Why should parents give a cell phone to their children?
There is a scene that is repeated with increasing frequency in contemporary family life. A child comes home from school and says that their classmates already have cell phones. A teenager explains that the class group is on WhatsApp, that plans are organized there, and that a good part of social life no longer happens only at recess, but afterwards, in the evening, on a screen. Parents listen to this demand with a mixture of tiredness, fear, and resignation. They know that a cell phone is not just any toy: it opens the door to social media, exposure, bullying, pornography, comparison, anxiety, consumption, notifications, and a form of permanent availability that even adults have not been able to manage clearly. But they also know something else, although sometimes they don't want to say it: that the cell phone has become a practical condition for belonging to social life.
The question seems simple: when should parents give their children a cell phone? But perhaps that question is already too late, or poorly formulated. Because it places the problem on age, as if everything depended on finding the exact moment: ten years old, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. As if there were a number capable of resolving a cultural transformation. However, the underlying problem is not only when a child enters the world of cell phones, but who organizes that entry, who gives it meaning, who establishes its limits, and who occupies the symbolic place of guarantor of that step. The cell phone will arrive, sooner or later. The decisive question is not whether it will arrive, but whether it will arrive as a simple object given out of fatigue, pressure, or imitation, or whether it will arrive as a true rite of passage mediated by adults.
This is not about defending cell phones because they are innocent. It is not about denying their risks or minimizing parents' concern. On the contrary: precisely because the risks are structural, because the cell phone is not a neutral device, because it does not introduce the child to an isolated tool but to an ecosystem of communication, market, desire, recognition, and attention, giving a cell phone cannot be reduced to a simple domestic concession. Parents should give a cell phone not as one who gives a device, but as one who presides over a threshold. Because if they do not perform that rite, the rite will not cease to occur. The market will perform it.
What is a rite of passage?
A rite of passage is not simply a first experience or an action performed for the first time. The initiatory appears when a community recognizes that an individual has crossed a threshold and that this crossing transforms their place within the group. In archaic societies, this step could be marked by physical tests, isolation, learning secrets, name changes, body markings, or public ceremonies. The initiated did not return the same. There was a before and after. Childhood did not end simply by biological accumulation, but by a symbolic mediation that said: now you belong in a different way.
Mircea Eliade, historian of religions and one of the great modern scholars of myth, analyzed rites of passage as processes of symbolic death and rebirth. The child or uninitiated had to abandon a previous form of existence to join another. In many cultures, this transformation was not understood as a light metaphor, but as a true change of status: the initiated entered the world of adults, of ancestors, of the secrets of the group, and of common responsibilities. The community did not merely allow this step; it managed it. The elders were not spectators. They were guarantors of the transition: they accompanied, watched, imposed tests, interpreted the meaning of what had happened, and reincorporated the initiated into a broader social order.
Edgar Morin, in his book The Lost Paradigm, adds another dimension: the rite can also be understood as a way of complicating the relationship between individual and community. Initiation not only integrates the subject into an already given order; it also grants them a position from which to respond to that order. The initiated is no longer merely someone who receives a tradition, but someone who can reinterpret it, strain it, displace it, and introduce variation. Initiation, when it works, does not produce mere obedience. It produces belonging with the capacity to respond.
Every rite reproduces an order, because it initiates the child into a community that already exists before them. But a living society does not reproduce itself by exact copy. It needs continuity, but also variation; it needs transmission, but also reinterpretation. The archaic rite, in that sense, was not just a technique of integration or discipline. It was a way of managing the passage between generations. The elders handed down a world, but in doing so they allowed the new member to inhabit it from their own position. Without that position, there is no true maturity. There is only adaptation.
Art and literature have repeatedly represented this structure. The hero who leaves home, crosses the forest, descends into hell, survives a trial, and returns transformed is not just a narrative figure; it is an image of the initiatory passage. Leaving childhood does not happen in a straight line. It requires loss, fear, separation, learning, and return. In mythical narratives, the young person does not become an adult by simply receiving an object, a name, or a permission, but by understanding the weight of what they receive. A sword, a mask, a secret word, a body mark, or an inheritance mean nothing if they appear outside a symbolic order that gives them meaning. They matter because they condense a transformation: they are not prizes, but signs of a new responsibility.
