with. At least back then our parents knew that were were only associating with other kids more or less our age, but with the net, dunno.
Where I live (Denmark) it's quite common for 4th or 5th graders to have cell-phones (that would be around 10 years of age). They don't call one another that much (let alone their parents unless they need a ride or something) - they use their phones to send each other text messages. Piles of them. That has become such a part of their pattern of social interaction that kids without cell phones feel left out. And quite frankly, they often are.
Most cell phone plans nowadays feature an optional "all the SMS'es you can send for DKK99 (~$15) per month" that is VERY popular with the young crowd (and certainly their parents).
My oldest son is in 2nd grade now, and in a few years we'll buy him a cell phone. Not for GPS tracking, partly for minor emergencies (of the "missed the bus" kind), partly for "I'm at Johnny's house" messages but the primary reason is that a cell phone is often a required device for social interaction with friends at that age. I may not like that (in fact, I don't) but the social well-being of my son is more important than my personal taste. A group of parents (myself included) have been trying to make my son's school ban cell phones from the classrooms with some success, but after school there's not much we can do about it.
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