At what age should a teenager be given a cell phone?

This article excludes the middle: phones that are not smartphones. They can call and text their family, emergency services, and close friends, but that's it.

Also the "it's different for everyone" response is too simple. Kids have friends. One kid with a phone who discovers porn is going to secretly show it to everyone they can. Ditto beheadings, assaults, etc etc. This is bigger than the individual.

The article makes it seem like kids one day having a phone is a fait accompli, I like to think of smart phones as this generations tobacco. Right now it looks like a universal practice, but we already know the significant mental and physical issues that have been caused mainly by constant access to our phones and the networks they connect us to. I hope my children never own or use a smart phone. If they do I hope they are disciplined enough to use it only as a very capable tool, and not as a necessary accessory to their life.

My children currently have access to a phone that can place call's and send text messages. Maybe it would be nice to have GPS on it once they get to driving age, but everything else is very much detrimental to their life and happiness.

Ideally it should be illegal before 18, then parents don't have to worry about peer pressure or ruining children's social lives.

The argument of using apps in school is absurd, schools shouldn't be expecting students to have hundreds of dollars computers in their pockets where pen, paper, and talking works just fine. I could see a non-smart phone for communication purposes, but smart phones are not about communication, they are about consumption.

I don’t think teenagers should have access to social media or smart phones before 18. For contacts, a dumb phone works just fine.

I recognize and have done my best to help my kids recognize that technology of all kinds can take over your life if you aren't making cognizant choices. That stated, for parents and kids on the go these devices can be a huge help. How many times already this week have I texted my kids to update them on schedule changes? How many times have I checked in with them about something going on where there input is needed? I think too that generationally, kids are comfortable texting in ways that can be therapeutic. If they need to text me or a teacher or a peer something that might be difficult in person and that gets them the breakthrough that they need, then I'm not going to complain that they should be calling / talking rather than texting.

I can't thank Apple enough for Find My Friends as it is a great way to keep track of my teens. It's the best way to trust but verify.

I do wish the parental controls were better on both Android and Apple, but I also recognize it is a Sysiphean problem.

For us, when the kids got to an age where their activities took them away from home and not necessarily at school, that's where it started to make sense. Practice gets done early, practice gets cancelled, activity moves to a different location, kid gets sick, I forgot my <important thing>, etc. Essentially as they start turning into little adults it reaches a tipping point where they need to be given adult tools along with the information needed to make adult decisions regarding content, time allocation, etc.

This article is making something really complicated out of a situation that has a really simple solution. As soon as your kid is old enough to actually use a phone which is like 4th grade get your kid an iPhone, set up the parental controls to your tolerance, and then gradually take away the parental controls as they get older.

Swear words / explicit music is fine around 4rd grade, violence and explicit music videos 6th grade, porn around 8th, buying things for themselves is around freshman year, screen time lifted and sending and receiving nudes is sophomore year.

You're not going to fix social media being awful by depriving your kid of it, you'll only socially isolate them and make sure that when they're making their first mistakes with it they'll be old enough for those mistakes to matter. Also in the same vein ffs people give your kids alcohol in a controlled setting, both casually like with dinner and letting them go to or hosting parties where you can literally take all their keys. The number of people I knew in college who had to get their stomach pumped because they literately didn't know how alcohol worked/affected them was too damn high. The gap between what's legal and right is huge when it comes to this because we still haven't shaken off our puritan roots.

This article is so out of touch it's hilarious, teenagers not only can handle the news just fine but are a group that's more politically active than your average adult. I am constantly shocked at just how much people forget what it was like to be a teenager. Let me tell you who I'm surrounded by at protests, it ain't 30yo professionals.

Apple should make a mode for iPhones that lets parents lock down any and every feature on their kids phones/watches. If they would do that, they'd sell a lot more phones to a lot younger customers.

But to answer the question, in the current climate, a smartphone as late as possible. A dumb phone pretty much any time.

They should be outlawed for the young like cigarettes are in NZ never allowing them to possess one.

10

I feel like fixating on the device only gets part of the point. I try to remember being a teen, and in spite of not owning a mobile phone until I was 27, and not having a beeper before then, I was still exposed to all of what this article and a lot of the comments are pointing out as harmful things. I saw plenty of porn, gore, witnessed a lot of in-person violence. Looking back, I can see a lot of my friend group had some very inappropriate relationships with predatory adults. We drove while intoxicated, had underage unprotected sex. My sister got pregant as a teenager. Her best friend from high school was murdered by her mom's boyfriend. One of our best family friends who I babysat for was one of the few surviving victims of Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. My middle school was shot at in three separate drive-bys. It's not like we didn't face danger. By any reasonable measure, at least in the US, the 90s were more dangerous than the world is today. Remember the movie My Girl? That actually happened to me. One of my best friends from when I was a kid, my dad's co-worker's daughter who hung out with us before I could form memories and ended up going to the same middle school as me, died from touching a cat because of allergies when we were 12. Stupid, preventable nonsense.

The problem that kids face today isn't danger. It's scale. Telecommunications has created a world where everyone is hyperconnected 24/7 and it's overwhelming. One issue with phones is the media content. There's too much of it, it never stops, and it creates an environment of constant comparison you can never escape from. Back in the day, getting really into TNG or X-Files was in itself an escape. They only came on once a week. They didn't try to fool you into thinking what was happening was real and your life didn't measure up because you weren't living that. The streaming ecosystem creates an entirely different dynamic where the consumers feel like they aren't living their best lives if they're not also producing their own content because of the illusion that the most popular celebrities are just regular people showing you their regular lives. But even without a phone, it's still there. The streaming services are all reachable from any other computing device or even a television.

Then you get into social networks. People you actually know, but barely. If someone bullies or annoys you, you can never get away. Instead of playing pick up basketball or lifting together with regular friends, you're doomscrolling Instagram watching a bunch of underwear models who can slam dunk thinking that's normal. Maybe you avoid some of that if you can't doomscroll, but if you have friends, they're going to show you the same feed. You can't make them unaware of the environment of FOMO and personal inadequacy this creates.

It's different being exposed to this kind of thing as an adult. Now that I'm spending time on Hacker News, it often makes me feel unaccomplished. There are technical wizards here, people whose books I read when learning the industry, people who retired as multimillionaires before they turned 30. But you know what? I barely knew such people existed when I was a kid. I'm just a normal guy now, but I felt like a god as a kid. I got 2nd in the So Cal regional spelling bee. Won the district-wide art show two years in a row. I lettered in four sports. Won two cross-country state championships, not individual, just team, but still. Perfect SAT score. I was 3rd tallest in my graduating class.

It turns out I was just a somewhat big fish in a nothing pond, but what would it have been like if I'd known that as a kid? If I was aware of how big the world is and how many ridiculous outliers and exceptional people are out there and how far I really was from being great at anything at all, what effect would that have had on my self-esteem and mental health? I can deal with it as an adult. I'm content at this point to live out a mediocre but happy and comfortable life. I don't know that kids can do that. Kids are ambitious. They're self-centered. They naturally form steep and brutal hierarchies.

I'm just not sure that taking away the phone, restricting usage, having GPS and parental controls, actually protects them from any of that.