Modern Rites of Initiation: Car, Alcohol, Nightclubs, and Consumption
Modern societies did not abolish rites of initiation. They weakened them, dispersed them, and often handed them over to the market. Capitalist modernity does not eliminate the need to mark the passage between ages, but it transforms the objects, settings, and mediators of that passage. The car, for much of the 20th century, was one of those signs. Obtaining a driver's license was not just about acquiring mobility: it was about gaining autonomy, speed, personal space, the ability to go out without parental dependence, pick up others, escape the neighborhood, or enter an adult form of social circulation. The automobile was technical, economic, and symbolic all at once.
Something similar can be said of makeup, certain clothes, the first night out, alcohol, nightclubs, concerts, certain haircuts, or certain musical and cultural consumptions. None of these things were merely what they seemed. Wearing makeup could mean entering a grammar of desire, presence, and gaze. Going out at night could mean temporarily leaving family surveillance and entering a space of peers. Drinking alcohol could act as a clumsy, risky, and often absurd sign of belonging to an age. Going to a nightclub was not just listening to music; it was exposing oneself to codes of seduction, shame, group, body, and recognition. In all these cases there was consumption, but also a threshold.
The decisive point is that all these steps, although experienced as personal growth experiences, were already permeated by an economic logic. The transition to another age was no longer organized solely by the family, community, or older generation, but also by objects, industries, brands, leisure spaces, and consumption circuits. Belonging began to be expressed through something that is bought, used, worn, drunk, driven, or displayed. Socially recognizable age acquired an economic translation. Growing up began to mean also entering specific markets: the market of the night, of fashion, of cars, of music, of alcohol, of the body, of entertainment. Capitalism does not destroy initiatory rites; it converts them into initiatory consumptions.
The difference with archaic rites is not that there were no objects or material exchanges before. There were. Every ceremony has clothes, food, instruments, spaces, markings, gestures. The difference lies in what organizes the meaning of the rite. In an archaic rite, the object was subordinate to the community and to symbolic transformation. In the modern rite of consumption, the community is progressively subordinated to the object and to the market that distributes it. It is not just that the teenager drinks alcohol, has a car, or buys clothes. It is that entering socially recognizable age increasingly passes through commercial circuits that define what one must have, how one must appear, and what type of belonging can be bought or imitated.
Even so, these modern rites had a limit that is now decisive: they were partial. The car could offer autonomy, but not everyone had one, nor did all social life depend on it. Makeup could introduce someone to a new relationship with image, desire, and gaze, but it was not a condition for existing within the group. The nightclub was a stage for initiation, but it began and ended at a certain time, on certain days of the week. Alcohol could function as a clumsy or dangerous sign of entry into a certain youth or adult world, but it did not by itself organize social life. They were intense, risky, absurd, or pressure-laden rites, but none constituted a total infrastructure. One could participate in some and not in others. One could be left out of certain scenes without being left out of almost the entire shared world.
In all those rites there was also an element that should not be overlooked: fear. Not fear as a simple external danger, but as a sign of a threshold. The first time someone shaves, puts on makeup, drives, drinks alcohol, goes out at night, or enters a nightclub, they are not just going through a social practice; they are also going through a zone of insecurity. They do not fully know how to behave, how they will be looked at, what is expected of them, what part of their childhood is left behind, or what comes next. But that fear does not belong only to the initiated. The previous generation also experiences it, in a different way. Parents fear what can happen in that step because they know, often from their own experience, that these modern rites were rarely truly mediated. Night outings, discos, alcohol, or the first exposure to desire did not always come accompanied by an adult word capable of ordering fear and giving it meaning; they frequently appeared as poorly tolerated, prohibited, or abandoned territories.
This fear, therefore, was not an accident of the rite, but part of its structure. It indicated that something was being crossed. Initiation did not consist of eliminating fear, but of shaping it, inscribing it in a recognizable scene, and making it bearable through codes, companionship, and recognition. When that mediation was lacking, fear could break the rite: turning the outing into anxiety, alcohol into a pure test of belonging, or desire into a search for approval, a forced performance, or a repressed zone. The problem was not feeling fear when entering a new world; the problem was entering without mediation, without anyone to help interpret what that fear meant.
mobile as a 21st Century Rite of Passage
The mobile continues this series of initiatory objects and scenes, but it alters their scale. It has something of a car, because it promises autonomy; something of makeup, because it introduces a new relationship with image and gaze; something of a nightclub, because it opens a scene of belonging among peers; something of alcohol, because it can function as a clumsy password for entering an age. But, unlike all of them, it does not remain linked to a space, a schedule, a specific practice, or a partial scene of life. The mobile condenses communication, image, desire, consumption, information, entertainment, surveillance, memory, public presence, and availability. It does not merely accompany adolescence: it reorganizes the way it is lived, observed, compared, and narrated.
