When Should Kids Have Access to Devices? Lake Placid Mother, Daughter Wonder

July 12, 2024 —

Amy FeiereiselWhen Should Kids Have Access to Devices? Lake Placid Mother, Daughter Wonder

A recent law in New York City seeks to restrict what kids see on social media platforms. It’s part of a much larger, nationwide conversation about the role social media and the internet play in young people’s lives.

It’s an issue all parents and families have to struggle with every day, including Kelsey Francis and her daughter Lydia.

Lydia is eleven years old and just finished fourth grade at Lake Placid Elementary. She doesn’t have a cell phone yet, but she recently got an iPad.

“I like to draw, so I have drawing apps. I have this puzzle game,” Lydia said. But there are also a lot of things she can’t do on it. “I can’t get into the (Apple) Play Store because it’s locked and you can’t unlock it. And I can’t get on Google. Like, if I have a math problem, I can’t look it up!”

That’s because the iPad has parental controls. Lydia remembers negotiating with her mom to get it in the first place. “She said, ‘Aren’t you a little young?’ But I said, ‘My sister got it when she was my age!’”

Lydia is the youngest of three children. Her mom, Kelsey Francis, says their household rule is no smartphones until eighth grade. Francis is a teacher, and her husband is a child psychologist. She says that because of their jobs, “I think we’ve seen that once you let the genie out of the bottle, you just can’t put it back in. Parenting is hard enough without having to manage social media.”

Francis has taught high school English for more than two decades, and she says she turned to her students for advice when she and her husband were considering buying a phone for their oldest child.

“I asked my students, my 12th-grade students, ‘Should I buy my son a phone?’ And they said, ‘No! Put it off as long as you can.’ Which surprised me, they didn’t say I was some kind of cruel, archaic parent.” She says her students are aware that social media and devices “are addictive and cause a lot of unnecessary drama in their lives.”

At the same time, social media and personal devices play an important role in the social lives of today’s children.

High school sports teams communicate via Snapchat group chats. During school holidays, teenagers check in on Instagram.

That’s why Lydia has an iPad, which makes it easier for her to communicate directly with her friends outside of school hours.

“I really wanted one because all my friends had a device,” Lydia said. “And I was the only one who didn’t. And my friends were like, ‘I have to text you.’ I was like, ‘I can’t!’ It was hard because my mom had to communicate with all my friends.”

She says it’s easier now that she has an iPad. Now Lydia can basically text her friends privately. She says she likes that because people can be cruel on social media. “It’s like Snapchat. When you post something on Snapchat, it disappears, so people can write nasty things about you,” Lydia said.

She also explained how social media has become a cause for arguments between friends, mentioning a Snapchat feature called “Friend Solar Systems,” which shows users their eight “best” friends on the platform, or the people they talk to the most.

“It’s like you can literally look up your friend on Snapchat and see who they’re friends with and who they’re more similar to, they’re communicating with,” Lydia said. “And then the drama starts and nobody wants that and it just turns into a huge fight.”

Kids today struggle with a lot of fears about social media: being recorded, having their picture taken, feeling left out when they see their friends hanging out without them. Lydia says she understands why her parents want her to wait. “It’s just better when you’re older or because you’re more mature to do the right thing with it,” Lydia said.

Kelsey Francis said that as a parent, she would like to see the social pendulum swing away from kids having access to devices and social media. She compared it to cigarette smoking in the U.S.

“Smoking was everywhere, and then of course (came) massive education campaigns and more regulation, and it went down dramatically,” Francis said. “And I wonder, I wonder if the same thing will happen with social media. You know, a generation from now, people will be like, ‘Oh my God, you gave these devices to kids?’”

She says it would be much easier for her children to navigate the Internet if there was a rule against giving children electronic devices.

For now, iPads are enough for her two youngest children, and her 17-year-old has a cell phone.