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To have a kid in 2025 is to be anxious about when they’ll inevitably start asking for a phone. It’s easy for me, the mom of a toddler, to say I will wait as long as possible to give my son any kind of smart device. But for parents of tweens and young teens, especially ones who relied on iPads and Chromebooks throughout the pandemic, things are much more complicated. And despite recent phone bans in many schools across the country, individual families are mostly navigating the pros and cons of smartphones for kids all on their own.
Preteens yearn for independence — and many parents want to loosen the reins — but that requires giving them some way to check in and say, “I made it to school,” or “I’m going to Frannie’s house this afternoon.” Without the infrastructure of pay phones and without their own phone or smart watch, kids who walk to school or take public transit have little to no safety net or way of knowing if a train is delayed or if their mom is running late to pick them up. And without texting, Snapchat, or FaceTime, some kids will end up feeling cut off from social interactions taking place outside of school or extracurricular activities. Lots of parents want their children to have vibrant social lives and would rather relinquish control over the communication and scheduling part of kids hanging out with their friends. But monitoring text messages and setting up parental controls can prove to be just as exhausting.
I wanted to find out how different families are approaching this specific coming-of-age moment. So I talked to seven parents of kids between the ages of 7 and 14 about the choices they’ve made so far, how it’s going, and what they wish they had done or could have done differently.
We have three daughters. Our eldest is turning 14 in October, the middle one is 10, and the youngest just turned 8. I feel really lucky that we’re not doing this five-to-seven years ago, when we didn’t know all the things we know about data collecting and depression. But it is still a major struggle.
During the pandemic we got all three of our kids iPads, even the youngest, who was 2 years old back then, because learning was happening online. It definitely made devices and screens an integral part of our life. The younger two still have iPads with a lot of limits in place. There’s a lot of playing video games while FaceTiming with their friends. Or if we say they’ve been doing that too much, they’ll set up FaceTime and do craft projects with their cousins. In my mind, that’s a different bucket even though it’s still a screen.
My eldest daughter started walking to school by herself when she was 11. We got her an Apple Watch just so we could track her. That school goes up to eighth grade and all devices are banned, so when she got to school, she would put her watch into her bag and not be able to touch it until the end of the day. Last year she started at a new school and started taking the bus, so we set up an old phone for her. She doesn’t have Instagram; she doesn’t have TikTok. But she does have texting, and she gives us her phone at 9:30 pm on school nights so she doesn’t sleep with it in her room.
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I was sort of telling myself, As long as she doesn’t have TikTok and Instagram, it will be fine. But it’s not fine, actually. She’s on YouTube and Pinterest and, unbeknownst to me, the YouTube user interface is basically the same as other apps like TikTok — the sort of slot-machine-style scroll. There are so many great things about YouTube. A couple years ago her sewing machine was broken, then all of a sudden I heard her using it. She was like, “I looked up a tutorial on YouTube and I fixed it.” At 11 years old! But she’s also able to scroll through influencers on the same app.
There have been a few times where I’m like, I’m so glad that my oldest has a phone, like when the bus broke down. But for the younger girls it will definitely be later than their sister got one, and it won’t be an iPhone — it will be a smartwatch or a dumbphone.
—Regan Stephans, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
My daughter is 13 years old. At 10, we bought her a Gabb kids smartwatch that we had for a very short period of time. It was more of just a check-in-type thing rather than a regular thing that she wore. It was basically useless, in our opinion, and it was gargantuan. So as soon as she started really paying attention to how she looked, she was like, “This is ridiculous.”
Then we gave her my old iPhone for music purposes only. It had the Apple ID attached to it, but there was no activation for a phone service. She wasn’t able to use it outside of our Wi-Fi network or our house. It was connected to a shared family account, so if there were any apps that she was trying to download, we would get a notification for approval or refusal. We decided to give her her own phone at 12 years old because during the time that she had Wi-Fi only, we had a power outage, and she was home alone and she couldn’t call anybody. So we realized, Oh, shoot, for safety purposes we need to probably revisit that.
