When to buy your kid a cellphone?

The parents, teachers and police officers trying to instill some healthy fear of the Internet in today’s teens have their work cut out for them.

Fighting their own lack of knowledge, an ever-shuffling mix of popular apps and games, poorly regulated social media sites and inescapable WiFi availability, shielding teenagers – and often kids much younger – from the Internet is nearly impossible.

Middle school has become the age of the first cellphone, the gateway to the bulk of a young person’s Internet use. In 2017, children got their first cellphones at an average age of 12.1, according to a national survey by Common Sense Media. The same holds true for Frederick County, according to Victoria Clark, a middle school teacher who leads a class on 21st Century living at Urbana Middle School in Maryland. There’s a lot of variance from school to school and family to family, but Clark said she sees most kids are getting their first cellphone in sixth grade, often as a Christmas gift that winter.

She said students come back from break with this new device that unlocks worlds of social connectivity and instant communication, while also unleashing an entirely new set of issues: comment sections full of ad hominem attacks during political debates, accounts falsely claiming the identity of a student, female students encountering predatorial users. Clark said as a teacher of Lab 21, the class required for all sixth grade students in Frederick County Public Schools that aims to teach good digital citizenship, students sometimes come to her with these issues.

School counselors can get involved, she said, particularly in cases of cyberbullying and more serious digital problems, but Marshal Linehan, an officer at the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, said kids often don’t know where to go when an online issue comes up.

“Nowadays, a lot of kids are wrapped up in their devices and we don’t do a good job of explaining to them who they can go to for help if they have an issue,” Linehan said during an Internet Safety event at Ballenger Creek Middle School this month. “Often they don’t feel comfortable talking to parents. The more kids that use it, the more secretive it becomes and the more it pulls kids from those family relationships.”

Despite the trouble they bring, every year Clark said she’s seen more and more students entering middle school with a cellphone.

“The reality is at Urbana Middle School, 80% of my students have cellphones. That’s pretty high,” Clark said. “They are getting them at a younger age because kids are getting home before parents get home from work, parents want a way to immediately get ahold of their kid after school … With the climate we have in society, if an emergency occurs, parents feel a comfort level if their son or daughter has a cellphone.”

So essential to both adult and child social interaction and communication, many parents break down and get their children phones in middle school, or even sometimes in fourth and fifth grades. But some do resist, in Clark’s classroom and nationally. A widely-publicised pledge to “Wait until 8th” encourages parents to make a pledge they won’t give their children cellphones until eighth grade in part because “Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of Snapchatting, Instagramming, and catching up on YouTube.” But these are forces that Clark said sometimes can’t be stopped.

“I pick up my cellphone and say to (parents), ‘Look. Here is an inappropriate picture. Your daughter doesn’t have a phone, but what is going to stop someone from showing your daughter the phone?” Clark said. “They are still exposed to it whether they have a phone or not.”

Linehan urged parents to start honest conversations with their kids early. He’s seen kids with Snapchat and Instagram as young as 10 years old, he said, and their parents had no idea. He’s seen cases of students buying an iPod or store-bought phone with money they earned at part-time jobs so they could download all of the usual suspects – Instagram, Snapchat, Musical.y – against their parents’ wishes.

“We are starting to see an increase in this stuff at a younger age, as young as sixth grade,” Linehan said. “Sexting and sextortion, that’s a big deal for the things we’re seeing at the middle school level… Recognise that you are likely not the biggest influence in your child’s life ... Kids are using Tinder. You wouldn’t think it, but they are. Check your child’s devices. Do not discount even middle school kids.”

Clark asks her students how many have Instagram each year, and close to every hand in the classroom goes up. They’re constantly on YouTube, she said, and Snapchat isn’t far behind. Middle school is a pivotal age for this very reason, she said. Kids are often exposed to technology throughout their elementary-aged lives, but they start acting independently and venturing out into social media in new ways around eleven and twelve years old. That’s why in part FCPS began teaching middle school-aged students about digital citizenship, Clark said.

“We can’t be blind to the reality of what these kids are exposed to, we have to educate them,” she said. “There are so many backdoors to this. Can kids create accounts their parents don’t know about? Absolutely. They are getting smarter and smarter at a younger age. I would have never thought at my age that even my own boys they’ve had experiences I never thought I would have at that age … But I feel it is my job as an education that you have to prepare them so they understand consequences.”

Virginia Borda, a senior at Brunswick High School, got Instagram when she was eleven years old – and was surprised to hear social media sites like Instagram and Facebook require their users to be 13 years of age to create an account.

“I didn’t ask my mum permission or tell them when I got social media,” she said. “My mum has never checked my phone, never has done anything invasive into my privacy like that. She has always said don’t post anything you wouldn’t want someone to see.”

The idea of privacy, while essential to Borda, should be completely killed immediately according to Linehan, who advised parents to follow their children on social media, password protect app downloads, read their child’s texts, check the privacy policies of anything on your child’s phone, and to remember gaming systems are usually connected to the Internet as well and could be a source of danger.

“Everything in your house is yours: that phone, that bedroom, that dresser, that shoebox they keep up in the corner they think you don’t know about. Kids, you have no privacy,” Linehan said. “Be a parent, not a friend.”

Some apps like House Party, Linehan said, allow kids to FaceTime with multiple strangers at once. Others allow kids to hide apps and photos from a parent, disguising them as a calculator, for example. He advises parents to charge all devices in the house in one central location, ideally near where parents sleep.

It’s not uncommon for “dumb stuff” to circulate around online, Borda said, but she said she tries to surround herself with people making wise decisions, and has always been aware herself that anything she posts or sends online is permanent. Her rule of thumb: don’t send it if I wouldn’t want my mum to see it.

“People post when they’re drinking, taking pictures of the bottles,” Borda said. “Even if your parents don’t care, it’s illegal. Sometimes people if they’re smoking weed put that on their social. One of the most horrific thing I saw was this guy at school who posted a picture of him and this girl having sex.”

The biggest pitfall she said she sees constantly online is a mix of friends and strangers going back and forth about a topic, like gun control.

“I do witness it a lot and it’s kind of funny to witness,” Borda said, “but then I think this person is having a whole heated debate in front of the whole world to see.”

Linehan’s advice to parents for how to more closely monitor their children’s internet use came with one big disclaimer.

“You’re not going to know everything about your kid just like you’re not going to know everything about your spouse,” he said. Instead, he advised parents to do what they can to educate themselves – and to put their own phones down.

“If you are someone who has a demanding career and are always answering emails,” he said, “I challenge you to put your phone down and model the behaviour you want to see in your kids.” – The Frederick News-Post/Tribune News Service