That is why its difference is more radical. The car could stay in the garage, the discotheque ended at dawn, makeup could be removed, alcohol belonged to a specific scene. The mobile, on the other hand, is not left behind when leaving a scene nor abandoned when an activity ends. It remains close, ready to summon at any moment. It is not a localized rite that one enters and then leaves, but a persistent environment that accompanies the initiated after entry. This is the specific difficulty of the digital rite: the initiatory object is not received and then left behind as a sign of a completed transformation; it remains active, notifying, summoning, modulating, and reorganizing the life of the initiated after the initiation.
From there, the problem of exclusion is better understood. It is not just that a child without a mobile phone may be left out of a specific plan or conversation. The exclusion is broader and more difficult to name, because it affects the ordinary ways in which the group recognizes itself, organizes itself, and tells its own story. Not having a mobile phone can mean not participating in certain shared rhythms, not understanding references that circulated outside the classroom, depending on others to find out what is already presumed to be known, or being left out of spaces where belonging, presence, and identity are negotiated. The mobile phone does not simply add another possibility; it becomes a silent presupposition of many forms of daily life.
That is why the question “to give or not to give a mobile?” ends up being misleading. It suggests that parents retain the intact possibility of keeping their child out of that world without structural consequences. But the mobile phone is no longer merely a desired good or a fashion item. It is a social infrastructure. Like all infrastructure, it becomes invisible when available and brutally visible when it is missing. Nobody thinks much about electricity until it goes out. The problem, then, cannot be resolved as if it were a matter of accepting or rejecting one more consumption. The real dispute is not between mobile yes and mobile no, but between a mobile received as an object of consumption and a mobile received as a rite of passage; between an initiation carried out by the market and an initiation mediated by adult figures.
When parents merely delay the mobile phone without constructing any meaning around that delay, they may believe they are resisting the market. Sometimes they are doing so partially. But something else can also happen: that they are postponing the moment when the market will carry out the initiation anyway. The child waits, watches, compares, desires, and accumulates anxiety from the start. And when they finally gain access, if there is no adult symbolic mediation, they suddenly enter the world that others had already taught them to desire. In that case, the prohibition did not produce critical distance; it only produced waiting. And waiting without elaboration can intensify capture.
The adult figure as guarantor of the rite should not be understood narrowly here, nor necessarily linked to biological parenthood. It can be the family, parents, educators, guardians, grandparents, school institutions, or any adult capable of assuming a mediating function. The important thing is not who formally occupies that place, but whether someone occupies it. Every rite needs an instance that says: what is happening is not trivial, this is not just an object, this modifies your position, this gives you access, but it also commits you. When that figure disappears, the rite is not left empty. The market occupies it.
The market does not initiate to form subjects capable of distance, responsibility, and elaboration. The market initiates users, and its objective is to prolong usage time as much as possible. It does not provide the mobile as a threshold of responsibility, but as a consumption interface. It does not explain the flow of content: it normalizes it. It does not teach to stop: it teaches to remain. It does not offer critical language about the attention economy: it converts attention itself into raw material. In an initiation mediated by adults, entry into the world should be accompanied by an interpretation of the world. In an initiation carried out by the market, entry appears as unmediated normality. The child does not receive an explanation of the forces that permeate them; they receive a screen that already contains those forces operating on them.
Therefore, giving a mobile phone can be an act of surrender or an act of symbolic reappropriation. It depends on how it is done. If it is given because “everyone has it,” because “there is no other choice,” because “that way they stop asking for it,” or because “it helps us locate them,” the gifting is absorbed by the same logic that was intended to be controlled. But if it is given, explicitly or implicitly, saying, “this is an important step, and you will not go through it alone,” then the scene changes. The mobile phone ceases to be a prize, a toy, or a concession, and becomes an object loaded with meaning: not because it is sacred, but because it opens an area of life that requires mediation.
The Role of Adults in Mobile Phone Use
The usual mistake is to think of that mediation as a set of technical rules: schedules, permitted applications, parental controls, punishments. All of that may have its place, but it does not touch the core of the problem. Rules without explanation are experienced as imposition; limits without meaning, as arbitrariness. The issue is not to design a perfect domestic regulation, but to dispute the meaning of the mobile phone against the meaning the market has already given it. The market has already given its answer. It says that being connected is belonging. That responding quickly is mattering. That showing oneself is existing. That consuming is participating. That being available is being part. Faced with that grammar, the adult figure must introduce another: not every connection is belonging, not every immediate response is care, not every exposure is existence, not every consumption is participation, and not every availability is connection.