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She has limited data but unlimited talk and text. And then through Apple and Verizon, we have a plethora of parental controls. She only has access to certain websites through Safari and Chrome. We can set time limits on when she receives messages, when she’s able to get incoming or outgoing calls. And then we can also put restrictions on who she can contact and who can contact her within certain hours. From 10 p.m. through 8 a.m. she doesn’t get any access to phone calls or text messages, except for emergency contacts, which we’ve opened up for 24-hour access. And she does not have access to any social-media accounts whatsoever.
Her close friends do not have phones. They have iPads at home and can do messaging and FaceTime. They have watches that allow them to text via the watch, but they do not have access to any kind of apps or social media. For her schoolmates, it’s a completely different story. I would say 95 percent of them have access to a 24-hour phone. At one point we were getting upward of 110 text messages overnight from the class group text. I don’t know for sure, but I’m fairly confident that we are among maybe six or seven other families that are fairly stringent on phone use. So there was a lot of drama. There were a lot of, “I’ll smack you when I see you” messages, maybe joking, but I don’t know the comedic level of threats from eighth-graders.
As a parent, you want your child to be included socially, but you also want to protect them from the chaos that will likely ensue just because of the age group that they’re in. They’re not nice sometimes, and then whatever gets said can be misinterpreted and taken out into public. I mean, we can all misunderstand a text and mistranslate a text, but then you add 12- and 13-year-old boys and girls, and it’s a recipe for possible disaster.
—Zoe Paulson, Los Angeles, California
I have a daughter who is 13 and a son who is 10. My daughter has an iPhone and my son just got this thing called a Lite Phone. It’s not specifically designed for kids but more just for anyone who wants a dumbphone. There’s no browser, and it’s really slimmed down. It’s almost too small, actually, and it was kind of annoyingly expensive. But I got it for him because we just needed something for times when we’re late picking him up from practice, so I can text him and be like, “Hey, we’re going to be ten minutes late.” It does let him call and text friends, so I thought maybe it would buy us some time before having to buy the smartphone.
It was presented as a gift, and I think it was a disappointing gift because it was not a smartphone. He told a couple friends, “I have a phone,” and I think they were expecting to see an iPhone 17 or whatever. Then he pulls out this thing and they’re like, “Oh, that’s not a phone.” But I think he’s glad he has it now. Not too many of his friends have iPhones; it’s much more common to have a smartwatch. Middle school seems to be the tipping point. I wouldn’t be shocked if this year I start to see a lot more iPhones, but through fourth grade, people were definitely holding off.
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My daughter got her phone the summer before sixth grade when she turned 11. Before that she had a Gizmo watch, but she didn’t use it that much. Then for a while both kids knew the password on my phone and my wife’s phone and could kind of use them whenever they wanted. My daughter doesn’t have a “go down the YouTube rabbit hole” type of personality. But with my son, it was different. It’s so funny: You watch a kid watching YouTube on a phone for an hour, let’s say, and you’re sort of repulsed by it. There’s something just so propulsive about that screen experience where they’re so sucked into it. But I watched a lot of television growing up and I don’t find that I have that same reaction if he’s watching an hour of television.
My daughter doesn’t have any social media, and we’re definitely the outliers on that. The one that is becoming the sticking point seems to be Snapchat because that’s basically texting for their generation. They don’t really even use text messages. They use Snapchat instead. So I think sometimes she feels a little left out or she’s not hearing about plans. That’s the one we’re closest to caving on, but we haven’t yet.
I was a little surprised on the social-media front that a lot of her friends are using TikTok and Snapchat with total freedom. Just the amount of thought and time you have to spend thinking about this, which I think is under-discussed, just the weight of it, is such an irritating thing as a parent.
—Brian DiMenna, Fairfield, Connecticut
I have two kids, a daughter who is 13 and a son who is 9. Our school district has done some seminars on the effects of digital technology and social media on kids’ brains. But the attendance was low; people just don’t want to hear it, I think because then they have to make adjustments in their lives.
