Tell me about your tweens cell phone rules

[tennisgal]

DS's 12th bday is this weekend and he is getting a phone (he's getting MH's old phone that currently has a cracked screen)  I'm tempted to leave it cracked for a little bit to see if DS further cracks it vs getting the screen fixed right away.   Anyway.   Talk to me about what rules you have in place for the kids phone use/what offenses lead to phone getting taken away. 

We are already planning to: 
 - know the passcode and can check anything at any time
 - have the phone be downstairs after a certain time at night (likely 830pm)
 - no social media
 - probably have him pay a small amount ($5/month) to help with the cost
 - any apps downloaded need approval from parent

Offenses that lead to taking the phone away for a period of time:
 - any sort of bullying/inappropriate pics or videos
 - decreasing grades at school
 - having the phone taken away by a teacher due to using at school (I believe they are not supposed to have them in the classroom and are supposed to put in their lockers)

What other things should I think about?   
 

[waverly]

Do you have parental controls? DS has an iphone with parental controls in screen time. Parental controls limits the hours the phone can be in use, the time spent on the phone, the content (porn etc. is blocked), he has to ask to have apps installed. iPhone gives more leeway to 13 and older, so we changed his age/ birthdate to be younger so we have more control. If we find an issue with a game or the internet then we can delete the app and he cannot reinstall.

How often will you check the phone? Will you use any monitoring software?

[CrazyLucky]

My kids are 11 and 13 and have similar rules to what you have listed. Their phones have to charge outside their rooms each night. They are not allowed social media. They don't need permission to download an app, but we do get a notification when they download an app. We have the websites they can get to on lockdown and they do have to get permission for that. We recently got a request for DS to go on onlyfans. Uh, no. We did some research and it turned out to be a person who teaches drumming online. DS is very into drumming. But still, no, not getting onto onlyfans.
In addition to the requirement that we have the passcodes, it is to be understood that we can and will go through the phone at any time. I don't go through it much, but a few weeks ago I got a text from another parent with some screenshots of texts my son had sent her daughter. I was embarrassed and upset that he would send things like that (not sexual, but definitely bullying). So he lost his phone for a while then. If I had to do it over again, I would set the precedent of checking his phone every week and letting him know I was. If he knew I would see what he sent, maybe he wouldn't have sent it.
Another rule for us (that adults follow too) is no phones at the dinner table. You might want to suggest to a grandparent or aunt or uncle that they get him earbuds for a birthday gift. My kids are watching videos or playing games almost non-stop, and I do not want to hear that crap.
My kids both went through a program with scouts about online safety. Things like never sending a picture. Never giving any personal info to someone you don't know, even something as innocuous seeming as what school you go to. If you have a class like that available, it might be worth it. For the scouts, it's called their Cyberchip, I think.
Don't be afraid to modify the rules if they aren't working for you. It's a learning process for both of you.

[mrsGreeko]

With my two older DDs the rules when they got their first phones at 11 were the phone didn’t go in their rooms ever. If it did it got taken away for the day.

I could check anything I wanted at any time (really only did with my oldest and basically never have with my middle, there’s complications with doing this for sure relating to other kids not wanting to contact yours knowing a parent is reading everything, desire for autonomy, trust and how that works and the lack of trust you display by doing so, it gets complicated), all the parental controls were set up (that my oldest got around again and again, thankfully now apple has closed a lot of the easy loopholes that she exploited), they couldn’t download apps without permission, no social media, the usual. That all said, it didn’t work all that well for my oldest and she also got a burner phone in 9th grade because my rules were too ridiculous, so make sure you are re-evaluating as the kids ages. Losing the phone didn’t happen often honestly because that’s complicated too, my girls got phones for babysitting, but then their babysitting clients weren’t able to contact them if I took the phone away, friends wouldn’t utilize other avenues to contact them to do in person things which is a healthy necessary thing….

All that said I now have a 12.5 year old DS who doesn’t have a phone or watch and will not for as long as we can hold out. My girls taught me that once you let that genie out of the bottle you can’t put it back and it changes everything about how your kid interacts with the world IMO.



We also have no screens at the dinner table and no earbuds in when you are around other people and no scrolling phones in the car when we are driving places. In other words talk to the people who are in front of you, not in cyberspace.

[vamoose]

My kids with phones are 11 and 13. We are still figuring out how to navigate everything. We have the rules that you have listed (except phones go in my bedroom at night, because my oldest was sneaking his phone downstairs after I went to bed for a time). We also have no phones in the car for local drives, no phones at the table while eating and AirPods out of ears when talking to people.

The main issue that we still face is the amount that the kids want to turn to their screen during any down time. It was a lot easier to enforce “x minutes of screen time per day” or whatever before phones. Now they will be ready to go and waiting and go right to phone. Which… I mean, I do that sometimes too! So we are watching and talking and trying to figure out what having a healthy relationship with a phone means for our family. It’s honestly requiring some hard reflection on my own phone usage.

[erbear]

Screen time limit
No phones at the table
No phone until homework is done
No phone at restaurants
No phones when friends are over

[sugarbear1]

No phone in room, ever.
Absolutely no SM, but also youtube and internet surfing need to be discussed.
Appropriate use -- my son (14) cannot just "be on his phone."
Other than texting I do not allow phone use in the car.
No phone at the table / rarely during meals in general (if he comes home late after practice, I let him watch videos while he eats, but only after we've chatted, etc).
Homework and extracurriculars always come first.
His dad and I have 24 / 7 access.
The phone is a brick from 9pm to 7am; the only thing he can do is make a call.

