We've told E that he won't be getting a smartphone til he's 16 - wish us luck! I just feel the data that shows harms is too strong now for me to do anything different. A few local schools are now entirely smartphone free and I'm sure that number will increase. It helps that there's a strong smartphone community in his primary school. I'm 'working with' ie being surveyed by a phone company at the moment who are designing a new phone for parents who don't want their kids to have smartphones. Should be out by September. Here's hoping!
I'm dealing with this at the moment with my youngest stepdaughter (11) and it's incredibly difficult and a bit of a minefield. Despite all the best intentions, I think all kids find themselves addicted to their phones. However, yesterday we met friends for a half-term day out and I couldn't believe it when we got to the end of the day and she hadn't looked at her phone once. So I would say planning out-of-the-home activities that involve fresh air and company is a very good way to control phone use! (As usual, ridiculously simple and obvious advice but it's also amazingly easy to ignore...) x
I was saying the other day, I would definitely buy a kids' book about all this. There are so many books for adults like The Anxious Generation, Digital Minimalism, etc - if there was a fun, non-preachy, 10-year-old-friendly book around those themes, I would 100% buy it xx
Check the phone policy of the schools you're applying to - I'm working at a completely phone free one and it's been life changing. Also, I'm assigned to a y7 tutor group and they have lots of pastoral care. They all seem so tiny compared to the teenagers and they are all exhausted now, but they're nailing it! xx
The school Ezra will most likely go to allows smartphones, but they must be switched off in bags during the school day. I guess it's just all the time around that... xx
Love this. We have an 8 year old and a 6 year old but are trying to set rules for our own phone usage now so when they get phones the rules we want to establish are already embedded as family rules, not just things for them. So our phones stay downstairs, not in bedrooms, every single night. We try also to leave them by the chargers rather than having them in our pockets. And big fan of having paper magazine subscriptions - on a Friday we have The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week Junior and the Beano all drop through the letterbox and occasionally this makes for blissful Saturday morning lie ins of the four of us all reading our magazine of choice together in the big bed. The Beano reader tends to have less to contribute comparing how the same story has been protrayed in each publication, but not always.
I love this! There's really nothing nicer than leafing through a paper magazine, and it's so great for kids to grow up in a house where there is intelligent reading material just lying around.
I'm not yet at the stage of leaving my phone in another room at bedtime, but I have been trying to pop it in a drawer after picking the kids up from school, so I'm not looking at it during that crucial dinner/bath/bedtime period.
Great post and very relatable. I agree with Laura’s comment below that ‘Despite all the best intentions I think kids find themselves addicted to their phones’. And yes it’s a minefield. Our children are now 19 and 15. We decided to give them Nokia ‘bricks’ when they started secondary school in Year 7 and even then I’m not sure they really needed them. I found the smartphone argument from other parents incredibly frustrating ‘Everyone else is getting their kids a smartphone so we’ve decided to get our son/ daughter one, we don’t want him/ her to be left out’. This started happening at primary school in year 4 and 5! Madness.
We are all ‘everybody else’. We don't have to be unquestioning lemmings. We were definitely in the minority with the ‘brick is best for now’ approach. We did eventually get them smartphones (hastened by the pandemic and the children being stuck at home away from their peers). Naturally their phone usage instantly shot up massively. Car journeys that were once full of conversation or choosing music were spent hunched over screens, books that were once read were ignored, (The Week Jnr subscription cancelled!), exhausting arguments and ‘haggling’ about when phone usage was and wasn’t allowed became the norm. It’s a really tough dilemma but from experience I’d say don’t go ‘too early’. Yes it’s great to have good intentions to set boundaries but again, from personal experience, you may find you spend a lot of time attempting to reinforce those boundaries.
Warning: It’s exhausting and once you’ve got a smartphone the (highly addictive) genie is out of the bottle and there's no going back. There’s a reason there’s a whole younger generation who don’t like reading books and have a Tik Tok attention span, but that’s a whole other post. Maybe consider the brick option first - the more parents that did that, the easier it would be, but that's just my thoughts. Good luck with whatever you decide. x
We've told E that he won't be getting a smartphone til he's 16 - wish us luck! I just feel the data that shows harms is too strong now for me to do anything different. A few local schools are now entirely smartphone free and I'm sure that number will increase. It helps that there's a strong smartphone community in his primary school. I'm 'working with' ie being surveyed by a phone company at the moment who are designing a new phone for parents who don't want their kids to have smartphones. Should be out by September. Here's hoping!
