First Phones for Kids: What Parents Need to Know

By Michelle Maisto  |  Posted 2013-08-11

First Phones for Kids: What Parents Need to Know





The Wireless Carriers Are Eager to Help














Parenting and First Phones


First Phones for Kids: What Parents Need to Know

The study also found that 90 percent of kids think it's OK for parents to set rules concerning how they can and can't use their phones, though only 66 percent of kids said their parents actually do this. Thirty-eight percent of parents (according to the kids) didn't talk to their kids about being safe when using a mobile phone.

Additionally, 53 percent of kids said they'd ridden with someone who was texting and driving; 22 percent said they'd been bullied via text message; and 46 percent said "a friend" had received a message or photo that was more sexually explicit than their parents would approve of.

"How you treat your kids' phones is part of our parental philosophy," Roger Kay, principal analyst with EndPoint Technologies, told eWEEK. "You kind of give them a tour and say here's the good stuff, here's what to avoid, and then you let them do their thing."

Kay chuckled and then added, "Or, that's my take, anyway. My son told me and my wife recently, 'You're the most liberal parents I know.'"

For those parents unsure of how to talk with their kids about a first phone, Safely offers a five-point "mobile phone contract" that parents can download and have kids sign. One point is, "A phone is never more important than human beings." Another is, "A phone is a privilege." The finer print under that last one reads: "Prove yourself incapable of making good decisions with this phone, and you may have to resort to tin cans and string to get in touch with anyone."

"Years ago, back before modern smartphones, I was looking at location-based services and thought I would totally use them when I gave my daughters phones," said Ken Hyers, a senior analyst with Strategy Analytics.

"Oddly enough, now that my kids have the phones, I don't use those services," he continued. "My kids would realize it was on, and it would alienate them. My teenager would sooner throw her phone away than have me peering over her like that. [My] 12-year-old would accept that it's the price to pay. But I know for certain that if I activated the GPS, the 14-year-old would seriously throw it away."

Kay takes a different approach.

"The other day my daughter turned off the location services and I let her know ASAP: Turn it back on! It's like an ankle bracelet. We need to know where you are!"

He added that his daughter could appreciate other benefits of the technology. Days earlier she'd lost the phone but was able to locate it on a map. Kay's wife drove to the spot "and they found it at night, at the side of the road, under a pile of leaves," he said.

"Between 16 and 18 they still need a fair amount of supervision, but at 18, you're done," he said, a little bitter-sweetly, before his tone turned wry. "I mean, their judgment is pretty poor until they're about 24, but you can't do much about that."

Prepaid or Family Plan?

A month-to-month contract on a very inexpensive phone is in many cases the way to go.

"A lot of parents are starting out their kids on prepaid. There's an allotment of minutes, and that's it," said Hyers.

But, he added, "More and more, kids are starting out with smartphones added on to postpaid family plans. It's a nice excuse for the parent to upgrade. Mom gets the iPhone 5, and the kid gets the hand-me-down iPhone 4."

First Phones for Kids: What Parents Need to Know

Hyers added, as an interesting side note, that there's a trend of kids becoming disenchanted with the iPhone, because so many of them are using old ones. Hyers said he thought the data coming in couldn't possibly be right, but he looked around and found other researchers finding the same thing.

"We found that the iPhone and iPad were being viewed as an older person's device, and not as cool as they once were."

Prepaid plans can start as low as $10 a month for limited service and often a parent can just buy the SIM—an ideal scenario for passing on a hand-me-down device where the SIM is accessible.

Among the many, many prepaid offers out there, Cricket Wireless, for example, offers contract-free talk-and-text only plans starting at $25 a month for 300 minutes.

For a teen who wants a data plan, but who maybe hasn't yet proven himself responsible enough for an annual plan, Walmart's Straight Talk Wireless offers a SIM-only (use your own phone), no contract, unlimited 30-day plan for $45 a month.

Consumer Reports, in a January report on prepaid services, said it found people in its surveys were happier with the service from Straight Talk than with prepaid plans from any of the major carriers.

For those who'd rather that the whole family stay on one plan, T-Mobile now separates the matter of buying a phone from buying phone service, which makes it very straightforward to consider pricing options.

On a T-Mobile Family Plan, three lines start at $90 per month—the first line is $50, the second $30 and the last $10. Each phone gets unlimited talk, text and Web, though after each hits 500MB of data, users are knocked down to a slower network. For four lines, under the same conditions, the monthly rate is $100.

On the Verizon Wireless network, Share Everything plans are tallied by adding the price of the amount of data you want to the price of the device you'd like to connect. Smartphones are $40 each per month, tablets are $10 and feature phones are $30. While 500MB is $40 per month, that's a bucket of data that all three smartphones would be sipping from—versus 500MB each on T-Mobile.

A near equivalent would be to pay $60 for 2GB (plus unlimited talk and text) that the three phones could share, for a monthly total of $180.

AT&T's Mobile Share plans work much like Verizon's, except the cost per device goes down the more data you buy. If you buy 2GB for $50 a month, the price per smartphone is $45. Three smartphones and 2GB to split between them (with unlimited talk and text) would be $185.

The Sprint network is a little different. Up to 10 lines can be added to an Unlimited, My Way plan. For three lines, the first is $50, the second $40 and the third $30. (The next four to 10 lines are $20 each.) Subscribers then have the choice of $20 a month per line for 1GB of data or $30 per month per line for the phones to have unlimited high-speed data, plus unlimited talk and messaging. Three smartphones with 1GB each per month would be $180 a month total. 

First Phones for Kids: What Parents Need to Know


Practical Advice for Parents







Hyers likewise advised taking nothing for granted.





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