Anonymous wrote:How much do the mind having a “different” phone?

If they did I might find this to be more a feature than a bug. It’s good for kids to learn to not always go with the crowd. I didn’t always have the thing everyone else had and I am glad if it because I find it easier as an adult to do my work thing and resist peer pressure than I might have otherwise.

My 7th grader has a gabb phone and he has no complaints. We are going to hold off on the smart phone as long as possible.

Of course Gab.com

I hit submit to soon. They are like kids in a candy shop when they first get the internet on phones. I was slowly able to give my kids access through iPhone parental controls, through apps and eventually Safari and YouTube. If their first iPhone was when they were older, like their current ages in high school, I could restrict but realistically not as much. I could be that mom if I really wanted to but every teen in high school really does have some sort of smart phone and the coach uses various apps to communicate with the team.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m in favor of the iPhone because you can slowly let up on restrictions and it won’t be as big of a deal when they finally get the smart phone with full access someday. For both of my kids, the communicated with friends mostly through iMessage in the early cell years since some friends had cells and some were using iPads.

Not sure I follow. "Won't be as big of a deal"? In what sense? Why not just get the cheaper phone now, rather than paying a lot more for a phone with features you're not using, only to have it become obsolete by the time you take the training wheels off?

You quoted me. I wouldn’t pay for an iPhone or buy a new one at full price and not use it. For DC1, we activated one of our old iPhones and that was free. For DC2 we didn’t have a decent one to activate so we went in person to Verizon and asked if they had any promotions. They always do. They had an offer that if we could trade in anything we could get one for free. It was not the newest model but it was still relatively recent. We found an old iPhone 4 and traded that in.

We never had any complaints about the kind of phone.

How much do the mind having a “different” phone?

We gave our 7th grade a Gabb phone and it has worked well. She was delighted to be able to text and call friends, and we were happy to keep her off the internet. Win, win!

Kids got Gabb phones when they were in middle school and graduated to Iphones at age 16. The Gabb worked great for us - it did everything it needed to (though the tracking didn't always work.) The kids did complain, of course, but they'll always find something to complain about.

Do you already own the iPhone? If you do, I'd do that, but I wouldn't buy an iPhone for a kid. I bought my kids android phones that were around $100 and put them on a Ting plan, which is very cheap. They have done better with them than I expected but we have had two screen cracking incidents, one of which totaled the phone.

So, for pinwheel, it’s the cost of the phone and then also the $14 pinwheel monthly fee, plus the mobile service additional line monthly fee?

I am probably going to stick with iPhone and lock it down. We also have Qustodio already, so we have that monitoring and limiting program. If we didn’t have Qustodio I’d look at pinwheel more closely.

Anonymous wrote:We're getting a phone for my son at the end of 6th grade and we're talking about getting an iPhone but shutting down internet, not allowing social media, etc. and I thought, why not just try this Gabb phone instead?

If your child has one do they constantly complain about things they can't do on it? Looking for honest opinions between a Gabb phone and an iPhone with lots of restrictions.

We have a Gabb phone, as do a few of DC's friends. We really like it. They can do group chats, emojis, photos, etc just fine. The things they complain about are not being able to access gifs, though they can receive / view them. (So sometimes we work around by letting DC send self GIFs from our phone and DC can download them / save them and send on to friends.) And the fact that it doesn't have the ability to use spotify was also frustrating at first, but then we just let DC buy a bunch of MP3s and load on phone (like in the old days!) and that's fine. Even with the music purchase still cheaper than iphone.

In general my attitude is, we have an ipad, so if there's something you must do, something you can't do on gabb phone, do it when you get home on the ipad. I would rather you NOT being doing that stuff outside the house when it will be getting in the way of your interacting with other people, the world, etc. Ability to delay gratification, impulse control, etc also good to develop.

Last note - after we got ours, the Pinwheel phone became available. If you want something that's between the two, you might look at that.

Anonymous wrote:I’m in favor of the iPhone because you can slowly let up on restrictions and it won’t be as big of a deal when they finally get the smart phone with full access someday. For both of my kids, the communicated with friends mostly through iMessage in the early cell years since some friends had cells and some were using iPads.

Not sure I follow. "Won't be as big of a deal"? In what sense? Why not just get the cheaper phone now, rather than paying a lot more for a phone with features you're not using, only to have it become obsolete by the time you take the training wheels off?

I’m in favor of the iPhone because you can slowly let up on restrictions and it won’t be as big of a deal when they finally get the smart phone with full access someday. For both of my kids, the communicated with friends mostly through iMessage in the early cell years since some friends had cells and some were using iPads.

We're getting a phone for my son at the end of 6th grade and we're talking about getting an iPhone but shutting down internet, not allowing social media, etc. and I thought, why not just try this Gabb phone instead?

If your child has one do they constantly complain about things they can't do on it? Looking for honest opinions between a Gabb phone and an iPhone with lots of restrictions.