Year 6, Stick to Bricks!

Age 10 to 12 is when the catastrophe happens. Parents succumb to the understandable fear that their child will be a social outcast without a smartphone, and ownership tips from below 50% to close to 100% by end of year 7.

Parents, your child does not need a smartphone for secondary school and there is a high likelihood that this device will harm them and their peers!

Listen to teachers, health professionals and psychologists. According to The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges this is a Public Health Emergency. Are you really going to ignore doctors and roll the dice with the mental and physical health of your child?

Instead, make a brickphone the first communication device you give your child (if they need one at all). If you feel you must track them, put a Tile or AirTag in their school bag. If you are looking for a brickphone that provides tracking, consider the Xplora One.

Don’t listen to what BigTech executives say. Instead, look at what they do. They don’t give smartphones to their own children.

Already bought your child a smartphone? Reframe this decision. If you had just signed a contract for a monthly supply of cigarettes for your child, would you feel imprisoned to continue?

If you bought over the Easter holiday, you are probably in a contract and can cancel it within 14 days, full refund, no questions asked.

Beyond that time period, you may be able to work out an exchange, whereby you return the smartphone for a brickphone.

Or, just sell the smartphone on the second hand market and take the hit. It will be worth it, to your child, your relationship with them, your wider family, your child’s peers, their school.

Not bought one? Great! Tell other parents of your decision and stick to it.

Worried about placating your child? One idea from Hannah Oertel - work out the annual cost of a smartphone (the device, the data, the insurance) deduct the cost of a brickphone (device and data) and promise to find ways to give them the difference. It is hundreds of pounds.

There are around 15 weeks until the summer holidays. This is crunch time for an entire cohort, approximately 700,000 pupils.

15 weeks and counting. A fork in the road. A summer of screen battles and then the inevitable WhatsApp disaster of Year 7? Or something different?

As CS Lewis said “progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road”

Year 6. Stick to Bricks!