A survey of 1000 parents in the Netherlands, commissioned by telecom company T-Mobile, shows that one in four children is given a mobile phone when they are between six and eight years old, and most children own one by the time they go to secondary school.

By Anna Ritchie, Expatica

Parents cited security as the main reason for giving their child a phone. And 70 percent of the parents surveyed regularly give their child call money, on average 13 euros a month.
 

The publication of the survey's findings coincides with T-Mobile’s launch of a family subscription package, which allows up to six family members to call and text each other for free. With only one person paying a monthly extra of ten euros, the new deal should work out cheaper than individual subscriptions and/or ‘pay-as-you-go’ credit for several people. Cheaper for families already using mobiles, perhaps, but it will probably lead more parents to consider arming their kids with phones. This begs the question, is it a good thing for kids to have mobiles?
 

Too young
Marieke Zegers, mother of seven-year-old Valentijn, believes her son is too young to have a phone and insists that giving a child a phone does not make them any more secure. “Children with phones can still drown, have accidents, get robbed or harassed or steal from the local shop.”
 

She goes on to question parents’ true motives and wonders whether what they really want is to be able to check and control their child without being with them: their child is never out of their ‘sight’ yet the parent need not spend time with them.
 

The child’s age is the most important issue and cheaper calls would make no difference. She expects that by age nine or ten Valentijn will be responsible enough to take care of a phone.
 

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Daughters
Mike de Haan, father of seven-year-old Ties, agrees children of that age are simply too young to be entrusted with their own phone. “I would never give my kids a mobile phone at six or seven,” he firmly states. “It’s ridiculous.”
 

Natasha Gunn relented and gave her nine- and ten-year-old daughters their own phones at Christmas after a year of “nagging”. At the age of nine the eldest had complained that everyone in her class had one. “It's part of growing up in this century,” she acknowledges.
 

For Gunn, the motivation was for her kids to be able to let her know when they were going to a friend’s house after school, and call her or the police in an emergency. Security again: the same reason given by the majority of Dutch parents in the survey.
 

She chose to give them basic handsets—no camera or video function—with prepaid SIM cards to stop them running up large bills. But “after a couple of days, the eldest’s 10 euros of credit was gone. And they wanted an upgrade to state-of-the-art phones like other kids in their class!”