Buying a mobile phone for your child can have some major advantages for you as a parent. It's a great way to keep in touch with them when they venture out alone or with friends and provides peace of mind that they can contact you anytime anywhere should they need help.
That said, you may want to consider the following points before deciding on a specific phone and tariff.
Legal Position
The legal position for children and mobile phones is something of a grey area. Children are fully entitled to buy and use a pay-as-you-go phone. In theory, a child could have a monthly contract (paying in arrears), but this is extremely rare as mobile companies cannot solicit or offer the child a credit facility, and usually cannot enforce repayment of any money lent to a child, which may include money in the form of phone credit.
In theory a child could get a phone contract with a parent or guardian acting as guarantor. In practice, a far more common set-up is for the contract to be held in the name of the parent, who then has full responsibility for any charges.
Monthly Limits
Many phone contracts have some form of limit on the number of calls, number of texts, data use, or more than one of these services. Depending on the contract, once the limit is hit either the service will be cut off for the rest of the month, or additional use will carry high fees. Most networks have some form of alert system when users approach limits, though this is usually sent via a text message.
Parents who take out a contract for a phone therefore need to either regularly check usage levels with the child and stress the importance of staying within limits, or set the account up so that they have online access to check bills.
Adult Content
Generally mobile operators block adult content on websites accessed through the phone by default and require the user to specifically ask for this access to be blocked, generally through a process that requires proof of adult identity. The more sophisticated the phone, the more likely it is that an IT-literate child will find a way round this.
Emergencies
Several networks offer "emergency" calls on pay as you go services so that parent's don't have to worry about children being left without credit when needing to make a vital call. For example, Orange allows users who've run out of credit to call 450 and gain an extra £2.50 in credit. Calls and texts then cost 5p more than normal until the user tops up and repays the £2.50. Vodafone offers a similar service, activated by texting IOU to 468. The user gets £2 extra credit, which is deducted from the next top-up, along with a 30p service charge.
Safety
There is no conclusive evidence on the safety of mobile phones for either adults or children, mainly for the simple reason that people haven't used phones for long enough to make it possible to track lifelong trends. The United Nation's cancer research agency currently classes phones as possibly carcinogenic: that's the lowest level of risk short of saying their are absolutely safe.
As far as children are concerned, there are some theories that extended use can be more dangerous, simply because if rays penetrate the same distance in an adult and a child, the depth is comparatively greater with the child and could cause more damage. The most consistently cited advice is that users should prefer texting to voice calls where possible.
