My Daughter Broke Her Phone. Should I Repair It?

She was repeatedly warned to be careful. For months, we've left the broken phone out as a reminder of consequences.

Photo by Vlad on Unsplash

Two years ago, I let my then-seven-year-old daughter have a cell phone.

She’s nine now. This cell phone, importantly, does not have a cellular connection, meaning it functions the way it was intended: a small form factor tablet with a nice camera. (It does, however, crack me up when she finds some free wi-fi and will send me a message from it.) She likes taking pictures and videos. She likes emulating her older friends that have phones. Plus, I had a spare Google Pixel in a drawer. It seemed harmless in the moment, and over time, I was vindicated. She loved and respected it.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

When my daughter discovered this phone, I asked why she wanted it. “I want to take pictures and videos” was her response, and so I laid down some conditions. If I caught her using the phone for other reasons, it would be taken away. If the phone became a possessive or distracting object, it would be taken away. If she started bragging to her friends, creating problems in their homes, it would be taken away. “You can tell people you’ve been given a camera, not a phone,” I told her, and seemed to understand.

What she has not done over the long haul, however, is take good care of it.

The phone would be removed from its case—and then quickly dropped. That’s fine when it’s on carpet, but over time, it would happen on places that were decidedly not carpet. And over time, those hits added up. Soon, there was a crack. I’d remind her about taking care of the phone, about how it wouldn’t be replaced if it was broken, and she would nod in response, before, inevitably, the phone would tumble out again.

Then, one day, the phone stopped working. The screen had given up.

(Honestly, though, two years low key a pretty good run? Adults do way worse.)

Some version of the following exchange then happened between the two of us:

Nine-Year-Old: Is it broken forever?
Me: I’m not sure. I’ll try charging it and see if it turns on, but the screen looks broken.
Nine-Year-Old: [silence]
Me: I did warn you about this. If it’s broken, it’s broken. It’s too expensive to get fixed.
Nine-Year-Old: …I know. It’s my fault. I don’t get to have a phone anymore.
Me: I’m sorry, kiddo, but you knew the rules.

This was a few months ago.

I tried turning the phone on and off, but it was well and truly busted, and there was no way it was coming back from the dead someone repairing it. I was tempted to surprise her with a fixed phone after a few days, but soon, the phone went out of sight and out of mind. She forgot about it. Why pay to fix something she wasn’t thinking about?

That started to change recently.

She was again hanging out more regularly with older kids who, as you might expect, spend a lot of time on their phones—mostly in messaging. (One recently joked about having hundreds of messages in a day.) My daughter is capable of communicating through Messenger Kids, but how many 12-year-olds are using that app, do you think? Exactly. Plus, the whole reason she asked about a phone in the first place was the “mobile” aspect of it. It could go in a backpack, a purse, a pocket. Sure, you can send photos to one another about outfits via a tablet, but that tablet’s sitting back home.

Now, desperation has been setting in.

This is what my daughter has been reduced to using. It’s not that bad, though. And hard to break! This thing is a beast!

My nine-year-old dug up an old “kid phone,” the kind of thing you buy a small child so they can feel like they have something approximating a phone, but once you’ve had the real deal, you know this is a fake piece of crap. Nonetheless, she found a charger for this fake piece of crap, and has started lugging it around. It’s a little sad, honestly!

Which is why I was not shocked for my daughter to recently bring up getting a fixed phone as her big Christmas gift. In our house, the kids get gifts from “Santa” and gifts from “Mom and Dad.” We shift the ratio as the kids get older and likely to be drifting out of Santa’s orbit, so they understand that we’re part of the gifting process, too.

That’s when it struck me: maybe this is the perfect gift for her.

It’s clear the punishment has sunk in, which is the point of a successful punishment?

So, then, what next?

There is a spare and fairly new-ish iPhone in a drawer, but my five-year-old knows what an iPhone is. If the nine-year-old unwrapped something like that, it could be a problem. Plus, she didn’t have any issues with her previous “phone.” She liked that phone. That’s her phone. (I also think the parental settings on Google devices are far superior and more flexible than those on Apple devices, despite largely being an Apple device family.) So for now, that iPhone can stay in the drawer a little longer.

Yesterday, I dropped off her phone to be repaired. When this publishes, I’ll have picked it up, and presuming everything goes to plan, it will be hidden until Christmas, at which point she’ll unwrap two things: a life lesson and, finally, a repaired phone.

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Also:

• We have talked about getting her a watch of some kind next year. I like that the cell phone doesn’t have a mobile connection, but especially if she’s going to be out and about—like, say on her bike—more often, light tracking would be helpful.

• The lack of a cell connection, despite losing tracking, is useful because it means the device is less useful. She only uses it while goofing at someone’s house and is not unnecessarily distracted the way so many kids immediately get with a phone.

• I have felt better and better about letting her play with a phone the more and more schools are embracing the ideas of limiting us and/or forms of bans.