When my daughter was a little younger, she got a Gabb watch, but it just wasn’t reliable and we barely used it. So when she went into sixth grade, we got her a Nokia flip phone and we just bought her a fun case that she decorated with stickers. It’s been awesome. I mean, she probably doesn’t love it as much as I do, but it was our compromise because a lot of her friends had either a smartphone or an Apple Watch or something that had a lot of technology and options, and we didn’t want her to have quite that much flexibility. So we said, “You can get a phone and have your own number, but there are going to be these limitations because it’s a flip phone.”
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This is her second year using it. I know she has frustration because it’s not as easy to text on. It uses T-9. I don’t know how old you are, but that’s how I started texting. If you want to type the letter L, you have to push the five key three times. She has the ability to text a friend, but it isn’t as fun to do because it takes more effort. So it kind of self-prohibits her from using it; she’s like, “I’m just going to pick up the phone and call.” I’m like, “Perfect. Good. That’s what you should do. Pick up the phone and call somebody.”
She uses it mostly to make plans. She babysits, so she needed a form of communication to be in contact with another parent or myself, but she does not have the ability to get on the internet. She has a weather app, so she can check the weather. It doesn’t have YouTube or any social media. She can take pictures and short videos. They’re not the best resolution, but they’re enough for fun. We don’t want her to miss out on making plans with friends or being able to call us when she needs a ride someplace, but she doesn’t need all this other junk yet. So far so good.
We also have a house landline that we’ve had forever. We use a service called OOMA. I think we literally pay $6 a month. It’s dirt cheap. And we’ve had that forever because that’s the number we give out when we don’t want junk calls spamming our cell phones all the time. My kids both actually use that once in a while, but it got to the point where all their friends were calling our cell phones and not the house phone. So that’s another reason why we got the flip phone — even though we have our landline, she needed something that she could use when she was out and about.
I think we all realize that at some point, you can’t keep your kids from everything, so you have to let them learn and experience. But I think somebody who was a speaker at one of our school events said, “You wouldn’t give your kids a set of car keys and just send them out with the car. You have to do driver’s ed and you have to do training.” And where is that? With digital devices, we don’t have that. It’s kind of, “Here’s a phone.” And then it’s too late by the time something happens.
—Tricia Granja, Bay Village, Ohio
I have two children, ages 10 and 11. It’s been a conscious decision not to give them a phone, and we haven’t determined when or if they will have one. Certainly they know they won’t get one before ages 16 or 17.
As far as other devices, they started going on long bike excursions this summer. And because we live in a place that’s pretty rural, they both got a Garmin watch that allows us to track them. It also has the ability to message just me and my husband. They can actually send voice notes. So they send messages saying, “We made it down to the common,” or “We’re on our way back,” things like that. And then a bonus was they found out they could send a message to each other, so that was pretty sweet.
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They have strong opinions, and we’ve talked at length about the fact that they would love a phone just like anyone else. Or the other one I just learned about is Facebook Messenger for kids. I think there’s an app for children, and they both have advocated, “Why can’t we just use that?” So we talk about it: “Well, we’re going to do some things differently than some of your friends do.” We have long conversations about why my husband and I don’t feel like it’s necessary: “There’ll be a time when you’ll have unlimited access to your friends in the evenings, but you just don’t need it yet. You’re too young.”
—Lindsey LePage, Keene, New Hampshire
I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and my kids are 10 and 2. The older one does not have a phone. My husband and I have agreed that she is not going to have any sort of device hopefully attached to her person or available to her as mobile device until she’s in eighth grade.
She has an iPad, and she gets a couple of minutes a day every three to four days to text or FaceTime. We have even run into challenges with that because she was added to some group chats that went off the rails that we didn’t know about. We had to start checking her texts because she would be on the iPad for five minutes and then get really depressed and sad. And it turns out there’s all of this bullying garbage going on. I have heard rumblings of Snapchat, which is really surprising to me. Most of what these kids have access to, or at least that I know of, because this is what she has access to, is just iMessage. And that’s where all of this bullshit’s going down.
