As my son is about to head into secondary school, and he will be navigating buses and whatnot, we thought now might be the time to get him a phone. If buses don’t come or we need to know where he is, there is no way around it. So, we bit the bullet.
Of course, there are phones and there are phones. We were pretty adamant that we did not want to get him a smartphone. We have a host of reservations about that. There is growing awareness of the issues around smartphones. Recent TV dramas and a number of other media outlets are pushing matters. There is a growing campaign – Smartphone Free Childhood – looking to encourage more parents to pledge that they will not give their children smartphones until they’re 16. Even the secondary school we have landed in have made abundantly clear that smartphones cannot be used in school at all and made their own pitch that it is just better if pupils have a dumb phone.
This is a difficult issue to navigate. After all, my generation is the one who first picked up mobile phones during our teens. Being something of a contrarian (and, it turns out, my wife took exactly the same view) I remember resolutely refusing to own a mobile phone as a teenager. Around the age of 14 they were the thing to have du jour. I refused to own one because it was all commercial and, frankly, the very concept just irritated me. I would not join the hordes until I had to! That was thrust upon me when I was 16 or 17. I was going to be away and needed to be contacted and a mobile phone was the simplest way to resolve the issue. So I got what would now be called a dumb phone.
Of course, tech moved on and smartphones became a thing. I never got a Blackberry when they were all the rage. I don’t think I got my first smartphone until my late 20s. They had been out a while but I was reticent. Nevertheless, by that time, Huawei were not considered the tech-arm of the Chinese communist government and they produced some decent and very reasonably priced handsets. I got one and that was that. As is the way with most newly adopted tech, I almost immediately wondered how I had ever coped without it. A whole new world was open to me. A world which – just over a decade on – has lost its shine and I spend my time working out the best ways to limit when and where I take it with me because I am only too familiar with the all-consuming, 24/7, non-stop beck and call to which everyone now thinks I answer because I am theoretically always contactable through dozens of different apps and media.
My point here is not that smartphones, or tech, or the internet, are all just bad and evil all the time. In fact, I genuinely love new tech. I love getting new tech. I love fiddling round with it and that sense (albeit almost always misplaced and varying only by degrees) that here is a thing that will definitely make my life vastly better. Some of the time they do genuinely make my life better in the areas in which they are put to use. Despite my refusal to own a mobile phone when I was 16, I am not that late an adopter and generally appreciate new tech. It should be noted my staunch refusal to own a phone at 16 was not because I was a Luddite; it was because I hate populism, commercialism and herd-mentality. As soon as people insisted I must have one, I could not bring myself to own one. I am nothing if not a contrarian. Tell me I must and every part of me – even if the thing would objectively be beneficial to me – just wants to say no. You can’t tell me what to do – only Jesus gets to do that, and he very rarely couches his concerns in terms of demands! But I digress.
My point here is not that tech is bad. It is that I was an adult by the time I was even navigating using a dumb phone and a significantly older (but still relatively young) adult before I even owned a smartphone. I had done other things and had other priorities before I had a beeping, flashing, attention-demander constantly accessible in my pocket. And it’s not as if adults don’t find it hard enough not to get sucked in to its perma-demands. So I had no desire to foist that upon my 11-year-old when, in truth, all we really wanted is for him to have the ability to ring us if he missed the bus.
So a smartphone was not on the cards. But there are all manner of dumb phones. There are dumb phones that amount to walkie-talkies, dumb phones identical to the kind I had when I was 17, and dumb phones that look identical to smartphones. There are even semi-smart dumb phones that can do some internet things, but not lots of internet things a basic smartphone can do. If you are looking for alternatives, there is a rundown of potential options here. In the end, we opted for a dumb phone that looked and operated like a smartphone. It can call, it can text, but it can’t do anything else. It looks like a smartphone, it operates like a smartphone, but it is ultimately just a dumb phone.
It is worth saying here, these are not particularly “Christian” considerations. Lots of people reach the conclusion we do with no Christian background whatsoever. They simply do not want their child to have a smartphone for all the now well documented reasons people give. These considerations are not particularly driven by our Christian convictions. They are largely pragmatic. I mention that because – though I know a lot of Christians have these concerns and may even have some specific concerns arising from their Christian beliefs – this really is not a matter of biblical fidelity or faithfulness to Jesus. You do not have to reach my conclusion on this as though I am presenting the Christian position.
As I am wont to repeat a lot on this blog, you are free to do whatever you think is right. Jesus does not say ‘thou shalt not get your child a smartphone’ and the bible does not demand a smartphone free childhood. Tech is not inherently evil. As with anything, it comes with good and bad and can be used helpfully or unhelpfully. You can deny your child a smartphone throughout their childhood and still find they don’t become a Christian, develop a pornography addiction and any number of other issues some associate with smartphones. We have to accept your child – even if they don’t have a smartphone – will still see other people’s phones and may be able to access things in other ways. By the same token, you may give your child unfettered smartphone access and face none of these problems whatsoever. This is not a A-B input with guaranteed results nor is it a matter of obeying the bible.
What we are dealing with here is a matter of wisdom. Wisdom, it should be noted, that can be parsed in any number of ways. There are (believe it or not) some good reasons to get your child a smartphone. There are, equally, some good reasons not to do that. Lots of different factors will feed in to your decision; the kind of child you’ve got, the friends they have, the kind of environment you live in, your ability to monitor what your children are doing, the role your school takes (if you have one) and how they will/won’t back up your choices, and any number of other things. You will, no doubt, ask why you want your child to have a phone at all and what you think is accomplished by giving/not giving them access to one. These are not questions and considerations with one right answer.
For us, the answer is simple enough. We want to accomplish the ability for our son to contact us now he is getting public transport further away. We also wanted to give him a level of independence and autonomy to keep in contact with his friends and arrange times to meet them. We are happy to give access to the internet, but not unfettered, not without some supervision and not at all times. For us, this meant a smartphone was neither necessary nor helpful. The potential problems outweighed any potential benefits and most of what would be helpful can be achieved in other less distracting and life-affecting ways. We have no desire for our son to be left out and we certainly don’t want him to be laughed at (though he is the kind of child who, like his parents, would probably be quite happy to appear different to his peers). Again, for us, that shakes out as a dumb phone that looks like a smartphone so there is no purposefully different weirdness imposed on him by giving him an old-fashioned brick phone but nevertheless not giving smartphone access.
Our younger daughter has no access to phones yet at all. It is likely we will follow the same trajectory with her (though – as with most of our parenting decisions – I reserve the right to either admit I was wrong or insist she is a different child and do something else altogether). For the time being access to a tablet at home for set periods whilst we are together in the same room seems to work just fine.