A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if her 5-year-old son was too young to have a cell phone. My response was YES and DUH! But lately I've been feeling as if I'm in the minority--in more ways than one. Everywhere I look I see another 5, 6 and 7-14-year-old on a cell phone. Am I the only one who thinks there is something wrong with this picture? Yes, of course the one to your right.
A 2006 study by Yankee Group, a market researching firm, has predicted that by 2010, nearly 54 percent of tweens (that's 8-12-year-olds) will have cell phones. But why? Who will all these tweens need to talk to so urgently that they can't wait until they get home to speak? If someone gives me an answer to this question that isn't "their bff (best friend forever)" or "their grandma," then I will be convinced that it is a good idea for children to have cell phones.
Most parents believe they should get their child a cell phone for safety reasons. For instance, if their child gets lost, kidnapped, or if there is a school shooting or some other dire situation where their child would need to get a hold of them, then a cell phone would come in handy. But cell phones can be a false sense of security for both the parent and the child if they believe that a cell phone works to prevent the likelihood of a child getting lost. Kids might tend to wander more freely away from their parents if they know they have a cell phone on them, and parents might not keep as keen an eye on their child when they know that their 7-year-old is only a phone call away. Cell phones will make the child and the parent feel safer, but the child won't actually be safer in any given situation. In the event that a child is kidnapped, I highly doubt that the kidnapper will wait a sec while the child calls his mom to let her know where he or she is. And of course parents should have some way of knowing if their child's school has an emergency, but with so many kids calling their parents and 911, there is bound to be some interference with emergency calls, and some distorted information given to both the parents and the dispatchers.
Another thing about "safety". When you tell a tween that you want him/her to have a cell phone for "safety reasons" they think "Yes! Now I'll be safe from being the only kid at school without a cell phone." And when you tell them to only use it in case of an emergency they think, "So if a teacher of student gets on my nerves, I'll call you," or "If I find out something that my bff doesn't know, then I'll call her and spend hours telling her all about it." With this and the added unsafe threats of cell phone bullies, sexual predators, and not to mention possible cancer, the safety factors of cell phones are not completely clear to me.
I say, if kids aren't old enough to drive, then they shouldn't be any place where there isn't a trusted adult around with a phone. If parents depend too much on the iphone or any other cell phone, then they're going end up realizing "ilost my 5-year-old, and my 5-year-old lost his iphone," or "igave my child an iphone, and he gave me an isorry for the huge bill." Until they're old enough to drive and/or pay for it themselves, reason will win on this end of the line.
Photo by Bex Ross
