Kids, phones, pleasures, peril

Steve Barnes

An Arkansas couple I know have a big decision to make, one that others of their generation face, or soon will face; a question confronting countless other parents — tens of millions of them, actually: When does the kid get a phone?

As are so many others his age, the son has long been familiar with cellular technology. He can navigate mom’s and dad’s smartphones with ease. (And with their permission thus far.) Deftly does he maneuver the various apps, the little multi-colored squares that collectively resemble asymmetrical quilts on the phones’ faces, tiles that open the door to the internet, to words and images banal or intriguing, benign or malignant.

He is of excellent parents, this young man: Their phones harbor no sinister gateways, and, being somewhat fond of their youngster, they are as watchful of him and wary of his influences as eagles tending the nest. Still … For some quick research, where else but to the internet, that repository, that source of sacrament and sacrilege? A few keystrokes brings up some data from a dozen or more research firms, their consensus being that the average age of first smartphone ownership is 10.3 years. (The little fella in mention will turn 10 in October.) A pediatrician writing in a recent edition of Forbes cites a survey reporting that slightly more than 40 percent of 10-year-olds have a smartphone. By age 14, the research found, ownership soars to just over 90 percent.

I ran all that past the young man’s aunt, mother of his two cousins. She recalled that “the girls” got their first smartphones at “11 or 12.” (If her memory is a bit vague, consider that “the girls” are soon to be 26 and 22, respectively.) Much has changed, she notes — specifically the level of menace and every parent’s fear of the unimaginable that is now easily imaginable.

There had been school shootings through the decades, yes, but scattered across the country as they were, and usually claiming “only” one or two lives, or inflicting non-fatal wounds, it was possible for most adults elsewhere to set aside their fears.

Then came the killings of four students and a teacher near Jonesboro, in 1998, which seemed to presage the slaughters that followed. Barely a year after the Arkansas horror came Colorado’s Columbine school massacre, its death toll three times that of Craighead County, Arkansas. Then came Red Lake (10 dead), Oakland (7), Newtown (28), Roseburg (10), Parkland (17), Santa Fe (10), Uvalde (22) and Nashville (7). And scores of others, with fewer or no fatalities. Bear in mind that the aforementioned are school shootings; young people go to the movies, too, and can die there; and to shopping malls, as in Allen, Texas, where a 3-year-old boy was among the nine people shot to death only last week. A great many parents and a growing number of their progeny have come to regard a smartphone as a lifeline, a means of alerting authorities, of reassuring kin.

If today’s kids fear gunfire on their campuses they fear something else as well: the failure to fit in. And, as the statistics suggest, fitting in these days would demand they arrive at school each day with not only laptop and textbooks but smartphone. The pressure for adolescents and teens to conform can be overpowering (some of us can recall it, no?) and that translates to pressure on parents. Once equipped with their devices, the thought of being without them is, well, unthinkable. Simple face-to-face communication before, during or after school hours evidently is so … retro?

When one of the “girls” incurred the displeasure of her parents many years ago her punishment was to be without her smartphone for three days. Exiled to cyberia. As her mother recalls, the kid cried so hard and for so long that her face was swollen almost beyond recognition. But here’s a news account from Tennessee, where a Nashville high school teacher took the phone from a pupil who was texting during class. The student responded by pepper-spraying the teacher, twice. Two months earlier the same teacher was slugged by another student he had caught using the phone to cheat during an exam.

So, this Arkansas couple — with their son’s 10th birthday only five months distant, should they start shopping for his smartphone? The experts would note that there are still cellphones that don’t connect to the internet, so there’s that option. We’re told also that apps can be installed on any mobile device to block unsavory websites and to permit monitoring by parents, but doesn’t experience tell us that apps can be circumvented?

It’s a different world.