
The universe has spoken and today it’s on my side. My daughter’s iPhone – the ground zero of all our teenage arguments – has fallen out of her pocket (unzipped yet again, of course) and the screen is smashed to smithereens on the pavement. Her only alternative is to take a spin on the Pinwheel phone, a product that strikes terror into her 14-year-old heart. No TikTok, no Snapchat, no web browser, and all I can think is, ‘Tough luck, love.’
I don’t think I’m a particularly strict parent, and nor am I some Luddite trying to wrap her in cotton wool. However, I do believe in boundaries and I’m exhausted by trying to enforce them when it comes to a regular phone. She hides hers and refuses to give it back at night and, both physically and emotionally, we’re far beyond the toddler stage when I could just confiscate her toys.
I’ve tried using parental iPhone controls but – thanks to the Internet – she already knows how to circumvent any PIN that I put on it in about 30 minutes. And that’s just one of her workarounds. It seems there are hacks for everything, and I can confirm that an Apple argument a day does not keep the doctor away.
So the fact that she immediately loathes Pinwheel fills me with great confidence as to its security. ‘Mum, this phone was clearly created by people who really regretted having children,’ she howls. ‘It’s Gen Alpha jail.’ (She said a lot more besides, but this is about the most publishable.)
She eye rolls at Pinwheel’s claim that this phone is suitable for older as well as younger kids. ‘Trust and believe, if your kid has this phone at 15 they’ve already got a burner and you’re never going to be invited to their wedding.’
She’s also quite outraged to note that some of the ‘fun’ filters included in the Pinwheel camera Library are credited to SnapChat. ‘That’s really taking the ****,’ she harrumphs.
She does cheer up briefly while messing around with Pinwheel’s ‘ask AI’ feature in search of small victories. While her queries about, say, swearwords are swiftly shut down with a virtual finger wag, she’s thrilled to get quite a spicy and detailed answer about how babies are made. ‘Pinwheel parents might not like that!’ she crows in triumph.
There’s another respite from the indignation as she peruses Pinwheel’s list of pre-approved apps, finding herself particularly tickled by the selection of American-centric religious options. An app called ‘Shut up Devil!’ has her snorting into her cornflakes in mirth. Otherwise, there’s little that captures her interest beyond a smattering of ‘red rated’ apps such as WhatsApp, which Pinwheel advises you install at your discretion as you can’t monitor any of your kids’ messages on there.
It’s worth knowing that parents can (discreetly, if you like) add temporary access to the Google Play store via the carers portal, enabling you to choose and install apps that are not officially vetted via Pinwheel. So that does make the phone a bit more versatile and palatable for older kids, while still keeping social media locked down. Cleverly, the system will automatically delete any social media apps that you try to add, even as a legit, logged-in carer.
On balance, I would say that Pinwheel may be a useful option for parents who are giving their child their very first SIM-enabled phone as a naive tweenager or younger. At that point, there’s less chance of a kid feeling horribly left out because they’re the only one who can’t hang out with all their friends on Snapchat, etc.
But once that genie is out of the bottle, I’m afraid to say there is no going back. The truth is, there is little you can do to police the pace at which your child’s peers consume and communicate via social media – and is it really smart for yours to be the only one shut out of the conversation? Does that leave them vulnerable to bullying, or the feeling that people are talking about them behind their back? (‘Well, Mum, my friends are definitely laughing about this awful Amish phone…’)
I wish there was an easy answer, but there isn’t. I’d say the best you can do is talk to kids honestly about the potential pitfalls of social media and teenage communication in general, and also pray that iPhone will close loopholes to prevent parental controls being so easily overcome. I wish I was smarter, and less exhausted, and maybe could figure out an answer myself..
Although Pinwheel’s portal itself is at least secure in theory, the concept isn’t infallible. Bottom line: there’s nothing to stop a savvy kid taking the SIM out of their Pinwheel and swapping it into a regular phone. If my daughter had figured this out, I guarantee that at least one of her friend’s homes has a drawer cluttered with their parents’ old phones to ‘borrow’. Pinwheel certainly won’t send you an alert to tell you if your kid has pulled this swapsies trick – I asked customer services. It seems like a massive oversight to me.
I’d love to tell you that my daughter came up to me at the end of the week-long experiment and told me that, actually, her inner wellness had been boosted by the social media hiatus. Not a chance. The sad truth is, she would rather use her Christmas money to fix the smashed screen and return to our last (rubbish for all) compromise: a SIM-free iPhone and our house wi-fi being switched off at 9pm every night. It’s infuriating and silly, but she cares not, as long as she has some access to the teenage chatter – no matter how toxic it might be at times.
Sorry, Pinwheel, yours is a nice idea for younger kids, but the mobile phone world has already rolled on too far for us!
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