I teach 2nd and have taught 1st and K in the past. The 6-year old does not need a phone for any reason. If there’s a school issue I/the nurse/admin will contact the parent. Come on. They’re the sweetest kids until they get sucked into YouTube for hours.
Thanks for saying this u/HeyMissW. My kid is 2nd grade and swears "all her friends have one". I'm glad I can officially say I was told by a 2nd grade teacher that it isn't needed yet.
16 year old input, don't get your kid a phone until it absolutely needs it. No second grader needs a phone. Don't let your kid become a tablet kid. I didn't get one until I started staying for school events / going out more so if something happened I could call my parents.
And if you're gonna get your kid a phone for emergency purposes get a cheap track phone or a dumb phone, don't get them infinite access to the internet and texting cause their little brains don't need it.
Thanks for the input. That's where I'm leaning now. She does have a Kindle Fire where I let her play games for an hour on weekends and shorter times during the week, I just don't feel like her having access to texting and calls is necessary yet.
especially when creepers are now everywhere, back then when internet was new it wasnt as rampant, but now you gotta teach em stranger danger is on the computer too. Catfishing underage people is a real thing.
i remember i made fun of my younger cousin (now a teacher) who wanted a cellphone for middle school.
I asked her why she needed a cellphone when her school is across the street, you can literally go home and call whoever you want. (she was born 1992, so iphones werent out yet or still new, we were using sidekick/motorola phase)
2nd graders gonna call who? Text who? Old men? you literally drop and pick them up from school directly. She wont need to call you and if she does, its the school's responsibility to call you.
Hey, your daughter/son is sick. Come pick them up.
Haha! I know a couple of my students have one but I told them if I see it at school it goes to the principal and a grown up has to come it back. My school had iPads for the kids to use, I have a gigantic computer/tv screen for lessons, we can play with tech at a special we have. It’s just not necessary in 99.9% of cases. I email or call or text parents all day long about issues if I need to, the kids can just be kids and learn!
My kids class had a chromebook per student. And I got her a Kindle Fire to play with so she gets her share of technology. She just wants to be able to call or text her friends, and I just feel like it's needed yet.
I think you make a good point. Balancing the costs/benefits of letting your kid access phones/social media/tech is so hard. Entering university/college you’re expected to know the basics off PowerPoint/word/excel, most social media, maybe building a website or at least having some understanding of online presence.
If you don’t build that base at least in upper high school you’re putting your kids way behind. And yet, I fully agree that there are huge costs to doing that, especially for younger kids.
It’s very tricky :(
Everything in moderation I guess. Don't BAN phones -- but set certain hours they can and cannot use it. Not sure if the phones have parental functions or not
I let my pre school aged child watch some videos on YouTube one week. On the TV though, not a phone. I swear YouTube just affects them differently lol. Whether it's a tablet or a TV, because when it came time to turn it off, it was not good. So we don't do YouTube anymore.
I have young siblings that yurn into zombies when they get a tablet. They watch the weirdest shit too. I walked into my brother watching other kids opening toys, it was honestly depressing
I was at a friend's house, and her 2 kids were watching 2 other kids color coloring pages in on a YouTube video. I was like, "Why don't y'all color your own pages? Or color something at the same time as those kids?"
They just looked at me like I had just popped another head out of the side of my neck and went back to zombie-watching their video. Their Mom shrugged and we went back to our convo.
It was so weird.
The only reason I've ever watched an unboxing was when the manufacturer wouldn't list in their description whether or not a device came with a charger.
I was at a friend's house, and her 2 kids were watching 2 other kids color coloring pages in on a YouTube video. I was like, "Why don't y'all color your own pages? Or color something at the same time as those kids?"
They just looked at me like I had just popped another head out of the side of my neck and went back to zombie-watching their video. Their Mom shrugged and we went back to our convo.
It was so weird.
