Today, we are living in a world where everyone has a smartphone. And, more specifically, everyone seems to need that smartphone. They rely on it for so very much, and it has become more than just a phone, it has become a lifeline to the outside world, and to how we engage with the outside world.
Everyone owns a smartphone, these days, including children. Even young children that are five or six years old are being given smartphones. Many of these smartphones are quite expensive, as well, and these smartphones are a significant investment. Such a significant investment, in fact, that, more often than not, the children being given these smartphones won’t understand what went into purchasing the smartphone, nor the sheer range of possibilities that a smartphone opens up and allows into that child’s life.
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No one is going to deny the fact that owning a smartphone is quite important, especially today. And no one is going to deny the fact that smartphones are exceptionally useful devices that make life a lot easier, and, generally speaking, add several layers of convenience and accessibility to daily life.
In this guide, we’re not going to be talking about why smartphones are “bad”, or anything of that sort. Smartphones are great, and they are, to a significant extent, a necessary tool that many of us now rely on. If you are a member of the working world, you are no doubt familiar with this.
However, just because smartphones are so important and necessary for adults – and teenagers, for that matter – does not mean that smartphones are necessary for children. Even more so, just because smartphones are such a significant fixture of modern life, this definitely doesn’t mean that you should be buying your young child an expensive smartphone with a litany of features and settings – such as a 30MP camera and 5G, among other features that are all available in today’s smartphone market.
We’re going to cover the reasons why you should not buy an expensive smartphone for your kid, in this guide, and at the end of the guide, we’ll give you a very simple alternative.
What Are The Reasons Why I Should Not Buy An Expensive Smartphone For My Kid?
We’re going to start with one of the most obvious reasons. Kids aren’t always the most careful, when it comes to, well, just about everything. Kids tend to drop things and to break things, and that’s because they’re still developing the necessary coordination skills. Along with that, most kids don’t have a very good or in-depth understanding of the value of money. They don’t understand that the phone they just dropped cost one-third of your monthly salary, and that the phone has now been broken, and that investment has, essentially, been wasted.
Most kids, especially young kids, don’t have a good understanding of those things. And this means that they aren’t able to appreciate the device, nor are they able to understand the amount of time and energy that went into you buying it for them. And, if they do drop it, while they may be upset, they simply don’t understand the value of the device, in of itself.
If you have young children, smartphones have been shown to stunt their development and growth. Not a lot, but a little, and this is because, if they are engaging with the smartphone on a very frequent basis, they are learning a couple of things. One of which is that you just need to press a button to be entertained. This significantly lessens the desire to do things like going outside and learning and being curious and using their imagination. For some people, this is a much more subjective point, since some kids will do those things naturally, on their own.
However, there is a less subjective point that many scientific studies have validated. When children rely too much on a smartphone to communicate, they fail to develop their social skills, and this can lead to things like social awkwardness, as well as a detachment from the feelings of others, and this can lead to things like empathy being a bit harder for the child.
From an economic standpoint, there are a lot of smartphones available, in today’s market. In the past, just a decade ago, there weren’t that many smartphones, and the available ones were very hit-or-miss, in terms of quality. If you wanted a good smartphone, you had to be willing to pay a pretty significant amount of money for that smartphone. That’s no longer the case, today.
Today, all kinds of manufacturers are putting together excellent smartphones. Smartphones that are fantastic, and full of excellent features. Features that were once exclusive to the tier of smartphones that were all in the $400 to $800 price-bracket.
If you want to buy your child a smartphone, you don’t need to look very hard to find a good one. Most electronics stores – especially the online ones – have a wide variety of different smartphones, and these are good smartphones that are quite inexpensive, but very effective and useful, with all of the features that you, and your child, could ever want. There is no need to buy a really expensive smartphone for your child.
What Are The Alternatives?
We already covered the two alternatives, but to lay them out once more, the two alternatives are simply not buying your child a smartphone, which has many benefits, or buying them a cheaper one that doesn’t cost a small fortune.
By not buying your child a smartphone, you allow their brains to develop in a far more natural and cohesive manner. By choosing to buy a less expensive smartphone, if that smartphone breaks, it’s not going to be a huge issue, and along with that, they will still be able to call and text you and do what they need to do.
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