The smartphone confessions of a 13-year-old boy

This guest article is written by 13-year-old Jack Bicheno, who is spending a work placement day at Telecoms.com and was tasked with writing a story.

A subject people don’t really tend to talk about is what teenagers mainly use their phones for. Reasons for this may be that they can’t give their own insight into the matter since they don’t make it their business to look at teenagers phones to see what they’ve been doing (apart from my dad). As a 13-year-old myself I can definitely give an insight to my friends’ phone life and mine.

The first thing is actually something parents should really know themselves about teens and phones – that they take a great interest in social media. However many parents don’t know roughly how much time they’re spending on these apps. About 24% of the teens that go online daily say they go online almost constantly during the day.

For me this isn’t a problem since I don’t have any social media of my own but I really do feel like these statistics need to be noticed in an alarming way since the time they spend on social media could be put towards better productiveness in things like school work and hobbies not related to their phones.

I can admit that I spend a lot of my time playing games on my phone, this is bound to happen once a tween/teen gets their first smartphone. I know this for a fact since when I got my first smartphone the literal first thing I wanted to do was go onto the play store and download a crap-ton of games, most of which I never played any way.

Another problem that follows on from the apps and games problem is the amount of storage teens will take up on their phone without even knowing it. I think we can avoid this problem by first informing parents that this problem may occur and also inform teenagers to not straight away download apps that they want but not necessarily need, this does seem like a good idea since it will help the teens prove themselves to be responsible for their own phones.

There is a way all these problems can be averted and its quite simple: don’t buy a smartphone in the first place! Now there are definitely some cons to this such as the child feeling left out because all his friends have smartphones or that he doesn’t feel he has any control over what he gets and doesn’t get but if you want an easy and cheap solution I would choose that option.

Despite all I’ve said I still can’t deny that I’m one of those teens. However, this gives me all the more reason to make this story as #1: I don’t want any other people to end up like me and #2: I have a lot of expertise in knowing how teens manage to screw up their phones. I also believe parents (but hopefully not including my dad) should have more control over what teens do on their phones and also the type of phone they get. This should solve all of the problems I’ve stated in this story.