Mobile phone at aged 9?

I'm only 24 but I'm fairly sure mobile phones have only been affordable/common for about 10 years or something...certainly when I was in the first half of secondary school, no one had them, and we all survived!

I still remember the first time I was allowed to go 'into town' with my friends when I was about 10 or 11. No mobile phones. My mum made sure I had some silver coins for the paypone in case of emergencies and she was going to pick me up at a pre-arranged time. I had a fight with my friends, it was much earlier than I'd said I wanted to be picked up but I wanted to go home. I tried to phone my mum but it was engaged, so I decided to walk home (about 30 minutes) by myself instead. My friends phoned my mum and said they didn't know where I was and for about half an hour there was all hell let loose.......until I turned up at home safe and sound. Most people of my age and older managed to negotiate childhood safely without mobile phones, so I find it really difficult to understand why children 'need' them for safety reasons. Although mind you, the apparent demise of the phone box probably leaves parents feeling like they don't have much choice.

I am now a teacher in a girls' school and I cannot begin to tell you the extent to which mobile phones are the bane of our lives. There were so many problems with pupils getting them out in lessons that a new rule was brought in, that their phones have to be in their lockers, switched off, from 5 minutes before the start of school to 5 minutes after the end of school. If they were seen with a phone not in a locker during that time it would be confiscated and wouldn't be returned until a parent/carer made an appointment to come in and collect it.

You would not believe the uproar that caused! I have never seen so many furious, distressed teenaged girls who simply COULD NOT imagine how they could POSSIBLY survive from 8.40am to 3.40pm without their phone. And if they DID get their phone confiscated (they couldn't seem to understand that this shouldn't be a consideration because if they followed the rules, it wouldn't be confiscated) and have to go home without one until their mum could come in and pick it up then they would get MUGGED and RAPED on the way home and we were ABUSING THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS and PUTTING THEM IN DANGER etc etc. They even did a protest where they all sat down in the playground and refused to move (I was quite impressed actually, the first bit of gumption I'd seen from some of them!)

Then as it has progressed, perfectly nice, well-behaved girls who never normally get in trouble have ended up in huge amounts of trouble for refusing to surrender mobile phones when they are caught with them in lessons. These are girls who would never normally say boo to a goose, model students, escalating the situation to the point where they end up being excluded, simply because they are so panicked at the thought of having to go possibly one evening without a mobile phone until their parent would be able to pick it up, that they'd rather get into heaps of trouble that would go on their permanent record than just hand in the phone, chalk it up to experience and make sure not to get caught next time.

This is before you even talk about the unmonitored bullying, nastiness, gossip, etc that goes on through text messages. Parents are always told to monitor their children's internet access but they don't seem to do the same with phones. And don't get me started on Facebook - we have even had the police involved in incidents of Facebook bullying.

Obviously at the moment I speak as a teacher and not a parent, and I do understand that parents need to consider their child's safety above all else - I'm sure I'll be the same when I'm a mum - but it seems to me that giving children mobile phones just causes so many problems, and as yet I haven't heard of many situations (well, any) where something very bad would have happened to a child, but didn't happen because they had a phone (try telling that to my students who are convinced that if they step out of the house without a phone, they will immediately be mugged or raped. Never mind trying to get them to articulate how exactly they plan to stop a mugger or rapist in his tracks with a phone - hit him over the head with it?)

From a safety point of view, I think mobiles are wonderful. My 12DD just gets up from bed when the rest of the family leaves at 7:10. She gets ready and leaves school an hour later. She is home one hour before someone else is. It is really helpful that she texts me when she leaves for school and let me know when she is back.

I would however hate her to spend all her time on it, texting for the sake of texting. She doesn't though and never does. She only speaks to her friends on it to arrange time to meet up to if she has a query. This is why I don't want to have an i-phone or such at the moment. A phone at her age shouldn't be a toy of gadget, just an object of convenience.

pulliptears wrote: »

You really have no clue do you? You are likening owning a mobile at a young age to horrific sexual and violent treatment of children.

You sir are an idiot.

Most people spend a great deal of time warning their children about talking to strangers and wrap them in cotton wool to protect them from the bad guys!

And then the same people go ahead and give their very young, wrapped up youngsters a device that allows all and sundry access to them at all hours.
Supervision is often not good enough and children end up being vulnerable in their own homes. The children would be safer playing outside with their friends.

Child abuse is not all about horrific, sexual or violent attacks so I am not sure why you felt the need to assume the other poster was comparing that to owning a mobile. He did not imply that at all.

Feeding a child sausage rolls and chocolate everyday would be child abuse too!

You might want to research how vulnerable children under 10 are when they have their own use of a mobile and how they are targeted by undesirable people.

Tish_P wrote: »

daisiegg, that made me laugh because I can barely remember where I live without my iphone!

But people have always adapted to technology and people have always complained about it. Didn't ancient Greek philosophers worry that this newfangled writing things down nonsense was spoiling people's memory for epic poems?

You know what I also realised when I'd left my phone at home - I know virtually no phone numbers off by heart! I know my parents' and grandparents' landlines, which have been the same all my life, and my own mobile number, but I don't know my fiance's mobile number or even my own home phone number. Yet I remember being 12 or 13 and knowing all my friends' home phone numbers off by heart! So it's not just epic poems that people can't remember anymore...

tyllwyd wrote: »

I appreciate what you are saying but the same point could be made in so many other contexts as well. I remember being taught to use log tables in maths but how many teenagers would even know what they were, let alone how to use them? The way my DD is being taught in schools is so different to the way I was taught in the 70s/80s - some things are worse, some things are better. But the technology is here now, so we have to be teaching the kids strategies for how to live in a world where it exists, not pretending it doesn't.

Well yes, you're absolutely right, but log tables etc is slightly different to basic survival skills such as being able to cope if the train was cancelled and the mobile phone wasn't working...etc.


Facebook/text bullying is obviously dreadful, but it is the kids doing it, not Facebook or a phone - and we can't pretend to ourselves that no kids will have access to a pc or a phone until they are old enough to know better - so we have to try to teach them how to behave and how to cope if things go wrong. Then again, maybe as parents/teachers, we didn't have to cope with all this stuff when we were teenagers ourselves, maybe the next generation of parents will be more savvy and better able to advise their kids.

Agree with you again, but while it is the kids that are doing it, Facebook/phones are enabling them to do it. The vast majority of kids will say and do much, much more nasty and hurtful things over Fb/text than they ever would if they had to say it to someone's face. Especially when it can be anonymous. And there is a lot in place to try to teach them how to behave and deal with these new challenges - we have the community police officers in regularly doing assemblies about proper use of Facebook, we have whole PSHEE schemes based around sensible use of the Internet, etc etc.

See comments above in red!