While children may be eager to stay connected to friends, parents often feel pressure to ensure their child’s safety. Those two positions come to a head when it comes to deciding the right time to let your child get a cellphone. “I would delay that as long as reasonably possible,” says clinical psychologist Simon Sherry. “As a parent, it becomes nearly impossible to resist the tsunami of pressure that washes over you to get your kid with one of these devices,” he says. “If you have to, hold on as long as you can – 13, 14, 15 would be a good age – but by research, if you look at the numbers by age nine, a lot of kids are starting to adopt cellphone use.” Jenna Morton, a Moncton-area mother of three teenagers, says she’s had many serious discussions with her children before allowing them to get a phone. “It’s really tough to find a balance of how much and what types of content are going to be OK in your family,” she says. “I would say that we’re still worried, and the debate is still going on as to how you interact using a cell phone, using the social media apps.” Morton and her husband instructed their children to save money to purchase their phones. “For us as parents, it gave an added level of responsibility,” she says. “If you have to earn the money for something, you treat it in a different way than if it’s just handed to you.” Morton says she’ll occasionally review search history and app usage time. It would be great to return to an era where flip phones were easy to come by, Morton says, allowing communication to happen, while avoiding social media – and not costing so much money. Some phones also have certain security features that can be enabled. “There is a large group of people who cannot engage with these devices without serious problems,” Sherry says. “You want to keep your kid on the right side of that divide. You want them to have good sleep habits, normal attention, concentration, and memory,” he says. “You want them to be relatively free from depression, anxiety, loneliness, obesity, and a host of other problems linked to these phones.” He says it’s important not to demonize all social media and all phone use, because they can be used as a “communication device to create real-time social interactions.” “If you are a restrained user who’s looking at responsible content, great,” he says. “But the truth is that these phones creep into our lives and intrude into more and more of our time.”