Ooh that sounds really interesting! It really does feel there is a gap in the market for that kind of thing. Keep me posted!
I'm dealing with this at the moment with my youngest stepdaughter (11) and it's incredibly difficult and a bit of a minefield. Despite all the best intentions, I think all kids find themselves addicted to their phones. However, yesterday we met friends for a half-term day out and I couldn't believe it when we got to the end of the day and she hadn't looked at her phone once. So I would say planning out-of-the-home activities that involve fresh air and company is a very good way to control phone use! (As usual, ridiculously simple and obvious advice but it's also amazingly easy to ignore...) x
The best advice is the most simple I always find!
I was saying the other day, I would definitely buy a kids' book about all this. There are so many books for adults like The Anxious Generation, Digital Minimalism, etc - if there was a fun, non-preachy, 10-year-old-friendly book around those themes, I would 100% buy it xx
Check the phone policy of the schools you're applying to - I'm working at a completely phone free one and it's been life changing. Also, I'm assigned to a y7 tutor group and they have lots of pastoral care. They all seem so tiny compared to the teenagers and they are all exhausted now, but they're nailing it! xx
Ahhh bless them! It's such a big change, right?
The school Ezra will most likely go to allows smartphones, but they must be switched off in bags during the school day. I guess it's just all the time around that... xx
Love this. We have an 8 year old and a 6 year old but are trying to set rules for our own phone usage now so when they get phones the rules we want to establish are already embedded as family rules, not just things for them. So our phones stay downstairs, not in bedrooms, every single night. We try also to leave them by the chargers rather than having them in our pockets. And big fan of having paper magazine subscriptions - on a Friday we have The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week Junior and the Beano all drop through the letterbox and occasionally this makes for blissful Saturday morning lie ins of the four of us all reading our magazine of choice together in the big bed. The Beano reader tends to have less to contribute comparing how the same story has been protrayed in each publication, but not always.
I love this! There's really nothing nicer than leafing through a paper magazine, and it's so great for kids to grow up in a house where there is intelligent reading material just lying around.
I'm not yet at the stage of leaving my phone in another room at bedtime, but I have been trying to pop it in a drawer after picking the kids up from school, so I'm not looking at it during that crucial dinner/bath/bedtime period.
Great post and very relatable. I agree with Laura’s comment below that ‘Despite all the best intentions I think kids find themselves addicted to their phones’. And yes it’s a minefield. Our children are now 19 and 15. We decided to give them Nokia ‘bricks’ when they started secondary school in Year 7 and even then I’m not sure they really needed them. I found the smartphone argument from other parents incredibly frustrating ‘Everyone else is getting their kids a smartphone so we’ve decided to get our son/ daughter one, we don’t want him/ her to be left out’. This started happening at primary school in year 4 and 5! Madness.
We are all ‘everybody else’. We don't have to be unquestioning lemmings. We were definitely in the minority with the ‘brick is best for now’ approach. We did eventually get them smartphones (hastened by the pandemic and the children being stuck at home away from their peers). Naturally their phone usage instantly shot up massively. Car journeys that were once full of conversation or choosing music were spent hunched over screens, books that were once read were ignored, (The Week Jnr subscription cancelled!), exhausting arguments and ‘haggling’ about when phone usage was and wasn’t allowed became the norm. It’s a really tough dilemma but from experience I’d say don’t go ‘too early’. Yes it’s great to have good intentions to set boundaries but again, from personal experience, you may find you spend a lot of time attempting to reinforce those boundaries.
Warning: It’s exhausting and once you’ve got a smartphone the (highly addictive) genie is out of the bottle and there's no going back. There’s a reason there’s a whole younger generation who don’t like reading books and have a Tik Tok attention span, but that’s a whole other post. Maybe consider the brick option first - the more parents that did that, the easier it would be, but that's just my thoughts. Good luck with whatever you decide. x
This is so helpful, thank you so much!