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Not sure if it's reasonable, but a very simple answer is to get your kid a feature phone, if the intent is to be able to stay in touch/emergency contact (we let our kids bike to middle school and it was nice to be in touch). We didn't get them smart phones until high school.

Though if my kids are any indication, it's still 50/50 - one is on tiktok/snapchat/insta constantly, and the other could care less.

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Some parents in our social circle have been getting their kids smart watches. This allows talk to text and phone calls, but pretty much no internet. These devices are also good for parental controls like allow listing phone numbers (first thing our friends son did was make crank calls :)

I frequently recommend the apple watch with cellular to families... it has nice built in support to be set up for a child, the watch form factor is nice for lots of kids (harder to lose), and you are still getting a premium product (important for the families that I work with).

I thought Apple Watches required an iPhone to pair with? Is that not the case?

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