When Is The Right Time To Give A Child A Cell Phone?

There’s a lot of debate about when it’s okay for a child to have a cell phone. Some say it all depends on your family situation. Some parents issue cell phones when the child starts after school activities. Some parents give cell phones a lot younger, even around age 8.

PBS.org reported that it’s important that every parent ask the following questions:

§  How independent are your kids?

§  Do your children "need" to be in touch for safety reasons — or social ones?

§  How responsible are they?

§  Can they get behind the concept of limits for minutes talked and apps downloaded?

§  Can they be trusted not to text during class, disturb others with their conversations, and to use the text, photo, and video functions responsibly (and not to embarrass or harass others)?

§  Do they really need a smart phone that is also their music device, a portable movie and game player, and portal to the Internet?

§  Do they need something that gives their location information to their friends — and maybe some strangers, too — as some of the new apps allow?

§  And do you want to add all the expense of new data plans? (Try keeping your temper when they announce that their new smart phone got dropped in the toilet...)

Trust and maturity play a big part in when to give a child a cell phone. After all, on the positive side, a cell phone comes with a ton of convenience. On the negative side, a mobile device also comes with a million distractions. Social media sites. Photos. Videos. Not to mention the hundreds of texts that teens send every day.

If you’re the parent of a teen or tween and your child has a cell phone but you’re worried about his or her online life, the best cell phone spy app like Highster Mobile is an application that you’ll be very interested in.

Highster Mobile works by extracting data from a target phone (your child’s phone) and then displaying that data on a unique user dashboard. And once installed, the parent can see all content and activity on a cell phone, like all social media activity. Think about it! Now you can see what your teen is posting to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and more. Now you can see her posts, her pictures she’s sharing, and the videos she’s making.

The PBS.org article goes on to conclude:

“Just remember: When you hand kids phones today, you're giving them powerful communications and production “tools. They can create text, images, and videos that can be widely distributed and uploaded to Web sites. They can broadcast their status and their location. They can download just about everything in the world. If you think your children's technological savvy is greater than their ability to use it wisely, pay attention to the gap. Times may have changed, but parenting hasn't. We're still the parents. And it's our job to say ‘No, not yet.’”