Parents can do their kids a favor and put the money into a college savings account rather than buying their young ones a cell phone.
Like Hannah Stacks, the third grader in this story in the New York Times, my 9-year-old daughter would love a cell phone.
Unlike Hannah Stacks, she’s not going to get one.
I barely gave in to carrying a cell phone myself. And, after nearly two years of owning one, I have just memorized the phone number. Never much of a talker myself, I have spawned a vivacious, mile-a-minute gabber with a penchant for electronic gadgets. I hardly think she would settle for the ‘tween-friendly Migos or Fireflys mentioned in the Times article. Only the latest camera-text-messaging-calculating-emailing model will do. My humble Tracfone cell phone hardly registers on her radar.
If safety were an issue and she spent hours on her own wandering through town, I might consider a simple kid-friendly phone. But my daughter is nearly always within earshot or at school or a trusted friend’s house. We’ll continue to follow the almost primitive form of communication I had when I was a kid, the shouted call for dinner out the kitchen window, the landline phone, and the universal signal that bedtime nears—the lighting of the streetlamps.
I agree with Dr. Cornelia Brunner, deputy director of the Center for Children and Technology, a nonprofit research group in Manhattan, who said in the Times article: “The only harm is an economic one. Kids whose families can’t afford all this junk are made to feel worse and worse, and some parents end up shelling out money that would be better spent elsewhere.”
