Is your child ready, or are you?
These are different questions and they get muddled. A child is ready to reach people when there is somebody they want to reach and cannot: a grandparent two countries away, a parent who works late, a best friend who moved. A parent wants a phone when the child starts walking home alone, or staying at other houses, or going somewhere you cannot see.
If the answer is the second one, you want a way to reach them, which is not the same thing as a phone and does not cost the same either.
What it actually costs
A children’s smartwatch runs about 60 to 150 euros, plus a SIM and a plan, so call it 8 to 15 euros a month on top. A new budget phone starts around 150 and a plan for a child is usually 5 to 10 a month. A hand-me-down phone in a drawer costs nothing, and on Wi-Fi it needs no plan at all.
The device is the small number. What runs for years is the plan, and it is worth avoiding until there is a reason a phone must work away from Wi-Fi.
The conversations to have first
Where it sleeps at night, and whether that is your room or theirs. Who they may talk to, and what happens when somebody they do not know asks for a number. What to do about a message that upsets them, which is that they show it to you and nothing bad happens to them for having seen it. Whether it comes to school, and what the school’s rule already is.
The last one saves the most trouble. Many schools have a rule about phones and most parents find out about it afterwards.
What changes as they grow
Around six to eight, the want is usually one person: they miss somebody and would like to say hello without asking. Around nine or ten it becomes friends, and group chats, and being left out of one. Around eleven or twelve it becomes the internet, and the question stops being about calling at all.
A device that answers the first want does not answer the third. That argues for starting small, and just as strongly against starting big.
Where Rilo fits
Rilo is for the first want. Calls and messages between a child and the people you approve, on a phone that already exists, over Wi-Fi. If your child has nobody far away to talk to, they do not need it, and this guide has done its job either way.
See what Rilo does
