Comment by kraquepype
1 day ago
There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
I like lineageOS but it feels cruel to give a kid who is dying for a smartphone a nexus5 with lineageOS on it.
He's fine with what it can do, he got it when he was 7. Some mobile games, music, streaming apps.
It's about as cruel as the 10yo MacBook I gave my daughter when she was younger. She loved that thing.