This article appeared in The Age online this morning and I thought you might find it interesting.
THEY’RE bright, colourful and cute – but they’re not toys. Meet the new generation of mobile phones, coming soon to a five-year-old near you.
Phones like the Firefly and Britain’s Teddyfone are targeted at very young children, with new research showing that one in four seven to 10-year-olds already owns a phone. The study, commissioned by Cartoon Network, also documents a 17 per cent rise in phone ownership for children since 2006.
Raechel Johns, lecturer in marketing at the University of Canberra, said phone makers had their eyes on an emerging market.
”Previously mum and dad would have said, ‘No way’, but if they make it cute enough and enough like a toy they might say, ‘Oh, all right’,” Ms Johns said.
Tim Pethick is the head of Gecko, the company that sells Firefly phones in Australia. The father of three girls (his seven and eight-year-olds have phones) says the market is growing.
”Parents are going to want to be able to get in touch with their kids and have their kids get in touch with them,” he said.
Many of the new phones, including the Firefly, have built-in controls that allow parents to restrict which numbers can be dialled or stop text messaging. Dr John Irvine, child psychologist and author of A Handbook for Happy Families, says that young children don’t need phones, but demand is still increasing: ”It’s a snowball effect – the more kids that have it, the more have to have it,” he said.
”The truth is, the world has not got more dangerous, the risks to kids from stranger danger is no greater than it has been for many years. Are parents more protective? Yes,” Dr Irvine said.
The official view of the federally funded Australian Centre for Radio Frequency Bioeffects Research is that mobiles do not cause cancer.
But Dr Vini Khurana, a prominent brain surgeon, disagrees. ”This danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” he concluded in a recent paper, Mobile Phones and Brain Tumours.
