We got our daughter a phone at 14. I was tired of being her social coordinator, and she didn't like getting left out of group plans.

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Several years ago, my husband and I found ourselves facing a big parenting decision: At what age should we get our oldest child, who was 11 at the time, her own phone? Up until this point in parenting, our choices regarding devices had been relatively conservative. We did not have tablets for our young toddlers, and we did not have any gaming consoles or iPads for our children as they grew older. But we quickly realized that with middle school on the horizon, there was the social assumption that our child will have her own phone.