Paula Martos bought her son Jorge, when he was 11 years old and about to go to high school, a watch that allowed him to make and receive calls and messages to predetermined phone numbers. “We didn’t want him to have access to a cell phone, but we needed a way to contact him since we don’t have a landline at home and he starts doing things he didn’t do before, like going to and from school alone or sometimes taking care of his sister after school,” she explains. Already in his first year at ESO, Jorge is one of the few children in his class without smartphoneswhich, at the moment, is not a big problem. “He, fortunately, has never had much interest in this type of technology, at the moment it is not something that bothers him or that he asks for, so our idea would be to delay the arrival of the mobile phone as much as possible,” adds Paula. Carla is also one of the few in her first year of ESO class who doesn’t have one smartphones. And this route is the frontier that largely marks the arrival of the first cell phone. According to the report data Childhood, adolescence and digital well-beingpresented last November by the Ministry for Digital Transformation, in classes 5 and 6 of primary school, 51.6% of students own a mobile phone, a percentage that jumps to 82.8% in the first year of ESO.
For Carla, who also started attending a new institute this year, her parents gave her a dumbphone or stupid phone, one of those cell phones that represented the height of sophistication in the early 2000s. “The idea is to be able to stay in touch if necessary and that’s it. And that’s why we saw that the cell phone, as my children call it, was the best solution,” jokes Laura Álvarez, his mother. They did the same with their oldest son and he never asked for more. But with Carla it’s different, because she’s more interested in the smartphones. “I tell her that I’m really sorry that at a certain point she might feel different or inferior for not having something that everyone has, that I understand her and that I would a thousand times prefer it not to be like this, but this doesn’t weigh on us enough to change our determination,” she explains.
Núria Alemany and her partner think this Christmas will be the time their eldest son, 14, gets his first smartphone. Reaching 14 without this device, almost an epic as statistics show, was relatively easy for them because their son didn’t ask for it. “Now what I miss is WhatsApp, which in my opinion has become what the landline was for us,” says Alemany. The idea they have is to bet on the Balance Phone, A smartphones which has standard coverage of the main social networks (excluding WhatsApp) and all applications and websites with engaging content or content not recommended for minors. “We haven’t decided 100% yet, but in any case what we would like is to be able to help you have a better relationship with your phone than we have,” he says.
“I think it is excellent news that more and more families are aware and willing to delay the arrival of the first mobile phone, because in reality what we are doing is giving children and adolescents time. The time they spend without screens can be dedicated to other things and other healthy habits such as getting enough sleep, exercising or interacting face to face with friends”, says María Angustias Salmerón Ruiz, pediatrician specializing in adolescence at the Comienzo Center in Madrid and president of the Spanish Society. of Medicine. of adolescence (SEMA).
His opinion is shared by Antonio Rial Boubeta, doctor of social psychology, although he believes that this “is only a small part” of the solution to the problem. “Putting all the preventative effort on families and the education system means, without a doubt, overestimating the weight that education has in all of this, because there is a part that has to do with industry and social responsibility that is much greater”. For Rial, the new generations must be educated in a healthy and responsible use of technology, but without ceasing to protect them: “What we are failing is in protection policies, because we are leaving a lot of room for maneuver to the free will of the industry.” He is also in favor of challenging the tech industry to engage safety designthat is, from devices that take the end user into account and adapt to him, something similar to what the aforementioned Balance Phone offers.
Changing sides with social pressure
Among the reasons that push mothers and fathers to give their children their first mobile phone, in addition to the need to have direct communication when they begin to have more autonomy and independence, there are basically two. The first is the fear of being socially isolated. “I don’t know of any article that associates the lack of a telephone with the loneliness perceived by adolescents. However, there are more and more studies that link having smartphones feeling more alone”, says Salmerón. “The risk of social exclusion exists, without a doubt, and has its consequences, it has its price on a relational level, on an emotional level”, says Rial. The expert, however, clarifies that this risk is not the same at 12 years as at 16 years: “We give in to this fear too soon”.
The second reason is social pressure: it is not easy to bear the weight of your child who is the only one among his friends who does not have smartphones. “There are scientific studies that indicate that social pressure can be reversed and change position. If the majority of children in the class do not have a cell phone, those who do will be the excluded. So parents must agree to delay their delivery”, suggests Salmerón, who recalls the existence of a family pact for adolescence without cell phones. This platform online aims to end the social pressure on having a smartphone and delay the arrival of the first one smartphones up to 16 years; and families from all communities join together. “I would be satisfied if with these agreements we could delay the arrival of the first mobile phone until the age of 13 or 14, instead of 10.8 as is the case now, because in this way we would eliminate 80% of the social pressure”, adds Rial.
In any case, when the time comes to deliver the first cell phone, Salmerón invites mothers and fathers to ask themselves two questions. The first is why your child (not him) needs the device you plan to buy and whether the phone you plan to buy meets or exceeds those needs. The second is how they will hand it over to him: “It must be clear that the phone belongs to the parents, that it is not being given away, that it is a transfer and that, furthermore, it is given away under certain conditions.” In this sense, it recommends the creation of a digital family plan whose rules should be respected by all family members. “It’s very difficult for you to tell your child not to bring your cell phone to bed if you bring it with you. Example is an important part. You have to set boundaries and you have to respect them as parents,” she advises.
