Last year my friend’s 7 year old brother got a new iPhone 5. We were both surprised that someone so young was given a phone so expensive. I’m almost 16 and my phone isn’t even close to the price of an iPhone. I couldn’t understand why he would even need it.

I remember when I got my first phone in second grade; I was 7 just like him. It was a huge, red Nokia phone with big buttons and a long, black retractable antenna. My parents got me a phone because they both worked when my elementary school would get out. I had to carpool with some friends and they wanted to keep tabs on me to make sure I was safe and taken care of. My friend’s parents got their son an iPhone because he wanted one; he didn’t need it for any safety reasons.

At that age I only used my dinosaur phone for calling my mom every so often and playing Brickbreaker, so I can’t understand what he would do with it besides download games. I know for sure that I would have downloaded a bunch of games rather than use it as a phone at that age.

After thinking about how crazy it was, I began to understand. The world has changed since I was his age. You rarely meet someone who doesn’t have a phone. It’s normal now for children to have phones and tablets.

People use their phones to communicate almost everything they are doing to the world by texting, talking, tweeting and posting on social media. Technology has made it easy to communicate and get information out. Not having a phone would just throw you out of the loop because it wouldn’t be as convenient to talk to you or for you to find information.

Once I realized it wasn’t so bizarre for a child to have a cell phone, I saw that people think like I did at first. Now, when I hear people say things like “It’s crazy to give a kid a phone. I didn’t get mine until I was 13,” it annoys me. People just need to understand times have changed and technology is more than what it used to be. Children are going to have technology that older generations would have never gotten at that age.

Young children getting things like phones and tablets isn’t crazy or weird. People need to accept how in the modern world, technology is everything. Our society has changed and if children don’t have phones or tablets they won’t be prepared for the technology they will have to know how to operate in life. Right now people think it is crazy to give phones to children and in the future it will probably be the same problem with some newer device.