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Babies With BlackBerrys: Kids Increasingly Wielding Cell Phones

by Caleb Johnson on March 9, 2010 at 09:20 AM

At an age when we were still playing with plastic toys, 10- and 11-year-old kids today are downloading games, sending text messages and surfing the Web with cell phones. After the communications fall-out of 9/11, many parents saw cell phone ownership as not just a priority, but a safety measure. Providers cashed in on family plans, and the nation took up talking and walking. Yet, now we have a generation who can't remember what it's like to dial.

According to the New York Times, a recent study (PDF link) from Mediamark Research and Intelligence found that the percentage of cell phone owners among kids aged 6 to 11 has doubled since 2005. According to the study, boys are to blame. While girls are still more likely to have a mobile device than boys, the gap between them closed in the last five years to 21.8-percent for girls and 18.3-percent for boys (it was twice as big in 2005). Overall, about 36-percent of kids in the previously mentioned age group own a cell phone. That's just staggering, since even the youngest among us didn't get our first cell phones until we could legally drive [Edit. Note: To be fair, back then, they were brick-like and made horrible noises when the call didn't go through].

Kids today have a much better grasp on technology than we did back in the day. Nowadays, it's practically a necessity for a busy 'rent to be in contact with their tyke at all times. Yet, maybe parents are lighter in the pocket these days, too. Because an iPhone certainly costs more than a Barbie. [From: The New York Times]

Tags: cellphone, cellphones, data, kids, study, top, trends

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