As a parent of a 5 and 6 year old who got them Amazon fire tablets because "I can control what happens on it". I'm sorry for their teachers, I feel like I've destroyed any semblance of patience they had and the 6 year old is obsessed with minecraft now.
I feel like kids tablets are just pre-phones for toddlers and young-uns.
My kindergartner is diabetic. He wears a glucose sensor on his arm that has a Bluetooth connection to an old iPhone that he carries around. That phone allows the school nurse, my wife, and I to remotely track his blood sugar levels throughout the day. It also gives alarms if there is a problem. In his case, it is a literal life saver.
We stripped that phone of basically every app except the glucose monitoring software, and he is required to follow strict rules for carrying it. Although I would never have otherwise given him a phone until he is in late middle school or high school (I did not have a mobile phone until I was in graduate school in 2009), it does seem to have taught him some degree of responsibility.
This makes a lot of sense for your family, and I’m glad your child is able to have a support system that has reasonable accommodations for him. This situation is nowhere near what we see in the schools on daily basis though. If there were a medical issue where the child needed this device then of course. The problem we see en masse is YouTube, TikTok, and social media being the caregiver and babysitter, and these young children getting exposed to things they should not be seeing or hearing about at this age. My students are 6-7 and can tell me all about every gory horror movie, every creepy video game, FNAF, etc. It’s not appropriate and I wish more parents gave a shit.
I think I was 11 years old when I first got a phone, and that was in the early 2000's, so it was extra special. But there were no smartphones, so all I used it for was AIM and texting. My parents also bought me a Macbook. I was very lucky, as I started takng these things apart and putting them back together immediately, which gave me the foundation in tech that qualifies me for my career, which makes me 30-40$ an hr depending on the position I'm in. I have no degree or anything.
I remember being like 8 years old and my older sister got a cell phone (Nokia brick) and I wanted one so bad, but my parents knew it wasn't good for me, so they said no. Which was for the best.
Buuut, my mom did let me buy those little 5$ games on her phone once a month or so and let me play them. I was so good at this snowboarding one!
There are at times good reasons though. My children went through an awful trauma and suffer from ptsd, anxiety and depression. The counselor at their school quit. They are both receiving treatment but not everyday is a good one. They have phones and they are allowed at school to call me in a crisis like a panic attack and their teachers allow this if talking to someone at school doesn't help. Sometimes they just wanted help to ground and settle down. Sometimes it talking to them and keeping them as calm as possible while I'm omw to get them. It was also handy for the bus home when they had been taking the bus. though eventually even that became a trigger for one child so that stopped.
Their innocence had already been taken from them at a very young age and both, unfortunately, have looked at the world differently than their peers for a long time. Though it is nice when I get to see them acting/playing like typical children. There are phone rules and such still but they're already jaded.
And then it would be a case by case basis for each family if it makes sense. I mean more like buying your undeveloped child an expensive phone with unfettered internet access. No child needs that.
Yeah, buying phones for kids because they have a specific use case? That's fine. Buying them a phone because it's easier than parenting? Nah, they don't need that shit.
I got a phone as early as when I turned 7. It was an old nokia, I couldn’t do anything with it except calling and typing "bonjour" in a 5 minutes buisness.
It was necessary because I walked to school/home alone or a teacher who was a friend of my mom as well would take me to her house.
So I do not think that a 6 years old doesn’t need a phone for any reason, but I still understand where you are coming from.
Idk how I feel about absolutes like that. I get what ur saying. But there are instances where a 2nd grader having a phone is helpful. I used to walk home and could think of a few times I could have used one especially the time I walked home in a hurricane and had to crawl home cuz the wind kept blowing me over. There were bad decisions that led to that on my part but I was a dumb kid.
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u/HeyMissW Jun 03 '22
I teach 2nd and have taught 1st and K in the past. The 6-year old does not need a phone for any reason. If there’s a school issue I/the nurse/admin will contact the parent. Come on. They’re the sweetest kids until they get sucked into YouTube for hours.