Colman Noctor: Is there a right time to buy your child a smartphone? 

The decision to purchase a smartphone involves many considerations - most are fueled by fear

Pic: iStock

Colman Noctor

CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Is there a right time to buy your child a smartphone?

As the confirmation season approaches, many families are negotiating the cost of the outfit for their child, a venue for a celebratory meal with friends and family, or in some cases, a marquee in the garden with a guestlist akin to a wedding.

The smartphone is a relatively new addition to the confirmation ‘must-have’ list. If you are one of those parents who has decided to give in and buy your child a smartphone for their confirmation, you did well to hold out this long. Many parents are capitulating much earlier, with their children getting a smartphone for their First Holy Communion. So why has the sacrament of confirmation become synonymous with the first smartphone purchase? Perhaps parents have decided it’s a good time because their child will be heading off to secondary school in a few months, and it’s handy to have a way to communicate with them while they negotiate the transition. There is also the worry that if you don’t buy your child a smartphone, they will be the only student in their class without one, consigning them to being a digital outcast among their peers.

The decision to purchase a smartphone for our child involves many considerations and most are fuelled by fear. We fear it signals the end of their childhood. We also fear we are denying our child access to an essential tool to navigate the teenage social world.

The right age

External pressure is the most powerful influence. There is pressure from your child who doesn’t want to be a social outcast and from other parents who bought a smartphone for their child years ago, making you look like a digital dinosaur.

Furthermore, a common belief among parents is that research supports the idea that 12 is the right age to give a child unfettered access to the digital world. Why else would everybody be doing it? But no evidence supports this belief. The smartphone custom has emerged through tradition and catchy advertising slogans.

Twelve is assumed to be the ‘right age’ because it is the most popular age a parent relents and buys their child a smartphone. But just because something is popular does not make it right. Buying a phone for your child as they enter secondary school has become normative, yet this does make it a sound decision.

In an ideal world, we shouldn’t make decisions based on pester power or peer pressure. But in the real world, it’s the driving force behind many decisions. And so parents purchase a smartphone for our sixth-class child, despite their protective instincts telling them not to. Using age as a metric is an arbitrary and unreliable indicator of a child’s preparedness. The trajectory of development is so varied up to the age of 18 that very few children develop uniformly or predictably. Each child progresses through their physical, social, and emotional development at a different pace. So, their readiness for a challenge should consider their maturity and not just their chronological age.

Smart decisions

A child’s access to the online world is not a human right; it is a responsibility. We need to prepare our children for what they might encounter online — from cyberbullying to pornography — and coach them on how to stay safe. This involves a commitment from the parents and child.

In my doctoral research on ‘the impact of social media sharing on our mental lives’, I set out to identify the characteristics that would make some individuals more vulnerable to online influences than others. I found that most traits that lead to vulnerability in the online world are similar to those in the offline world.

The most vulnerable people I interviewed for my study were those who placed a significant value on the feedback to their online contributions. The participants who posted something online but are not overly bothered by the reaction it achieved were less vulnerable than those who forensically examined what comments their posts got. This suggests the more affected you are by the degree of online feedback you get, the more the risk of being negatively affected.

It’s said that power should never be given to those desperately seeking it; instead, it is best given to someone who doesn’t want it. This adage also applies to a child’s readiness for the online world.

My 12-year-old son shows little or no interest in smartphone ownership. He is not uninterested in technology — he uses an Xbox regularly. I bought him a ‘dumb’ phone a year ago and he has turned it on once. However, my 10-year-old daughter is constantly badgering me for a smartphone. She tries to convince me she is the only person in her class without one and suffers socially due to my unreasonableness. But her keenness to have the phone makes me more reluctant to give her access. This is not due to a cruel streak on my part but rather my concerns over her vulnerability online.

The more a child wants to be online, the more they may need help to manage the online world. If a child hands up their device on request and heads outside to play, they may be suitable to smartphone ownership earlier than the child who you have to pry the device from their grasp as they desperately beg for ‘a few more minutes’.

The Commonsense Media website has valuable tips when deciding if your child is ready for smartphone ownership. The critical qualities include whether the child is accountable, considerate, responsible, and able to follow the rules and adhere to boundaries. This is a helpful checklist to consider before agreeing to allow your child to own a smartphone - the greatest social experiment of our time.

In my follow-up column next week, I’ll outline how best to prepare your child for their first smartphone.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist