13 for a feature phone. 15 year old still has feature phone but will likely upgrade next year. Parents still have feature phones too.

My DD got a cell phone when she was in grade 6 because of a miscommunication. Her SAHM assumed I was picking her up; I was still at work. DW freaked out when she walked home, what with a the perverts in Vienna.

Now, she is in 8th grade. everyone has one.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:8. She was on the adv swim team practicing 4 nights a week--1.5/2hr practices including dryland training. If anything happened at the pool and it needed to close, she could call me to come get her early. There are 60 or so kids practicing. Using the front desk phone wasn't practical.

Or the coaches's cell phone
Or another parent's cell phone
Or another child's phone
Or the front desk phone

How did you survive when you were a kid without a cell phone?

The same way I survived without having a computer to type school papers, or having Google and online resources to help with school projects, or really any kind of technology outside of TV and a landline phone...

Just because I "survived" without them as a kid doesn't mean it's wrong for my kid to use those things...

5th grade because that is when DD started walking home by herself. It was a pretty basic phone then. She's in 8th grade now and has an Internet capable smart phone. It isnt, in my opinion, the phone that is dangerous, but parents who don't know what their kids are doing. That said , I don't think there is a blanket answer for anyone: know your kid and make the best decision based on that. When she was in 5th, she liked to go.to a coffee shop after school and I liked to call her when it was time to come home. Now she babysit's and her clients (our neighbors ) text her and we keep track of social media, but trust her.

I got her a cell phone when she started taking the train to school by herself towards the end of fourth grade. That was a flip phone. Had it through fifth grade. Summer before 7th grade, she was given a used iPhone from Grandma that broke a couple months later. Late December, Grandma gave her an iPhone 6. DD will be 13 this month.

We live in SF, I'm a single parent, and DD is taking trains and buses all over on her own. I feel better that she has a phone. When she didn't have one, I got so many calls from random numbers from her borrowing people's phones.

Anonymous wrote:8. She was on the adv swim team practicing 4 nights a week--1.5/2hr practices including dryland training. If anything happened at the pool and it needed to close, she could call me to come get her early. There are 60 or so kids practicing. Using the front desk phone wasn't practical.

Or the coaches's cell phone
Or another parent's cell phone
Or another child's phone
Or the front desk phone

How did you survive when you were a kid without a cell phone?

11 for basic phone, 14 for iPhone.

I think it was 5th grade, so like 10. She got one when we were upgrading our phomes as well and got an iphone. We don't regulate screen time because it takes away much of the forbidden fruit aspect. It is working well for us.

For 13th birthday

8. She was on the adv swim team practicing 4 nights a week--1.5/2hr practices including dryland training. If anything happened at the pool and it needed to close, she could call me to come get her early. There are 60 or so kids practicing. Using the front desk phone wasn't practical.

11, 6th grade.

At 8. His father got it for him so he can call him while in my house. Not sure why he doesn't call my phone to talk to him. Actually he does since now a 9-year old doesn't pick up his phone. Too young for a phone if you asked me.
My plan was for middle school as he would have to get home on public transportation.

Anonymous wrote:Oldest was middle school. Middle kid was when he started coming home from school alone and he did carpool for activities. Youngest will probably be middle school because she's not likely to come home to an empty house given that there are so many of us and she does the same activities as her older brother and he has a phone. She's not happy but she has an iPod touch which has all phone capabilities if you're in wifi.

The iPod touch is basically everything but the phone, which is the worst. I rather my child have a phone-only phone. Talking on the phone isn't the issue. It is the texting, internet browsing, social media, porn, and staring at a screen for hours that is the issue.

13yrs old for first phone (and no iTouch before that)

No social media until 14yrs old

At 15yrs old she is still not allowed to have Kik or Snapchat. She only has an instagram.

I know her passwords and I have disabled the ability to delete history and apps without my 4 digit passcode.


OP, do not cave to the "everyone's doing it." No one has to have a cell phone, especially young kids. It is a luxury. They can survive and even be alone without them. The risks of it completely outweigh the false sense of security parents seem to rationalize about it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What kind of phone? Flips/basic or smart?

I looked around for a flip phone and they seemed to hard to find and not any cheaper than low end smartphones (note some people report that flip phones are "socially unacceptable" to the MS set but that wasn't really something I cared about). I ended up finding a cheap smartphone that cost $50 without contract.

Tracfone is the way to go. You can buy a year of service and 400 min. of talk and 400 texts and 400 mb of data if it is a rudamentary "smart phone" -- for $100/yr. If you get the 3g data phones, then the internet will work, but they will not be as good as their friends (a built in deterrent). Let them talk and text, but minimize the unsupervised internet usage. If you buy the triple minutes for life, you get 1200 min. of talk and 1200 texts for $20 more than the one year service plan.