What age is a good age for cell phones?
Kids have been getting phones younger and younger as the world advances and technology becomes more and more prevalent in our everyday lives.
How old were you when you got your first phone? 12? 13? According to Child Mind Institute, 42% of kids have a phone by age 10, and 75% of kids have a phone by the age of 12. If kids have unlimited access to everything a phone can provide like games, social media, etc, then it is bad for their health and not good for them overall.
42% of kids have a phone by age 10, and 75% of kids have a phone by the age of 12. — Child Mind Institute
Data in chart from Statista.
Social media is not appropriate for young kids. There’s too many chances for something unexpected that a kid would not need to see to pop up on the screen. Sophie Goers ’25 got Snapchat the summer before fifth grade. “Even though I got it when I was young, I only had family members added,” Goers said. Although that is a good thing, she still had access to the Discovery page. The Discovery page is full of random clips that don’t really have a filter. Kids so young shouldn’t have access to it. Snapchat Spotlight is a newer addition to Snapchat and it’s very similar to TikTok. Like the Discovery page, it doesn’t have a good enough filter to make it kid-friendly.
If kids aren’t limited and they have no restrictions on apps like Snapchat, they can get sucked in and lose track of time. It’s not good for kids, or anyone, to just be scrolling for hours on any sort of social media. A study showed that 42% of people scrolling on an app experienced dissociation, which is when you’re completely absorbed with what you’re doing. When you experience dissociation, you completely lose track of time. If parents aren’t home, then they can’t control what their kids are doing on their phones and kids could be left staring at their phones for hours.
I didn’t get my first phone until 7th grade and even then, I only had it when I was babysitting. I had no games, I had none of my friends’ phone numbers and no social media. I only had family members’ phone numbers. 7th grade is a good age to start actually being able to get friends’ numbers and maybe a social media like Instagram which is pretty appropriate for kids that age because they’re starting to mature a bit more, as they are starting in junior high. Even though Instagram has Instagram Reels, Instagram would still be better than Snapchat because it still has less unfiltered features than Snapchat does. You can follow who you want so in the main part of the app you mainly just see that stuff instead of seeing whatever random things the app has up at the time, like the Discovery page. As kids get older, they are exposed to more things in school anyways so they mature quicker, so to me it just seems like an appropriate time to get a phone and be able to start socializing outside of school more.
I get that sometimes it truly is necessary for a kid to have a phone at a younger age like 7, if their parents are never home and they’re with a babysitter they should be able to have contact with their parents in case something happens. However, I don’t think they should be given unlimited access to whatever games they want. I used to have a setting on my phone where in order to download an app, my mom had to approve it on her phone first. I think it would be a good solution for this setting to be put in place for a 7 year old or anyone younger.
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