Not Ready for a Smartphone? Give Your Kid a Tracfone!
Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to talk about how I handled the year or so before I was ready to give my kids a smartphone. My kids, who are 15 and 13, both have smartphones now -- for better or worse. But I thought a lot about what age is what appropriate to give them cell phones. Middle school seemed like the right timing based on my research, so my son got a cast off iPhone for Christmas his 7th grade year. By the time my daughter reached middle school just 2 years later, the cell phone demographic had shifted somewhat dramatically to much younger, so she got hers within the first 6 weeks of school. With both of them, they began to gain more independence earlier than that. In 6th grade, both had extracurricular activities for which I dropped them and then came back to pick them up. Both were walking the mile to school and back. Both were allowed to walk into town or to frie...