I have two kids, with the elder one approaching the age where smartphones are starting to appear in their peer group (~10-11 yrs). Does anyone have a recommendation for a flip phone with coolness factor? Maybe ruggedized, with a compass built-in (non-GPS), something with “tool” aesthetics.
The hard part is denying your kid something that the other kids are using to actively communicate amongst each other (peer pressure).
Depends a bit where you live I think. Here in Switzerland smartphone ownership among kids is less prevalent than say in the US. There's mostly consensus that we're not doing the kids any favors. But the peer pressure is just there. Also it doesn't help that some schools use WhatsApp for in-class communication.
i cant really recommend a specific phone but "dumb" android phones do exist, so they can tkae pictures, send texts etc. to their friends but you can prevent them from scrolling through tiktok
I learned about the finder from the paper "Swapping 5G for 3G: Motivations, Experiences, and Implications of Contemporary Dumbphone Adoption" at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3637402 . Its list of "dumbphones" includes this rugged flip-phone:
and the Mindful phone, at https://greentouchstore.com/products/mindful-talk-and-text-m... ; the latter is based on Rabbinical Guidance ("Based on their policies the phones will not feature any internet or entertainment apps besides Text message app and Offline Music Player")
There's the Light Phone II - https://www.thelightphone.com/ ("a premium, minimal phone. It will never have social media, clickbait news, email, an internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed.")
