By this line of reasoning, it is impossible to ever establish any sort of intermediate steps between infantile total dependency and full adult responsibility. :rolleyes:
Damn! I wanted to be the first one to mention the Firefly Phone! 
Now if only there was some way of letting them have a phone where huge bills couldn’t be run up, where perhaps you can pay in advance. Then parents could provide a certain amount of money each month. If something like this existed, then somebody would have suggested it already. Right?
<< resisting the urge to rant about “back in my day” >> …
I’m a little taken aback by the talk here that a kid has to have a cell phone when he’s 12. My older son turns 12 later this year, and I’m having a hard time imagining him getting one within the next couple of years.
This is true. I was at the playground last week with my kids and some kid, who looked to be around 12/13, asked to borrow my cellphone so he could call a friend who he was supposed to be meeting there to play basketball. That’s not a huge deal, I’m sure if the other kid hadn’t shown up the boy would have just gone home eventually.
My 11-yr old has a cellphone because she gets home from school about 2 hours before I get home. A couple of weeks ago her house key fell out of her backpack, in the car, on the way to school that morning. Which we didn’t realize until she got home. Luckily she was able to easily call me and I ran home and let her in the door. Without the cellphone she would have either tried to find a neighbor that was home so she could call me or sit outside until I came home. I’m glad she had the phone. For us, the phone is just a piece of mind thing for me. I need to know that she’s able to reach me if she needs me. Before she started staying home alone I thought it was ridiculous for her to have a cellphone.
She has a basic pay-as-you-go plan which is a pain in the ass for me. She doesn’t talk alot on the phone, even so - it catches me by surprise when her minutes get low. I’m thinking of just getting another line on my cellphone plan so I don’t have to worry about her running out of minutes.
By the same logic, you should only ever purchase the most fragile, top of the line goods for your child, or they will never suffer the consequences of negligence.
Look, you try hard enough, and you can break anything. My brothers, who were actually less destructive than most boys, once table hockey with soy sauce bottles. Kids do stupid stuff. It’s in their job description. They haven’t developed the prefrontal lobe executive capabilities to reliably and consistently determine likely consequences.
Phones don’t have to be stolen for profit in order to disappear. They can be stolen for mischief, for meanness, or for humor. They can be lost, accidentally thrown away, loaned to a friend and never gotten back. So, it’s a good idea to provide the equivalent of training wheels when they first come into ownership of relatively expensive belongings.
[fake outrage] NEVER! All 12-year-olds are identical! They aren’t born; they’re stamped out in factories with approved Sigma-6 processes.[/fake outrage]
Twelve-years-old is smack in the pre-adolescent spectrum where they are creating their own very first, non-familial social networks. It’s a whole developmental thing, and because they’re kids, lacking those executive functions, they need supervision and guidance. The most obvious pitfall to allowing a child access to a cell phone is that they will go overboard with the opportunity to socialize with their peers and run up an astronomical bill (depending on the plan) or lose track of their obligations.
Will it happen to every 12 year old? Of course not. Is it more likely to happen to a 12 year old than a 16 year old or a 36 year old? Well, unless there’s something very odd with your 36 year old, yes.
I think your wife’s position is bizarre. I’m actually not really sure what her point is or what she would gain by denying the child the phone except to annoy him.
I mean, I’m not really sure what type of plots he and the other 12-year-olds are going to be cooking up on cell phones that they won’t be able to devise in a million other ways. Will she monitor his land-line calls? His emails?
Besides, like other posters have said, while a cell phone is technically a luxury, so are lots of things you’ll have bought for your kid by the time he’s twelve. And a lot of them will be more expensive and have way less practical use than a cell phone. And phones, by the way, are dirt cheap. Just get him one of the free ones along with a cheap calling plan and tell him that he needs to pay for any extra texts he sends or any minutes he uses over his limit.
And yes, in nine years time, a twelve-year-old without a cell phone is going to be thought of as extremely weird by his peers, and it will absolutely affect his social life.
This is the first time they come into ownership of something worth, ooh, maybe $15 (cheapest with Virgin Mobile, on a quick check)? It’s easy to throw in a phrase like ‘relatively expensive’, but is this really the most valuable item they’ve had responsibility for in their lives?
Exactly, the aforementioned 12 y/o had a $100 gameboy years before his cellphone which I pretty sure was $39.
I think my daughter was a bit older than 12 when she got hers, but she is 21 now and they weren’t as ubiquitous back then. When she did get it, it was on a family plan for $9.99 a month, plus a few bucks for text messages. It more than paid for itself in piece of mind, and in being able to have her call us to pick her up at the mall. Now she is in college, on the other side of the country, we speak for hours for basically nothing.
If you make the limitations clear up front, it is a great way of teaching budgeting. You can check usage on line if you’re nervous. As for getting into trouble, I was a kid before there were cellphones, and we could get into trouble without them just fine. Even better, since we could be more easily out of reach of our parents. (Not that I ever got into trouble, but I could have.)
