Does Your Toddler Use a Smartphone? Mine Does!
Ben and my iPhone
You know those people in the booth next to you at dinner who give their kids Dora the Explorer on an iPhone to keep them calm till dinner comes? Yeah, that is me!
I had a blackberry for the longest time, but one night when out to dinner a friend of ours quickly pulled up Mickey Mouse on his iPhone, and I knew at that moment, I needed one of those fancy contraptions and I never looked back. Smartest decision I have made in years when it comes to technology that is for sure!
But I am not alone, in fact a new statistic, red hot off the press says that 25% of toddlers have used a smartphone of some type. Which is not surprising with the social media age upon us, and so many more mothers buying into the smartphone craze. I started with a smart phone about three years ago, and I could never go back to a regular phone.
An article linked above is from Ad Age blog, and has a great chart of the mothers that were surveyed, which I found incredibly interesting:
Photo: Ad Ages Blog
They say in the blog post:
Digging deeper into the data we see that the percent of moms who haven’t let their children use a smartphone corresponds roughly to the percent of moms who don’t have a smartphone themselves. We suspect that moms who haven’t let their 2-year-olds use a smartphone likely got a smartphone when their kids were already older than that. Crazy, eh? Looking at stats for more-established technologies would seem to confirm that. The Gen-Xers and Boomer moms — who are more likely to have older kids — do show a higher overall rate of having passed the laptop or non-smartphone to their children of all ages.
As someone who is extremely tech savvy, and one of the generation Y moms that really could not go without e-mail, a smartphone, or my internet for a day I can certainly see how toddlers who have mothers in my ballpark would be more likely to be using these things. But honestly it all comes back to surviving motherhood, with three children, all three and under by any means necessary.
If they want to watch a youtube video of Mickey Mouse while waiting for dinner, I see no harm in it. I just wonder how long it will be before they start demanding their own?
Do you let your toddler play with your smartphone?
Heck do you even have a smartphone?
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HAHA My 3 year old has a bunch of games on my MyTouch. Spongebob Memory, a flash card math game, an app called KidDoodle, he can draw and save his pictures. I think he can work the dang phone better than me. He can call grandma and Daddy and his brother. So yeah, he uses it lol
I’m sorry, but this is just sad. I hate HATE seeing kids with phones. Especially toddlers. I mean, really??? What happened to crayons and paper?
crayons and paper are great but we are in a technological world now so expanding beyond those items is really necessary these days. Thats just the way of the world now.
Oh Amy, let me guess, you don’t have kids do you? Sorry to sound snide but I carrying an array of food/toys/crayons/distractions with me for my almost two year old. On average they buy about 5-10 minutes of attention span. In contrast, the iPhone can typically buy at least 10-15 minutes. That’s 10-15 minutes that my kid is quiet and not acting like those children that make people want to ban kids from public spaces. I’ll take it.
LOL Sad? You must not have a very exciting life Amy if it makes you sad to see a kid with a phone. My 3 year old is already reading some words so I guess we’re doing ok here
My niece was listening to my Ipod regularly and always asking to call her mommy on the phone when she was just two!! Even now at age 6, she plays the Wii, the playstation (in controlled doses) and loves chatting on the phone.