In the same way that you don’t hand your kids the keys to a car without any training and simply say “Good luck,” you shouldn’t hand them a smartphone and say, “What could go wrong?”
Their lives, your life, and others’ lives hang in the balance physically, legally, and spiritually. In short, we advise against giving your children a phone if you are not ready to have a conversation with them about it multiple times a week for multiple years.
Your family is on a journey together of enjoying, leveraging, and self-regulating your phones. And there is a destination! It is when your son or daughter has demonstrated integrity and has learned how to self-regulate his or her phone (that is, your kids no longer have limits imposed by you; they impose their own limits).