Reply to Does your 4th grader have a phone? Why or why not?

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[quote=Anonymous]I got my dd a phone sometime before 5th grade, but 5th grade is when everything hit the fan.  The 5th graders started a group text (I assume it included anyone who wanted to be on, but I don't know.)  It got very sexually explicit and raunchy.  Also lots of profanity and some meanness.

Some parents were reading their kids' messages and others were not.  I told my dd to tell her friends that even if their parents don't read them, many other parents WERE reading them and would pass the info on to their parents.

Things ultimately settled down some (though the profanity continues now several years later).  It's quite possible, though, that the really vulgar stuff just got moved to an app that I'm not familiar with and thus don't know to check.

The reason it was a dilemma was that the kids who had smart phones were part of all of this mess.  But the kids without smart phones were very tangibly left out.  There were multiple 'parties' that I knew about that were organized simply as group text messages.  ("Everybody, let's meet at the pool at 2."  Or "I'm having a party after school the first day of classes.")

I now have a 4th grader (now) and ultimately got her a phone.  I'll be on the look-out, but again, I was afraid of her being left out by not having one.[/quote]

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