JULY 21, 2008

Cell Phones For Kids

Newsweek technology writer Daniel McGinn (no relation to our very own Dan McGinn) recently took note of a paradigm shift in the mobile phone industry - it’s running out of new customers (with my emphasis):

According to the latest data, the U.S. “adoption rate” for mobile phones stands at 85 percent. That’s higher than the percentage of Americans who have DVD players (84 percent), home PCs (80 percent), digital cameras (69 percent) or MP3 players (40 percent), according to the Nielsen Co. “The concept that within my lifetime we’d have the kind of penetration we have today is unimaginable,” says Martin Cooper, 79, the former Motorola researcher who invented the portable cell phone in 1973. But for wireless providers, it’s a mixed blessing. With fewer virgin customers to bring online, the industry’s subscriber base grew by just 8.8 percent in 2007.

(…) The bulk of the un-mobile fall into three groups, says senior analyst Chris Collins of Yankee Group: children, the elderly and the credit-challenged. (There’s actually a fourth group, prison inmates, but companies haven’t yet found a way to target that elusive niche.)

Lots of parents have mixed feelings about kids’ having phones, but they’re showing up in school backpacks at earlier ages. By some estimates, half the country’s 28 million 8- to 14-year-olds already have handsets of their own.

As a parent, I want to know what’s good about cell phones for kids. Full disclosure: my 10 year-old has a phone, but we got it for her when my wife, now a stay-at-home-mom, was also working. In a big metropolitan area like Washington, D.C., long distances between parents and children (and even longer commutes once traffic is factored in) makes being able to have a open line of communication with your kids very important.

But other than talking to us, or her grandma, my daughter isn’t allowed to use her phone. She’s a little kid, and I want her to stay that way for a while - no need to be on the phone all day and night when she could be reading or playing. (And I also want my cell phone bill to be even incrementally less outrageous than it is now.)

What do you think? Cell phones for kids? If they have them, should they be just a long-range walkie-talkie between the kid and his or her parents, or would you cut them more slack? And who pays for those extra minutes? Does it come out of allowance, or is that just one of the benefits of being an American pre-teen?

I’m a young dad, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned. I’d rather see my kids outside, climbing a tree, than texting their friends.