Mobiles and children

IE Focus | By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School

If you still think the main purpose of your mobile phone is voice transmission, and you can’t understand why younger users seem permanently obsessed with their mobile screens, then you are missing out on something.For those of us who are at a certain age, it is a challenge for the memory to put some perspective on the technological advances we see as completely normal and as an intrinsic part of our everyday life today. One of the best examples is the mobile telephone, a device that has found its way into thousands of millions of pockets of people all over the world who never leave home without it. 

One recent study in the United States shows that the average age at which children get their first mobile telephone has now fallen to 12 years. Depending on the purchasing power of these children´s families, the penetration levels in the upper-middle-class segment are higher than 87%. If we look back in time, many of us would find it hard to remember that when we were 12 years old, not only did we not have a mobile telephone, but there was also no possibility of us having one. Not only that, the vision of anyone speaking apparently on their own in a car or while walking down the street would have made us immediately think that they had some kind of mental problem. The telephone was a device connected to the wall by a cable, with two different parts joined together by a coiled cable. It had a dial (show one to today´s children… they take knowing what to do with “that” as some kind of challenge) the use of which was also strictly limited as far as we were concerned.