The Right Age To Own A Smartphone

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

I started using a phone when I was in primary school. My Aunt saw how smart I was, and she decided to get me a Nokia button phone to reach out to her whenever I needed something.

The phone was limited in many ways, with no access to the internet, no camera, and no provisions for movies and music. I could only make calls, send texts,
play games, and listen to ringtones. I did that a lot, hehe.

It was a source of distraction for sure but it was not that bad because there was nothing like exposure. My innocent mind, eyes, and ears were preserved.

If I learned anything without my parent's consent, then it was from books or school but the phone was harmless.

But today, we have phones that are smart like humans. Phones that can do things beyond human imagination. With the innovation of AI, it made it more mysterious.

Regardless of age, you can find answers to whatever you are looking for, all you need to do is to understand how the system works and have a question, of course.

These phones have memories like that of humans, they can store information, they have cameras like the eyes of man, and they can capture moments.

They also have the internet which is the hottest part of the invention, with it you can travel anywhere in the world while still in your closet.

With things like social media on these phones, anyone can interact with a wider audience and have access to information, sometimes even information that is detrimental.

I really appreciate the coming of smartphones and they have been very beneficial to me. However, it doesn't change the fact that it is both a sheep and a wolf, it can be either good or bad, depending on what one uses it for.

It is no longer news that our kids now are astute, and the world is now a digital environment. Education, jobs, and so on are mostly digital.

This makes it a necessity to grant our children access to these smartphones so that they can cope with their age.

But another thing to consider is the age and maturity, these phones like I said earlier have the ability to grant anyone access to anything, they can either ruin or make, depending on what it is being used for.

Therefore, handing them to our children should be something we should carefully consider, ensuring they are mature enough to handle the devices without getting tampered with in the process.

In view of that I think, the appropriate age to give a smartphone to our children and allow them to have access to the internet and social media should be 18.

I chose 18 because it is the age most governments consider the beginning of adulthood. Most times, at that age, the teenager is almost done with high school or is already at college.

At this point, I am certain, they must have known the difference between right and wrong, and even though making choices is something they battle with at such an age, I believe that if they are given a proper upbringing, and have the right circle, they would not use these devices wrongly.

Aside from that, they also need the phone for assignments and other research purposes, depriving them of it at that age would make them odd in society.

But, if the child is already in college before 18, even if it's 16, there is nothing wrong with giving them a smartphone because college is another world on its own.

It's discipline that keeps people there and not strict rules, even if you don't give them the device, if they want to explore they can explore anything they want because they are not going to be under your watch all the time like it used to be.

Photo by RDNE Stock project

But giving a child a smartphone at an early age is something parents should avoid, a lot of kids are wrongly influenced by those devices.

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Thanks For Reading

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