The one exception to our extremely limited device rule is that her best friend lives in Scotland and moved there a couple of years ago. So when they get on FaceTime, there’s no limit. But anything else with her friends locally, we have a very strict limit.
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We have become increasingly reliant upon her friends’ devices to get in touch with her, which is not cool. That’s sort of a cheap way of getting around our no-device rule. Because one way we feel safer about her walking up to the drugstore a block away or something like that with a friend is like, “Oh, we have this kid’s phone number, and if anything happens, that person can call us.” And that’s not, to my mind, the most ethical way of approaching things, but it’s where we are right now.
She is in the deep minority in her friend group. I can’t think of a single kid that doesn’t at least have an Apple Watch except for the kid in Scotland who has nothing.
We’re probably jerks, but we are extremely strict about YouTube as well. If they want to watch something, they can watch a movie, they can watch a show, but there is no YouTube. And if there is, it has to be one thing and then it gets turned off. We don’t want that click and click and click.
I do think she is starting to understand our perspective, because she has come across content and come to us and been like, “What was that?” She understands the cascade of content and how you have to pull the reins and be like, “That’s weird.” So I think one of the good things that has hopefully come out of this is that she has pretty good behavior when it comes to wondering what it is she’s seeing.
—Cate Doty, Raleigh, North Carolina
First my 13-year-old daughter had a Lite Phone, and for about a year we were happy with it. Then she started getting frustrated with it. She was embarrassed to use it since it doesn’t look like a smartphone. So in the end, I think she lost it on purpose.
Next we got her a Troomi phone, which looks more like a real phone. The phone itself is actually a Samsung device, while the service is through Troomi. It is designed for tween families and it’s got tons of controls. You choose which apps to turn off. You can put restrictions on texting and browsing the web, and you can even turn off phone calls. You can also set schedules where they can only text or go online between certain hours.
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It’s been helpful, but it’s still something that we as parents have to manage. I hate it, but the alternative is nothing or an iPhone, which I’m not ready for and I don’t think she’s ready for either. But it’s still such a time suck having to manage it and making sure that she’s not overusing it. And just between my husband and I, having to make sure: “Did you turn off the web? Why did you turn off the web? Why is the text on? Why is someone calling her? It’s ten o’clock at night.”
I wish she would use her phone more for texting and calling friends, but it ends up mostly being looking. She has Pinterest on her phone so she can pin things, or she has the Hollister app so she can shop for things, although she doesn’t have any money so it’s just window shopping, really. I have seen her not doing the things she loves because she’s just staring at her phone. And she has a really hard time transitioning out of it and back into the real world. Suddenly it’s like, “Oh my God, I’m hungry! I have to pee!” She hasn’t taken care of herself or her needs because she’s been just obsessed with that one thing for half an hour.
It’s not the content that I’m worried about, because it’s mostly harmless stuff at the moment. But I feel like it’s created this sort of inability to focus on anything for longer than 30 seconds. Sometimes when we’re trying to choose a movie to watch as a family, my 11-year-old daughter will tab through the little previews on a streaming homepage, if given the chance, for 15 minutes straight. She’s just watching them all, and I realized it mimics YouTube shorts.
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We got the younger one a TickTalk watch, similar to a Gizmo or a Cosmo watch, for her birthday last year. I did lots of research before buying it because we had tried and really disliked one of the others when my older daughter started taking the bus to middle school; the service was spotty and it would just drop her, plus the location tracking was inaccurate. So it didn’t bring us the peace of mind that we were hoping for. Anyway, the TickTalk watch has been great so far, in that the tracking has been good. She’s able to call and she’s able to text. She walks to and from school, so that’s everything we need it to do.
—Margaux Laskey, Jersey City, New Jersey
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