alt Hacker NewsThis is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
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I purchased Mudita Kompakt phones for my kids when they started secondary school. There has been some pushback but overall it’s been a success.
The fact that they occasionally forget to take it with them or they leave it downstairs when they go to bed, makes me comfortable that it doesn’t have addicting properties.
And, because it’s android any apps demanded by school can easily be side loaded.
It hasn't been a problem for us. Our child has a cellular enabled Apple Watch (it has its own phone number). At home, the iPad satisfies all the other needs, and is restricted with Screen Time and Downtime. YMMV (kids are different)
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school.
In Australia this is normal. The distribution of phones increases slowly during high school, not before. Kids don't really use phones anyway, they use some combination of online games and messaging apps so they can do it from a computer or tablet without a phone.
I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.
Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.