My kid has been begging for a cell phone since he was old enough to grasp mine in his chubby little fingers. It was easier to say no when he was 5 or 6 because he was almost always with me and we could talk freely. But he is now 11 and reaching the growing independence of preadolescence. More and more, he’s not in my presence and it’s a little scary.

I resisted the phone call because I’m not sure he’s ready to take on the responsibility of keeping up. Can he avoid giving his number to random idiots who might harm him? Will he become a YouTube zombie?

But the results of the recent presidential election make me worry that he is increasingly safe in a country that is barely managing to politely contain its violence, and especially its racial violence. And when I heard about a disturbing alleged bullying incident last week in a Charles County Elementary SchoolI reflexively started searching for “best phones for tweens.”

Am I finally sure it’s mature enough for a phone? No. In a perfect world, this would be the most important factor. But our world is not perfect and the cracks of this imperfection have become jagged volcanic fissures. As a parent, I need to know that he can find me immediately, whether it’s a call for a ride or a call to security. I asked my closest parenting experts – that is, my friends and family on my private Facebook page – what they thought. The consensus was that the right time is a combination of necessity and nervousness. You will know, they said.

But will I do it?

“I get asked this question every day,” said former Apple employee Rachel Cohen, who spent much of her youth in Prince George’s County and now lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida. “Should I give my child a phone or a watch instead? » People came with 8 year old children.

For the past year, my son has had a smart watch specially designed for children, with contacts that I control. But I’m not impressed with its location monitoring capabilities and it doesn’t have enough features to entice me to keep it charged.

It is common to wonder about the moment and the reasoning which justifies the purchase of a smartphone for one’s offspring. In a recent Harris poll62% of surveyed parents with children aged 6-17 said safety and security was their main reason for purchasing one, with the ability to communicate when apart coming in a close second. Parents admitted there were downsides, such as children being more distracted and reading less. Yet more than half have maintained their decision to entrust their children to portable digital dogs.

Parents my age and older navigated the world of our youth without cell phones, but still had other methods of communication. This world no longer exists. Cohen got her first cell phone at age 16 after “they took away the pay phones at my high school,” she said. “I could go to the office to call, but when the offices are closed and there’s no pay phone, you can only call (one phone) someone so many times.”

Now that she’s a mother of three, she thinks she’ll consider getting a phone when her kids are in fifth grade and have extracurricular activities — maybe a smartwatch before that. Some of the other parents I spoke to said the activities were a big factor in their children getting a phone.

Derrick Pittman, who I grew up with in Baltimore and now lives in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, said he thought 16 was the ideal age to take on this responsibility. “There’s a certain level of maturity there, and if you’re driving, you need to be able to reach me wherever you are.”

This was the age at which her oldest daughter had hers, but her next youngest had hers at age 14 when the family was transitioning from Maryland to Pennsylvania and she was already living with relatives near their new House. And her youngest got hers in middle school when she started dancing seriously, and “there were times when someone else would pick her up at night, and we’d go home later than she expected.” would need to train.”

Not that it’s a free-for-all. Pittman said he talked to each of his daughters about expectations and responsibility for their new phones. “I had to remind everyone about screen time, and being in the IT field, it was obvious that the phone was going to be monitored,” he said. “Before they even got them, we had talked about the fact that there would be restrictions on what sites they could access, and that’s a tool, not something they’re entitled to. “It’s a necessity, and you have that privilege, but abuse that privilege and it disappears.” This was met with the normal teenager: “Why are you controlling my life? »

Like Pittman, Heather Gimbel of Reisterstown switched her daughter from an iPad to a phone in high school because of extracurricular activities. Gimbel made it clear to her child “that I could look at her whenever I wanted, to see who she was texting.” After six months, I stopped checking because she wasn’t doing anything about it. She didn’t really want the phone, so she put a personal ban on social media because it was a distraction.

I’m pretty sure that won’t be the case for my son, who keeps asking me why I haven’t uploaded his funny home videos of the “You can’t handle the” scene to my TikTok account. truth” from “A Few Good Men” or him, in slow motion, jumping over LEGO towers. I’ve already had a discussion with him about the restrictions and let him know that like Uncle Derrick told his kids, I will watch and get this thing back so quickly if he can’t handle this responsibility.

But once the phone is set up this weekend and Cohen, my Apple expert, explains all the protection measures to me, including blocking certain sites and contacts, I’m going to reiterate the rules and trust the the child I am raising. As a friend recently said, being a parent is like your heart is walking outside your body. At least now I can follow my heart better and hope there will never be a crisis that turns this new device from a tool to a lifeline.