Kids and mobiles – how old is old enough?

There are some toys that pretty much every preschool has.

The red and yellow cosy coupe car. The brio wooden train track. And the smiling, friendly faced Fisher Price telephone with its string, dial, and little red handset.

All known and loved by generations of children.

Except… ‘What IS it, Mummy?’ Asked Bubby D, her face wrinkled in confusion.

I stared at the telephone, and then her, and I realised. Kids these days don’t actually necessarily know what a landline telephone is!

We do have a landline, because we have to in order to use the internet. But it never gets used as a phone line – why would it, when we all have mobiles?

And Bubby D definitely knows about those…

In fact, it seems that most kids do. And according to recent research from broadband choices, quite a lot of kids have their own mobile phones too. Not three year olds like Bubby D, obviously; but it turns out that 90% of kids aged 8-14 now own one. And quite a lot of them are under 10.

Which gives me a bit of a wierd, scary kind of ‘eek’ feeling. Because the Wee Man is only three years off 8!

When I was young, I have memories of sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, twirling the phone cord around in my hand as I spoke to a friend. Begging to use the phone, and groaning at my sister or my mum as they came on the other extension and demanded that I GET OFF THAT PHONE! At least, I was young but not THAT young. Who do 8 year olds even need to phone, anyway?

But then I thought about it a bit more – and of course phones aren’t just phones these days. They’re portable homework helpers, players of brightly coloured irritatingly beepy games, and conveyors of random texts and social media hanging-outness.

So if you ARE lured into providing your tiny person with a mobile, how do you know which one to go for?

Contract – good because they won’t run out of credit and they have lots of free minutes/data/text…but also bad because they don’t run out and so the bills keep coming…and coming…and coming… (in fact the research shows the average spend for a kids’ mobile is £15 a month, but one in 10 manage to rack up bills over £30!). Plus of course with contract, you get a much wider choice of spangly, all singing, all dancing phones. Is that a good thing though? I’m thinking mid range is better, purely in terms of my fury when it inevitably comes home smashed, or lost, or used as a coaster.

Pay-and-go – more able to keep control of spending, but probably more spending involved as everything costs more. From what I’ve seen though, some of them have friendly animals that give more minutes/text/data for a fixed monthly fee, which might be a good option. And if the losing of the phone DOES happen, then at least you know that whoever finds it can’t leave you with a bill bigger than the size of your child’s eyes as they beg and plead with you for a new one.

Talking of how far kids would go for phones, there is research on that too. 15% of kids would go without food or sleep to play on them more! Clearly they haven’t found these Christmas pudding biscuits that I’ve just come across, pretty much nothing could stop me eating these biscuits. But there is good news too – even though a lot of parents vastly underestimate how much their kids are using their phones (45% of parents questioned, to be exact), it is also the case that some of these kids are using them in worthwhile ways (homework) and a lot of them are learning about financial responsibility through having to budget what they’re spending too.

So, there’s a whole new world of potential parental confusion out there for us in the next few years. And while I’m glad to be getting a bit of time to think it all through before the demands come calling, I think it’s pretty safe to say that for now, I think we can stick with the Fisher Price phone with it’s friendly plastic face and fixed price of around a tenner. Or whatever they cost these days.

Actually I’m a bit scared to look!