I swore my 11-year-old wouldn’t get a smart phone. So what made me cave in?

My daughter was not going to have a smartphone until she turned 16.

That was my boundary, and I was sticking to it.

She could get a face tattoo, join the reform party, and insist on being referred to by the pronouns Xe for all I cared, but she would not be getting an iPhone until she could jolly well afford to buy one for herself or Xerself.

“I want to preserve her childhood,” I would announce haughtily, while friends with offspring already at secondary school would try to point out how difficult it was to keep your kids smartphone-free once they got a bit older.

“They need them to stay in touch while they are travelling to school alone,” someone would argue.

“Nonsense!” I would respond,

Pointing out that, in 1992, I had to travel eight stops on the Tube to school every morning without so much as a carrier pigeon for company, and nothing bad had ever happened to me (apart from the time a stranger flashed me, but things were different now, right?

“Your child will feel left out if all their friends are messaging and they’re not part of the group,” argued another mum.

“Well I will raise a child who is confident enough not to feel peer pressure,” I replied.

“Yeah, well good luck with that,” responded the parents of the older kids, rolling their eyes in the same patronising way I do when my 11-year-old insists on going out into gale-force winds and rain without a coat.

I’d show them!

As year Five gave way to Year Six, we remained one of the few families to resist getting our child a phone.

Every week, our daughter, Edie, would come home and tell us that another one of her pals had become digitally connected, every week I would tell her that she would eventually thank me for my resolve.

“You can have a dumb phone when you go to secondary school,” I told her, “but that’s it!”

Last month, she finished primary school and I ignored her pleas for a phone until two weeks ago, when, as I tearfully took delivery of her new school blazer, it became clear that I could ignore her no longer.

With lots of care, consideration and research, a brick phone with limited capabilities was agreed upon (similar to the new £99 Barbie one, launched this week, which makes calls and sends texts but has no social media).

Buoyed by the recent announcement from EE that children should be protected from smartphones for their ‘digital wellbeing’, as well as the calls on Wednesday from the Irish Medical organisation to ban mobiles for under 16s, we set off to the high Street with full confidence in our somewhat old fashioned decision.

It was under the bright neon lights of the phone shop that I began to experience what I will now refer to as my own personal Waterloo.

The man serving us sniggered when I asked to see the selection of ‘dumb phones’.

“We don’t stock them in store,” he said, “and to be honest, you don’t want your kids using a handset that you can no longer remember how to work out.”

“There’s a reason they are used by drug dealers as burner phones if you know what I mean?”

I did not know what he meant, but visions of my 11-year-old leading a bucolic childhood because of my insistence on a brick phone had now been replaced with ones of her joining a criminal gang.

“Forget it, we’ll take an iPhone,” I gasped, u-turning quicker than a prime minister after an election win.

“You’re the best mum ever!” squealed my surprised child.

“Told you so!” laughed all my friends, when I admitted my reverse ferret.

So despite all my bluster, my daughter will start secondary school with a smartphone in her pocket, and a hypocrite for a mum. or should I say an idealist?

Because I think that’s what a lot of us are suffering from when it comes to this whole smartphone conversation – we want our kids to grow up in a sort of Swallows And Amazons utopia that has never really existed.

But when it comes to phones, we need to accept that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and has been for some time.

Doing this isn’t abandoning our kids to social media, it’s compromising, and accepting the reality of the world we live in, on our terms, rather than those drawn up by Meta and TikTok. My daughter’s safety and mental health will always be my priority.

We have set up her new device with so many parental controls that it is essentially an expensive version of two tin cans and a piece of string.

We have also drawn up our parental phone contract with her – no social media until she is at least 14, parental access to her messages, and everything must be switched off at 8pm.

We’ll see how long this lasts, given the speed at which I caved in the phone shop.

But it’s a good reminder of an important truth: that parenting is far easier in theory than it is in practice, and like my child heading off to secondary school, I will always have something new to learn.