Ask your wife what she’d feel like if there was an emergency at school and your kids were out of touch. You might check on school policies. Ours didn’t supposedly allow them on campus, but when the campus was locked down due to a bank robbery down the street, they came out. The real rule was that having them was fine, using them not fine. In any case, they hardly count as a luxury anymore.
We have had one for my daughter since she was about 8. I had divorced my first wife and she moved out of state. I got a phone for my daughter so I could always reach her. She moved back with about 2 years ago right before I got remarried and she still has the phone. We leave the house before she is up and get home after her–both by about an hour or so. With the cell phone she calls me in the morning and tells me she is up, then again at the bus stop. At the end of the day she calls me and lets me know she is off the bus and then again when she is in the house. It gives me GREAT peace of mind and is worth every penny we pay for it.
She has a nice phone–it is a Chocolate and it has music and texting and all the bells and whistles…and she uses them, but doesn’t abuse them. I like knowing that she can get in touch with me at anytime, and frankly it takes away any argument from her. One of her friends came over the other night and eventually got in trouble when she didn’t call home because she didn’t get permission–but my daughter would never have pulled that trick because she knows I wouldn’t buy it since I always have my phone.
She actually is a very responsible telephone owner to be honest. She charges it herself everynight and has religiously called me every day like clockwork. She texts mainly on it with her friends, but we make her call her friends on the landline unless we are out and about. So we haven’t had the $500 phone bills. In fact we have a 700 minute plan, I have 150 minutes, my wife has 150 minutes and my daughter has the other 400 minutes. Our phone minutes are usually about 550 minutes.
Yes–my kid rocks! 
But like anything in life with kids the emulate you and you need to show them how to be responsible in my opinion.
It’s not that he’s going to plot a nuclear war with the phone, it’s just that IMHO a 12 year old kid needs to be exploring the REAL world around him talking with live people, and not be walking around with a cellphone permanently attached to the side of his head.
He can wait until he is a dickhead adult before he ignores the rest of the world and uses the public space as his own personal business domain…
We had 1 family cellphone til my oldest when to college.
Got a phone for my oldest when she went to college - at which point I agree a cell is necessary.
Just got a 3d. My son, who graduates HS this Friday, will take it to college with him.
I see no reason why a 12-year old would NEED a cell phone.
As far as music, my kids have all had iPods for a couple of years now.
In my experience, the people who spend a lot of time on the phone ARE the kids spending the most time interacting with the real world and with real people. The kids who have cell phones but don’t use them? Well, those are the kids who sit at the nerd tables at lunch anyway
I’m new to this parenting lark, and thankfully this discussion is not going down for a decade or so. But I did teach middle school, and while I’m not opposed to the cellphone “just because,” I do think the “social pariah” rationale is a poor one. Phones, cars, and things of that nature do have a practical use, but for most kids it’s just a status symbol. A kid in multiple afterschool activities can make a good case for a phone… one who simply reaches an age cannot.
Also, I think it depends on the kid. A fairly mature, responsible kid will have earned enough capital with his/her parents to earn the privilege of having a phone, while one who acts his or her age probably isn’t ready. Now, I’m too old to have had a cell phone in HS, but pagers were pretty big back then. I certainly wasn’t getting one from my parents, but even getting one with my own money would have been unlikely - my parents wouldn’t allow it.
Plus, there’s a downside to giving young kids valuable consumer durables that are portable - they can lose it, it can be stolen, and they are often in environments where cell phones are not allowed or can be confiscated (i.e. school).
I also believe that if a kid that age does get a phone, it should be the most basic model - like the Firefly mentioned. I absolutely would not get a phone with web, camera, texting, downloadable ringtones, or any of that claptrap. Kids should have a goal to aspire to - when they get older, they can decide if they want to put out the cash for a bells-and-whistles phone.
If the kid is essentially in school and at the mall, I think 12 is way too young to have a cell phone. It’s also too young to have a personal computer and/or television in their own room, but that’s just me…
I don’t see this really turning into a debate, so I’m going to let you all continue expressing your opinions in IMHO.
[ /Modding ]
If they are busy in after-school activities - why not?
If you are afraid they will abuse it - get a phone that will allow them to call/receive from people in their phonebook only and have them turn in the phone when they are at home & retrieve it when they go to their next function.
You can block text messaging & downloads as well to prevent an unexpected bill.
I can’t really say what the proper age is but my 14-year-old nephews have survived without a phone. Sometimes their parents lend them one when it’s useful. When they do get a phone they will be paying for it themselves. It’s a toy and a status symbol.
Well no, but you should buy the kid some clothes or else they arn’t going to let him into to school. I don’t think we are talking about a phone as a status symbol, but the phone as a social planning device. In the future, it will be next to impossible to make plans withot a cell phone. Anyone without one will not be able to keep up with their social group- which may seem like nothing to an adult but is a big problem for a twelve year old.
How ever did we older folks survive our childhoods without cell phones? It must have been horrible.