[sparty04]

My kid (almost 12) doesn't have a phone (yet), but he's smart enough to delete things he doesn't want me to see. Is anyone having this issue? Between that and nonstop access to a screen, I'm super hesitant to give him one. He does have an iPad and an Apple Watch but I'm able to control his time on his iPad by locking it down after his screen time is up and it's not always with him.

[mrsGreeko]

Apr 9, 2024 17:59:25 GMT -5 sparty04 said:

My kid (almost 12) doesn't have a phone (yet), but he's smart enough to delete things he doesn't want me to see. Is anyone having this issue? Between that and nonstop access to a screen, I'm super hesitant to give him one. He does have an iPad and an Apple Watch but I'm able to control his time on his iPad by locking it down after his screen time is up and it's not always with him.

100% my oldest deleted things because she knew I was checking constantly. Thus I didn’t really check my middle’s phone and thus my youngest will be much older before getting a phone. 😂😂 He will need to be old enough and mature enough that I can trust him without having to constantly be looking over his shoulder. We aren’t even close yet.

You can try punishments to get them to not delete, however, most likely that just incentives more sneaking.

[lilac05]

We haven’t gotten to a phone yet, but two things to consider…

We purposely did not give DS1 a watch for his birthday as a gift. He got it around his birthday, but it was just because we decided it was time. (you certainly could say he’s getting it because he’s 12 now) I didn’t want to give it as a gift because I wanted it to be clear that it is our watch that he is using. We can check it any time, limit it in any way, and take it away if needed. We felt better about that not being a gift…because then it is a gift with strings attached. (I know most people do it as a gift, and no judgment there, just happy we did it the way we did. We don’t do huge bday gifts anyway, so that decision doesn’t cost us an extra several hundred dollars.)

For a similar reason, we won’t have the kids contribute to the bill (unless whatever service we provide is not sufficient).I feel like when I pay for something, I should have a say in how it’s used…and at least at first, my kids won’t really have a say in how their phone is controlled/used.

[pittpurple]

My daughter is 11 and has had a phone almost 2 years now. I did check it daily at the start just to make sure of what she was up to but now I just take it at random and scroll around - randomly enough so she wouldn't know to delete things ;-) I don't read the texts, but I make sure I know who she is contacting (it's all WhatsApp here), that she hasn't added any surprising aps, that she isn't googling anything we should talk about... just basic stuff. she also knows I use it to track her sometimes if she's out with her friends (we are still working on bus knowledge as we live in a city and she gets mixed up sometimes)

I have screen time set up so she gets 1 hour of online browsing or youtube and 1 hour of WhatsApp a day, then those aps shut down. No limits on listening to music or audiobooks - she's welcome to do that as much as she likes. Her phone shuts down almost altogether from 8pm-8am but she can text us (she has anxiety and it's helpful for her) and listen to her audio books or relaxation apps. She rarely has screen time outside of this (my kids don't have tablets or laptops and she doesn't really watch TV often).

It's easier as my daughter isn't particularly screen motivated and rarely wants to watch TV or play video games. I think I'll have to be a bit more strict with my son as he's definitely very different!

[tennisgal]

Thanks for the ideas.

I should probably come up with a timeline/frequency of when I'm going to check (every day vs 1x/week)

It is an iphone, so I'll need to look more closely at the parent controls. Thanks for the suggestion of changing the birth year to be able to use the controls longer!

[mrsGreeko]

Apr 10, 2024 10:17:52 GMT -5 tennisgal said:

Thanks for the ideas.

I should probably come up with a timeline/frequency of when I'm going to check (every day vs 1x/week)

It is an iphone, so I'll need to look more closely at the parent controls. Thanks for the suggestion of changing the birth year to be able to use the controls longer!

You can use the controls as long as you want even with a birth year set to actual. My oldest is 17 and when she moved to the dorms in January I stopped controls (or rather the ability to control, I’d stopped actually utilizing anything in there prior to that, but I still could have if I had wanted to). My almost 15 year old still have screen time set up on her phone. If you set up screen time on an iPhone correctly you can utilize it as a parent until you choose to stop.

[pinkyp]

My DD is 10 and nowhere near getting a cell phone, but one thing that concerns me when she does is her potentially getting phishing/spam texts. I can forsee her clicking on random links without a care in the world and getting a virus on her phone or whatever, despite my best efforts to instruct her otherwise.

[pugz]

Watch for back door access to the internet (and thus social media websites) on apps. The website Protect Young Eyes has great app reviews!

[niq]

V (10) has an Android phone that does nothing except calls, texts, Wikipedia. It goes to sleep (nothing works) from 7pm-8am. He's not really on it much. During screen time he'd prefer to be on the TV, Switch, or his Kindle Fire. Very few of his friends have phones so that might be one reason why he doesn't use it. We would take it (and the other screens) away on school days if they got in the way of schoolwork.

I do not proactively review his text messages. He got a spam link and he asked me about it. If there were some sort of conflict I would expect him to go to parents or another trusted adult for help.

See if your school or PTA runs internet safety or internet manners classes (or just manners in general) for kids and/or adults. Those can be good sources of advice (the one sentence advice I remember is "don't say anything you haven't already said to someone in person").