My 10-year-old asked for an iPhone for his 11th birthday. Many of his friends have them. He will be starting middle school in the fall and will no longer have just one teacher responsible for handling dismissal changes. He has various activities with various calls on his time (and our transport). There were practical reasons to get him a phone. But since he is the eldest of our four children, my husband and I knew that whatever we decided for him would become our official family “phone policy.”

Which implied that we needed a family phone policy.