Technology

As someone who's 23 and grew up with smartphones and all of that as they were starting to become popular I feel like I have some takes on a lot of the opinions I've seen on the different sides of issues like this. I lean in general towards giving your kid a phone once they're old enough to want to be able to talk with friends and do things on their own afterschool but having some non-intrusive ways to keep an eye on what they're doing with it until sometime when they're a teenager. That just seems like the best way to not ostracize them from other kids while still making sure they're being safe online. Even though in general things worked out fine for me with my parents letting me have my own laptop and iPod touch and eventually iPhone from a pretty young age without really watching what I did on them I definitely see a lot of times that I could have ended up being taken advantage of online if things had been slightly different. And the reason I say non-intrusive ways to keep track of what your kid is doing is because I knew kids who did have like parental restrictions on their phones and all of them knew ways to bypass them and do what they wanted to do anyways. So the only way you're gonna successfully keep an eye on them is if they don't know you are and you only interfere if it's a genuine safety problem, and even then you make sure to not punish them for it as that will make them start hiding things from you actively, you treat it as a learning moment and help them understand why what they were doing wasn't safe. I'm still very much figuring out what my exact views on this are but I think leaning too far in either direction of not letting them have social media or a smartphone at all even when they're starting to reach middle school or letting them have unrestricted access to social media and a phone both have their problems and you have to find a good balance in the middle.