What is the ideal age for a first phone? Your children could be ready for a smartphone or similar device anywhere from 10 to 14, or during middle school. A sixth-grader (typically 10 to 11 years old) could be a good start for considering a phone or a wearable.
Experts suggest that you should wait to get your kid a smartphone until at least 8th grade. Along with age, a kid's social awareness, understanding of technology, and maturity should be considered.
Make sure your reason aren't immature and unimportant (ex: talk to friends, social media, etc). Instead, give reasons such as texting a family member you see rarely or to contact parents at school incase of emergency. You could also find a way to earn a phone. You could do extra chores for pay and buy your own phone.
Don't Make the Grounding Too Long
Grounding for a week, or two or three weekends is probably sufficient to get the message across without losing it over time. A month may be too long. As the parent of a teen, a shorter time gives you a lesser chance of caving in and reducing the grounding period later.
Many kids are ready for a phone by age 13, but this decision really boils down to your child's maturity and the phone's necessity. We'll walk you through some important considerations, the range of cell phones and smartwatches designed for kids, and some tips for controlling screen time.
Overall, parents should be able to trust their kid enough to not look through their phones. This will also maintain trust and a healthy relationship. If there is heavy evidence that there is something that should be investigated, then it's okay, but if not… teens should have some privacy.
An iPhone is an especially good choice for a child if the rest of the family also uses Apple phones and devices. It's easy for the child to learn to use an operating system that the rest of the family uses as well, and using it is safe because parents can easily keep track of what their child is doing on their phone.
In Australia, the average age a child acquires a mobile phone is 13.1 years.
Typically, it's best for children under 13 not to engage in romantic relationships as they are still developing emotionally and cognitively. Healthy friendships are encouraged for teenagers between 13 and 15, but romantic relationships could be too much for them to handle.
Common Sense Media rates Snapchat OK for teens 16 and up, mainly because of the exposure to age-inappropriate content and the marketing ploys, such as quizzes, that collect data.
What is TikTok? TikTok is a video-sharing platform where you can watch and create videos, and livestream. The app has an age-rating of 13+.
Apple iPhone 12 – Best iPhone for older kids
More importantly, photo-taking and social media start to become an important part of their social life. So if you're willing to spend more on an iPhone with a more capable camera, Face ID, and a full-screen display, we recommend looking no further than the iPhone 12.
When you give a kid a device will determine how long a parent is going to be monitoring them, though not all parents agree on when they should give up control. As we showed in our previous survey coverage, parents tend to agree that they have to monitor kids up to about age 10.
It's also something that has a limited shelf life with your kid. Apple says it designed the service for kids ages five and up, but as mentioned, even my eight-year-old isn't independent enough to really make use of most of what it offers.
Snapchat, like many social media apps, does list an age requirement in its terms of service stating that no one younger than 13 years old should have an account. Statistics show that over 290 million people use Snapchat daily, and a lot of them are tweens and teens, despite the app's age limit.
As kids reach school age, grounding becomes the new timeout. “Between the ages of 6 and 10, you can start to ground kids for a few hours to a day at a time.” For older kids, he suggests “modified grounding,” where kids have to earn their way out of the grounding by completing certain tasks or assignments.
Research shows that spanking, slapping and other forms of physical punishment don't work well to correct a child's behavior. The same holds true for yelling at or shaming a child. Beyond being ineffective, harsh physical and verbal punishments can also damage a child's long-term physical and mental health.
While strict and responsive parenting style (authoritative) produces the best outcomes in children, strict and unresponsive parenting style (authoritarian) produces adverse outcomes including behavior problems, low self-esteem, self-control issues, and mental health problems.
Research shows that most people think strict parenting produces better-behaved kids. However, research studies on discipline consistently show that strict, or authoritarian, child-raising actually produces kids with lower self esteem who behave worse than other kids — and therefore get punished more!
Signs That You Might Be Overly Strict Parents. Strict parents are overly rigid and won't make any exceptions to their rules. If you have a long list of rules and don't find it easy to have a sense of humor when your kids break any of them, you might be too strict.