The notion that small children don’t need their cell phones is false. With both parents working outside the home, children often need a way to stay in touch. Cell phones make it easy for parents to connect with their youngsters as they move between school and child care centers, participate in sports competitions, or participate in other after-school activities. However, being able to monitor cell phone use, limit screen time, and control mobile phone charges is also important. Just as mobile phones can be helpful for children, there are definite dangers in excessive and unsafe phone use. Fortunately, prepaid phones make it possible to mitigate these risks. The following are three significant advantages of buying a prepaid phone for your child.
1. Prepaid Phones are Affordable, and They’re Easy to Replace
Think of all the times your child has lost their backpack, jacket, or house keys. Now imagine buying this same child a phone that costs several hundred dollars up front or requires more than a year’s worth of monthly payments. Fifty-one percent of parents in a recent mobile phone study reported having to replace their child’s mobile within 18 months, and 57 percent reported replacing at least two cellphones within this same period.
Children are naturally forgetful. Many children have tunnel vision. They have difficulty focusing on more than the activities and stimuli right before them. An expensive cell phone can be lost, stolen, or broken within weeks or even days. These losses are infinitely easier for parents to weather with prepaid phones. There’s a nearly unlimited range of options in affordable, prepaid cellphones. Moreover, many of these are just as functional, attractive, and fun to use as their more costly alternatives.
2. Find Flexible Plans That Match the Changing Needs of Your Child
Most children and young teens don’t use their mobile phones to do a lot of calling. They far prefer texting, online surfing, and using mobile apps to communicate with one another instead. For these individuals, mobile phones aren’t valued as phones at all. Instead, they’re handy, portable devices that are relied on for other functions. Thus, paying a veritable fortune for a high-end phone and a phone plan with lots of talk time is virtually guaranteed to be a waste of money. You’ll likely find that your child is constantly using their mobile phone to connect to your home network, surf the web, watch videos, or use their favorite apps.
Prepaid phone plans are flexible. You can upgrade to a new plan type whenever you’re child’s preferred way of connecting changes. Prepaid phone plans also allow parents to assess how their children use their mobile phones when they start out. This is far preferable to automatically locking into a mobile phone contract with rigid provisions and limited freedom for switching or upgrading. There are sites like prepaidbill.com where you can make instant payments to any prepaid wireless carrier. Thus, if your child runs out of minutes and you want to keep them connected, you can do so within seconds.
3. Set Firm Limitations on Screen Use
Although unlimited plans allow for unlimited talk, text, and Internet use, there are also plans that limit how many texts can be sent, how much web surfing can be done, and how much talk time a child has. This is one way to teach children how to budget their time. They’ll use it wisely when they know that they have only so much data for a single month. It also means that if your child spends too much time on their phone throughout the service period, they’ll be forced to spend much less on recreational phone use until their plan renews.
Prepaid phones for children are affordable. They’re easy to buy, easy to replace, and easy to manage. They also come with plans that make limiting screen time and teaching children good time management skills a cinch.