You resisted as long as you could. And you still vehemently and categorically deny that a seventh grader “needs” a phone. But your daughter was the last kid in her class that didn’t have one (a fact of which you were formerly proud). Apparently though, seventh graders no longer actually speak to each other like human beings, but instead sit right next to each other and silently Snapchat back and forth about their Instagram photos of text conversations about emoticons they sent via KIK. And even though your daughter was sitting right in the middle of a group of her friends at practice the other day, she was the only one excluded from actually communicating with any of them because of her lack of a phone. And one of the girls says to another that your daughter “doesn’t understand our lives because she doesn’t have a phone”.
And you realize that all of your objections to getting her a phone – though numerous and valid and well-articulated – are hurting her. So you get her a damn phone. And she says thank you, with her actual voice, like a human.
And rules are discussed, and warnings given, and you will be ever vigilant for the first sign that she’s becoming a phone zombie. And you imagine that this chapter is now closed.
But you stupidly fail to notice the wisps of smoke left by the genie you just unwittingly let out of the bottle. And the next morning, your other kids are in your room, bitching at you while you’re still in bed about when they will get their phones. And your five-year-old wants to know how long it is until he’s in seventh grade, and you explain that it will be eight years, and his head explodes, because “that’s longer than I’ve even been alive Dad!!! Be serious!”
And now there’s an entirely new thing for your kids to use to torment you. And they start fighting about what sorts of protective cases they will get for phones they do not yet own, and will not have for several years to come. And how does one even think to start a fight about such a thing?
And you may not survive eight more years of this.