While here we are in June, another summer upon us. We have survived all the end-of-year field trips, purchased all those teacher gifts, and thrown those dirty backpacks in the closet, where they’ll probably remain until August when I finally decide it’s time to give them a wash.
It is a time to look ahead to warm days and late bedtimes – extra ice cream and movie nights. And yet, it is always now that I also find myself reflecting on the year that has passed. This year has been a big one for our family, especially for our oldest, who just completed sixth grade.
In a year, she somehow transformed from a middle school newbie to an expert. She has taken on new responsibilities and earned new freedoms. One of these has been a phone.
When she started middle school, I was against her having any type of phone.
At that time, I didn’t see the need. She took the bus to school. I dropped her off at practice. She was rarely in a situation where she needed to reach me and couldn’t. And so we sent her to sixth grade phoneless, confident that we would breeze through middle school relatively screen-free.
But after a couple of months, things started to change. She wanted to walk home alone. Or walk into town with friends. She started asking for a phone.
After a couple of outings where she borrowed friends’ phones to relay pick-up times, we quickly realized something had to change. And yet, I knew we still weren’t ready to dive into a smartphone.
As big proponents of the Wait Until 8th pledge, my husband and I did not want our daughter to be on social media. Nor did we want her embroiled in the drama and excessive messaging that can sometimes accompany large group texts. And so we started looking for a simpler solution.
“How about a flip phone?” we suggested.
Our daughter groaned. “I can’t even text on that thing!”
So we kept looking.
A few weeks later, after a recommendation from a friend, we found the perfect solution—the Gabb Phone. Set up to resemble an iPhone, with real texting and the signature smartphone shape; the Gabb Phone is essentially a “dumb phone” designed to seamlessly blend into the middle school smartphone landscape while still keeping us parents in control.
To start, we purchased the most basic plan – no group texts, no image texts – and enabled the highest parental settings, which meant I had to approve contacts before my daughter could add them to her phone.
And while I worried that she would start texting her friends too much, I was pleasantly surprised to see that as the months progressed, her texting remained minimal. Most of the texts passed between the two of us. Changes to practice times, coordinating pick-up locations, and goodnight messages sent when my husband and I were on a date night.
Quickly, I saw her phone as a valuable tool that could grow with her as she continued to gain independence. After a few months, we turned some of the more restrictive parental controls off, like allowing her to enter contacts into her phone without approval.
Again, our path to owning a phone remained smooth. That is, until the spring when I started receiving a slew of texts to my own phone from her friends. Pictures and songs they wanted to share with our daughter but couldn’t because of her limited plan.
“It’s fine. I told them just to send it to you,” she said when I asked about it.
After a month of her stealing my phone to review her image texts, we finally decided to upgrade her this spring. And once again, our daughter has proved she was ready for the responsibility.
And so here we are, a year of middle school down and about eight months into our adventure with the Gabb phone.
Today, our daughter can text her friends, participate in group chats, and exchange pictures with them. She has earned these features slowly, making each new one an exciting addition that she has valued by continuing to be responsible in her usage.
While such a slow introduction to a phone might not be right for every family, for us, it has been just right. Our daughter has gained independence, and we’ve continued to delay the introduction of social media. Over the past school year, she has developed healthy phone habits while remaining tethered to the real world.
For a phone-hesitant mom and a smartphone-dreaming middle schooler, the “dumb phone” has been the perfect compromise – a valuable tool to help navigate this new world of modern adolescence.
It has provided us with exactly the experience we need so that when the time for a smartphone comes, we are all ready for all the good and bad that comes along with it.
