I've shared info before for parents about internet and phone safety for kids so I wanted to share an update on what we are doing for the girls. I will preface by saying, this is an individual family decision and I'm not judging anyone when it comes to technology and your family. As someone who works in technology, I have a lot of deep feels about keeping my kids safe physically and emotionally and that's going to mean tight restrictions on all types of technology. I also have had some great discussions with parents that give their kids more free reign than I would personally choose for my kids and it has helped my perspective on the topic that will benefit my family on this journey. So hopefully this will help some of you!
As we emerge out of this covid bubble, and with the big entering middle school, we have had several situations in the last several months where we needed to get a hold of one of the girls and found it very difficult. We found ourselves saying, this is why the average age for kids getting cell phones is around 5th grade. When we lost one of them for like the 3rd time this year, we decided we would be more comfortable if they had a phone or smartwatch to reach us. This was not in my plans! So how can we navigate this at the sweet age of 9 and10?
Primary goal: Talk & Text only and cheap
Gizmo watch - I looked into the Gizmo and quickly realized that the 5th grader was not going to wear it (she will rarely wear her fitbit) and I didn't want to invest in 2 devices + the cost per month.
Pay as you go plans- this ended up being more money than I wanted to spend and had data that I'm not interested in at this point.
Adding a line to our existing plan (Xfinity) - my assumption was this was going to be $10 per line because I thought that was what we were paying already, it turns out I was able to add my husbands old iPhone to our plan with talk and text only for around $3 a month (if she uses data it will just come off our joint data account as we do not have an unlimited plan but at this point we aren't allowing data) This is what we ultimately settled on
Next best option: US Mobile has a build your own plans that were very cheap for a text/chat option (starting around $4 a month for a limited number of minutes using an unlocked phone and I don't believe a contract was required
Even though I believe the 5th grader is completely capable and mature enough to make wise decisions on a phone given some coaching, I'm not ready to give her that responsibility/privilege yet and I want to continue to see that beautiful face not buried in a device. So these are the steps I took when setting up, what we call, the family phone, that will be in a back pack 99% of the time:
• Wiped the phone clean…completely reformatted the phone to factory settings
• Created a kid apple ID under my apple account
• Went to the screen time setting on my phone, where I can see her phone under settings (this is password protected on my phone)
• Set all sorts restrictions on Down time
• Content & Privacy- I basically turned off all the apps including the internet, I let them keep the camera with discussions of what is appropriate and what is not
• I did leave Share My location on so I can find the phone on my app
• I blocked the ability to add contacts and added the ones that may need to contact them
• Added a passcode on the phone home screen (they know this) it's in case someone picks up the phone or they lose it
• Added a picture with text that had my phone number in case the phone gets lost or left some where
• At this point we did not purchase Bark monitoring, I have not felt the need since the phone is basically on lock down but as we expand usage of the phone it will be added. If you do not have your kids phone locked down, please look into the Bark app. There are restrictions with both Iphone and Android, and I've heard various issues with Bark on Iphone.
Neither of them will be using the phone to text or call friends. I’m not ready for that, I’m not sure they are ready for that, and I want to keep my house as drama free as possible. They have access to friends messenger app on their (very restricted) kindles
I'm sure this is not a perfect plan, and will continue to evolve. If you have questions or would like to chat about why we’ve made the choices for our girls feel free to reach out, and I very much encourage parents to do your research! This is such an important topic!
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