The first smartphone: the checklist before you switch it on

Every autumn, with back to school and often with the move up to Year 7, the same conversation runs in thousands of households. And it almost always starts in the wrong place, which is age. Age is a convenient number, but it says nothing about whether your child is ready: it says how many years they have, not how they behave when something makes them uncomfortable.

Five questions that tell you more than a number

• When time is up on something they enjoy, do they stop without a battle?
• If something unpleasant happens away from home, do they tell you or keep it to themselves?
• Do they keep agreements they dislike, or only the convenient ones?
• Can they say I don't know instead of inventing an answer?
• Do they look after what is entrusted to them: keys, kit, school equipment?

If most answers are yes, the conversation stops being about permission and becomes one about preparation. If most are no, you have something far more useful than a ban: you know exactly what to practise over the coming months.

The list before the first switch-on

• Set up the accounts with the real year of birth. Many child protections hang on that field, and a false date switches all of them off at once.
• Turn on the family or teen mode each platform offers, one by one, before the device is handed over.
• Agree times: when it is used, when it is put away and where it sleeps at night. Written down and visible, not just said.
• Check who can message them: contact lists, requests and profile visibility in each app.
• Decide location sharing deliberately, app by app, rather than accepting the default.
• Check which apps arrive with an AI assistant already sitting in the chat list.
• Set the golden rule: if something odd arrives, it gets shown, and showing it is never punished.
• Talk about money: what happens if it breaks, gets lost or is taken.

The chatbots that are already inside

This point is new, which is why it gets missed. A 2026 phone arrives with AI assistants nobody installed: they sit inside the messaging apps, inside the social apps and inside the system itself. It is worth opening them one at a time and reading the chat list slowly. Each service has its own minimum age and its own settings, and the open register of minimum ages lists them service by service, each with its own check date.

The first week decides the year

Whatever is agreed in the first few days is what sticks. After that, any new rule feels like a punishment, and then it gets argued over. So it pays to start the term with the rules already in place, including the ones for the class group chat, which forms in exactly those days and brings habits of its own. We have written about that chat separately, because it deserves its own agreement.

One last thing that helps more than it sounds: the device belongs to the family and is on loan. That is not a disguised punishment, it is the reason why looking at it together in three months will feel normal rather than like a betrayal.