Before you get your kid a first phone

We got our son Ben his first phone, an iPhone, when he was 12. Before that we tried an Apple Watch and made one expensive mistake. Here’s what we’d tell any parent who’s about to do the same.

Start with what the phone is for

Before comparing phones, write down why your kid needs one. Ours came down to three things:

• Staying in touch after school
• Knowing where he is
• Emergencies

That list matters more than any feature list. Calls, texts and location need a basic phone, not social media, a browser or an app store. If your reasons look like ours, any option below works, and the real question is how much freedom you want to hand over on day one.

Our first try: a watch (and the mistake we made)

We started with an Apple Watch, mainly so we could see Ben’s location. We bought the model without cellular, and that turned out to be the problem. Without its own cellular connection, the watch couldn’t do the one thing we bought it for.

If you go the watch route, buy the cellular model. Apple’s Family Setup, which lets you manage a kid’s watch from your own iPhone, only works with a cellular Apple Watch. Apple recommends the SE 3, and on watchOS 27 it lists the SE 3 or Series 9 and later. A GPS-only watch can’t be set up for a kid at all. Even on a cellular watch, location sharing away from home needs a cellular plan, so budget for your carrier’s monthly fee for the watch’s line. Kid-specific watches work the same way: the Gabb Watch’s service runs $12.99–17.99 a month, and the Pinwheel Watch’s is $14.99 a month.

A watch can be a good first step for a younger kid. For us, at 12, it was a detour on the way to a phone.

The three kinds of first phone

1. A kid phone

These are Android-based phones built for kids. They have limited apps, contacts approved by parents, and no social media by default.

Phone	Monthly plan	What the kid gets
Gabb Phone 4 ($249.99)	From $29.99 on a 2-year contract	No app store, browser or social media; group and picture texting; GPS
Pinwheel	$29.99 with Pinwheel Wireless, or $17.99 with your own carrier	Approved contacts only; 1,000+ vetted apps; no browser by default
Troomi (Samsung, $6.94/mo × 36)	$24.95–34.95, month to month	Approved contacts; curated app store; optional filtered browser
Bark Phone ($15/mo × 24)	$29 talk/text, up to $79 unlimited	Bark monitoring included; parents can approve apps, a browser, even social media

Prices are from each company’s site, checked October 17, 2026.

Best for: younger kids, or kids you’re not sure will follow the rules yet. Most let you unlock more as your kid shows they can handle it. For the full breakdown, including first-year costs, see Gabb vs Pinwheel vs Troomi vs Bark Phone.

2. A regular smartphone with the free controls turned on

This is what we did. An iPhone or Android phone does far more than you need, but the free parental controls are now good enough to lock it down to what you want.

Best for: kids who can follow house rules, and families already on iPhone (Family Sharing makes setup easy).

3. A basic or flip phone

Calls and texts and almost nothing else. This is the cheapest option and the hardest to misuse. The trade-off is that location sharing, group chats and many school-related apps are limited or missing.

Best for: families taking the Wait Until 8th pledge, which allows basic phones but no smartphone until the end of 8th grade. More than 155,000 parents have signed it.

The free controls you should turn on

On an iPhone, everything below is free through Screen Time and Family Sharing:

• Ask to Buy: new apps need your approval. We use this.
• Schedules: the phone locks down at set times. Handy for a bedtime rule like ours (no phone after 8:30 pm).
• Communication Limits: you decide who they can call and text. Since iOS 26, kids also need your approval to contact new numbers.
• Communication Safety: blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime. Teens 13–17 now get it and web filters by default.
• Content ratings: App Store ratings now come in 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ and 18+.
• Ask to Browse (iOS 27): you approve each new website.

On Android, Google Family Link does much of the same for free: app approvals, screen time, location, and Chrome and YouTube filters.

For location, we use Life360’s free plan. Apple’s Find My also works and is built in.

Wondering whether to pay for monitoring on top? See Is Bark worth it for a 13-year-old with an iPhone? Our answer for most iPhone families is no.

House rules: set them before day one

Ours are simple:

1. No phone after 8:30 pm
2. New apps need our approval

Rules are easier to set when the phone is new than to add later. There’s also one more thing we didn’t plan for: the phone became useful leverage. When Ben gets in trouble, losing the phone for a while is a consequence he takes seriously. That works because the rules were clear from the start, and he’s followed them.

Check the school’s rules too

Ben’s school requires phones to be off during class. Many schools go further: as of March 2026, 33 states had passed K-12 phone bans. Look up your school’s policy before you buy. It affects how much your kid can actually use the phone during the day, and whether a watch or basic phone would cover what you need.

Is 12 the right age?

For us, yes. Ben was ready to follow the rules, and the phone solved real problems: after-school check-ins, location and emergencies. The last broad survey we could find, from Common Sense Media in 2019, found 69% of kids had a smartphone by 12, so it’s also a common age.

The better question than age: Can your kid follow rules you set, and do you have a real reason they need a phone? If both answers are yes, start with a phone that matches those reasons, turn on the free controls, and give them more freedom as they earn it.