Is your child smartphone ready?

As you sit in a restaurant, or indeed any public place, and look around you at all the people with their heads buried in their mobile phones, do you wonder if there’s anything wrong with this? Ultimately, does it matter?

We think that maybe it does. Those of us over 40 years old have known a time before smartphones, they’ve only been around for about 30 years, and easily available for far less than this, so we weren’t necessarily habituated to them from early childhood, and yet most of us are online for hours of the day. Who cares?

After all, most of us are casually catching up with friends on social media, or reading news or consulting Dr Google, it’s all innocent stuff, except that sometimes it isn’t.

And that begs the next question. Is it the very fact of being immersed in our smartphones that one should concern us, if indeed there’s anything to worry about at all, or is it what we could be looking at? And, again, does it matter?

Over the years this blog has repeatedly talked about our being relational beings and how a business should know its customers and constantly be reaching out to them to create and maintain relationships; how much does it matter that for many younger people their relationships have been largely online since they were young, and that they’ve had the freedom to look into all the dark corners that they choose since first being given their phones?

There’s a tremendous amount that can be written and said about us living in an increasingly fatherless society in which children have few enforced boundaries and a telecoms blog isn’t the place for it. It is however a place where we can question our own reaction and responsibilities. At what age, for instance, should a child be allowed a smartphone? Just how ‘smart’ should that phone be? Should the number of potential Apps be limited by memory? Should parental tracking be included as standard? Should a child’s phone be limited to speech and texts?

What do you think? We would genuinely love to hear.