> Wait Until 8th asks parents to sign a pledge, when their children are in elementary school, that they will wait until 8th grade to give them a smartphone. The

> Wait Until 8th asks parents to sign a pledge, when their children are in elementary school, that they will wait until 8th grade to give them a smartphone. The pledge only takes effect once ten families in that child’s grade have signed the pledge so that the child will have a community of peers and will not feel so isolated before 8th grade. > We think this is a great idea, we just suggest that the pledge should be: Wait Until 9th. Or Wait Until High School. Children are usually 12 or 13 at the start of 8th grade; that is still within the period of early puberty. I'm going to contact the Wait Until 8th people and ask them if they'd consider adding a "I'm willing to wait until <grade> before giving my kids a phone" field. Maybe there are enough people in a given community who would be glad to wait until 12th grade, but just "wait until 8th" doesn't let them discover each other. > Plus, if 8th graders have smartphones, that means that smartphones will be everywhere in middle schools, increasing the desire of 7th graders to get them. A while back I was considering a school system for my kids where the grades are split up into a K-5th campus and a 6th-12th campus, but they didn't have any policy about cell phone usage at either campus. I guessed that every 6th grader was going to feel pressure to have a cell phone by Christmas of their first year on the upper campus, and this was my top issue with this school system. They're now in a school where students have to turn in phones into a phone bucket in the office before the school day starts, and have to pick them up after school. I've seen the bucket in the middle of the day and there's only like 6 phones in there, so (it seems) there's very low rates of phone ownership for kids at the school.