This dispute is not resolved with a list of rules, but with various concrete forms of mediation against the attention economy. The first is time. The mobile pushes towards immediate response, permanent interruption, and constant availability. The adult figure must introduce an elementary truth, but today almost subversive: not everything needs to be answered now. Not every conversation requires immediate presence. Not every call from the flow deserves obedience. Having a mobile does not mean being available at all times.
The second is exposure. The mobile makes almost any experience recordable, shareable, and commentable. An image, a joke, an outing, a mistake, or an embarrassment can quickly go from being experienced to being circulated. Adult mediation must teach that not everything that can be shown should be shown. Not as moralizing, but as a principle of sovereignty: there are experiences that lose value when exposed, moments that need to remain out of the flow, and parts of life that are not content. If no one mediates this entry, the child learns that being in the world is equivalent to appearing before others. Therefore, it is not enough to say “be careful what you upload.” Something deeper must be conveyed: your life does not exist to feed a flow; your image is not a debt to others; your intimacy is not what you hide out of shame, but also what you preserve, because it has value.
The third is the distinction between spaces. The market tends to bring everything together under the same logic: conversation, social networks, videos, games, shopping, news, tasks, and entertainment. For the attention economy, the less difference there is between activities, the better: a conversation can lead to a video, a video to a trend, a trend to a purchase, a purchase to a recommendation, and a recommendation to another hour of staying online. The adult figure must interrupt this continuity and teach that not everything that happens on the mobile belongs to the same order. It is not the same to talk to a friend as to publish for an indeterminate audience; it is not the same to look for information as to be carried away by recommendations; it is not the same to use a tool as to inhabit a platform designed to retain. Distinguishing spaces is introducing thought where the market introduces continuity.
The fourth is the separation of functions. The cell phone absorbs activities that were previously distributed among different objects, places, and times: calling, photographing, writing, playing, looking, studying, meeting, being alone. This convergence is convenient, but it reduces the boundaries between experiences and makes it easier for everything to be subjected to the same regime of availability. That is why there are conversations that should not be mediated by the cell phone, study moments that should not share a surface with entertainment, and forms of rest that should not be open to notification. Separating functions is not nostalgia: it is preventing a single environment from organizing the totality of life.
The fifth is the cost assumed. Every distance from the flow has a price. Responding less quickly can generate misunderstandings; exposing oneself less can reduce visibility; not participating in certain dynamics can leave one out of some conversations. Autonomy is not free. If this cost is not named, the child will experience it as punishment or unjust loss; if it is named, they can understand that all true freedom also requires renunciation.
There appears the responsibility inherent in every initiatory rite. Growing up is not just about gaining permissions, access, or freedom. It is learning that every new possibility also brings difficulties, fears, costs, and forms of care. The consumer culture presents maturity as an indefinite expansion of options: more access, more choice, more entertainment, more connection, more presence. But no real maturity is built only with expansion. It also requires waiting, delay, frustration, judgment, and loss. Giving a mobile phone as a rite implies saying: you are entering a broader world, but not everything in that world should govern you. And for it not to govern you, you will have to accept greater responsibility, certain limits, and certain costs.
If that mediation does not exist, integration occurs in another way. The child enters the mobile phone as one enters a shopping mall with no visible exit: everything seems like a choice, but every path has been anticipated, stimulated, and monetized. Little by little, belonging begins to be confused with consumption, communication with availability, identity with profile, experience with content, and attention with life itself. Then the initiatory rite no longer leads to a position from which to inhabit the world with more responsibility, but to an almost total integration into the flow which, today, is presented as the natural way of being in the world.
What to Do When a Mobile Phone Is Already Inevitable?
That is the cost of adult renunciation, and it should be named directly. Many parents believe they are resisting the market when they delay or prohibit mobile phones. In some cases, that delay can be reasonable. But if it is not accompanied by a symbolic reappropriation of the rite, it can simply become a way of not occupying the place that the adult should occupy. The market does not need parents to agree; it is enough for them not to produce an alternative mediation. It is enough for the mobile to appear, sooner or later, as something obtained by social pressure, comparison, or family exhaustion. At that moment, the market has already defined the desire before the adult defines the meaning.
