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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.
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.
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just stay the f*ck off my lawn!
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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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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.
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.
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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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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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Five year olds need cellphones so they can call their lawyers when RIAA sues them for filesharing. Duh.
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.