We gave our kid their first proper smartphone when they had to do a bit of travel to get to school. However, I've fully embraced the parental controls of Google family link and Microsoft safety and it's been great so far. The combination of both provides incredibly granular controls to what they can see on the web, how long they use specific apps and what apps they're allowed to install.

Four kids, smartphone distribution from top to bottom was about 15, 14, 14, 12. It was all of course dependent on the age of the kid and the ability to cope with the immense wealth of bullshit you get from having a smartphone.

Saw this in the news in my country just recently. Like, middle school would be appropriate, with property parental controls. I think that is what was said.

My kids are still too young (not even 5 yet) but we’ve decided it’ll be largely up to their peers. They won’t be first, but we aren’t setting up an arbitrary age. We have been working on their relationship with screens and we just have to hope we do a good enough job. Once they have them we’ll undoubtedly limit the hours per day/week and I’ll put some restrictions on what they can do with them, but they’re always used to “daddy tv” (my server) so I’m less worried about the specifics and more focused on keeping the relationship healthy and transparent with us.

Edit: that second phone concept someone talked about here is excellent. I might borrow that.

As a non parent of Lemmy I would give my fake daughter a clay tablet at the age of 13

You know if my fake kids were ever to remark that I was abusive I would like it to be because of not buying them phone. Id love to be a fly on the wall of that therapy session