The question, then, is not whether parents should be afraid. They have reasons to be. The question is what they do with that fear. If it only leads to prohibition, it can leave intact the symbolic power of what is prohibited, because what is prohibited does not disappear: often it becomes charged with desire. If it only leads to technical control, it reduces the relationship to a domestic conflict over rules. But if fear is transformed into a rite, it acquires another function. It becomes a word, a limit, a warning, accompaniment. The adult does not simply say “no” or “not yet.” They say: this matters, that’s why it cannot happen in just any way.
Nor is it about idealizing parents. Adults themselves are captivated by mobile phones: they compulsively respond to notifications, confuse rest with scrolling, live awaiting messages, and have allowed work to invade home and home to invade work. Precisely for this reason, the adult function cannot be based on naive moral superiority. It is not about teaching from a purity one does not possess, but about recognizing the problem and, from that awareness, building a different scene for children. Sometimes the guarantor of the rite is not one who has defeated the system, but one who at least knows how to name it.
Giving a mobile phone as a rite does not mean celebrating the mobile phone. It means preventing it from arriving as a senseless inevitability. It means introducing a symbolic interruption at the very moment of delivery. The child or adolescent must understand that this object is not simply theirs, because no object that opens access to social life belongs only to individual use. It is theirs in use, but not in its consequences. What they do with it will affect their time, their relationship with others, their image, their desire, their rest, their way of being alone, their way of conversing, and their way of understanding the world. That is why the delivery must be surrounded by meaning.
In archaic societies, the rite separated the initiated from ordinary life to return them transformed. In the digital society, that separation can no longer occur with the same clarity. We cannot take the child to the forest and return them as an adult, nor completely isolate them from the world in which they will have to live. But we can create a threshold scene. We can make sure the mobile does not appear as a simple purchased package, but as a sign of a step. We can say, with actions and words, that this entry will not be managed solely by platforms. And we can introduce, where the market seeks minimal friction, immediate reaction, and continuous flow, a different form of relationship: more responsibility, more delay, more difference, and more awareness of the world they are entering.
That is why parents should give a cell phone to their children. Not as soon as possible, not in any way, not as a reward, not as surrender, not because it is harmless. They should give it to them because, if the cell phone already functions as a contemporary rite of passage, then the worst option is to let that rite be performed exclusively by the market. And not performing it does not mean preventing it. Many times it means giving up leading it.
The mobile will be, for many children and adolescents, the doorway to a new social age. Completely denying it can have exclusion costs much broader than simply the absence of invitations or conversations. But handing it over without mediation can have an even deeper cost: direct integration into an attention economy that does not need to be questioned because it appears from the outset as the normal environment of contemporary life.
The central question, therefore, is not the exact age. Age matters, but it does not solve everything. The decisive factor is who occupies the place of guarantor of the threshold. If the market occupies it, the child enters as a user. If an adult figure occupies it, they can enter as an initiate: someone who accesses a world but is not completely confused with it; someone who participates but learns to distinguish; someone who belongs but maintains a distance; someone who receives a tool, but also a warning about the forces that tool carries.
Delaying without disputing the meaning guarantees nothing. Prohibiting without producing mediation does not either. Renunciation can take seemingly prudent forms. The real challenge is not to prevent the mobile from arriving, but to prevent it from arriving alone. Because when the mobile arrives alone, it does not arrive empty: it arrives loaded with the meaning that the market has already prepared for it. And that meaning is clear: to be connected, to be available, to be visible, to be consuming, to be within the flow.
Against this, the adult function is not to deny the world, but to introduce the world against the market. It is not about protecting the child from all experience, but about preventing their entry into experience from being managed by forces that do not seek to form them, but to capture their attention. A rite of initiation worthy of that name does not avoid danger; it names it, organizes it, and turns it into responsibility.
Because growing up is not about not being afraid, but about going through certain fears with a form, a word, and a mediation that allow them to be understood. When fear is left without a rite, it becomes capture, anxiety, or a blind desire to belong. When an adult figure takes that fear and orders it within a rite, fear ceases to be simple anxiety in the face of the unknown and becomes responsibility: it does not disappear, but it acquires direction. The child then understands that growing up does not simply mean having more permissions, more access, or more apparent freedom, but entering a world where difficulties, limits, and costs also appear. True maturity does not consist of being able to do everything, but of learning to recognize what attracts and what threatens, naming the fears that accompany the step, assuming the limits that order it, and accepting the responsibilities that arise with each new form of freedom.