Nine per cent of five year-olds in UK have a mobile

News Paul Briden 10:47, 23 Aug 2013

Nine percent of five year-olds in Britain have a mobile phone bought by their parents, a survey has revealed

Some children in the UK are given mobile phones by their parents by the age of five, a survey has sensationally revealed.

The research, undertaken by uSwitch, claims that the ‘average’ British child has a mobile phone by the time they’re 12 years old and that ‘nearly one in ten (nine per cent)’ have one by the age of five.

However, despite the fact that the wider media appears to be going nuts over the report, the survey has only taken in data from a mere 1,420 UK families with children, which would mean that nine per cent only represents about 127 UK kids from single-child families.

As the survey does also mention families with two children, that could be expanded to as many as 254 kids with phones by the time they’re five years old.

But considering that the survey points out that there are 7.7 million families with dependent children in the UK, as of 2012, it can hardly be taken as representative of the nation as a whole.

On top of that, there’s the fact that there’s no information on the average incomes of families surveyed. Considering the figures given for the average value of both parent and child mobiles of those families surveyed (£254 and £124 respectively) it’s quite probable that the majority were relatively well off one way or another. Anyone would think we were not still in a recession.

It’s also worth clarifying that the survey refers to the devices surveyed families gave to their children broadly as ‘mobile phones’. While some of these are surely going to be flashy new smartphones it’s highly likely that a good deal of them are instead older style feature phones (possibly even hand-me-downs). More data on this front would be interesting to see.

It would also be interesting to see how many of these phones given to older children are given primarily as a means of communication with the parents, for emergencies and the like, versus those which are given as an elaborate toy with entertainment also in mind.

There doesn’t seem to be any logic behind giving a five year old a mobile for communication as they’re hardly going to be away from the parent unattended. Feasibly it can only be for entertainment purposes, in which case, the smartphone, along with the tablet, could be on the way to replacing the TV as the easy parenting method of choice.

Mobile Phones

by pbriden via Featured Articles