Are cell phones dangerous for kids?

Let us first clarify that no cell phone is dangerous for anyone. Unless it has razor blades hidden in the earpiece and have CS gas emit from the speaker, you can rest assured that the mobile phone is not dangerous. Driving on the wrong side of the road is dangerous, or smoking cigarettes made of asbestos is dangerous, but using a mobile phone is not. The question is, are mobile phones harmful to kids? And, does a child owning one present any sort of danger?

Yes they are

A mobile phone emits microwaves. Microwaves are a form of radiation that may be harmful to people. In a microwave the radiation is kept within a small box that has dissipated before you open the door. With a mobile phone the microwaves are external and so may be beamed though the child's skull.

But

The dose of radiation is so low that it is not harmful. The human body is built to withstand large doses of radiation, otherwise every pilot and coal miner would be dead within days. You also need to consider the fact that people at the top of tower blocks are not riddled with cancer, even though the mobile radiation from hundreds of mobile phones are passing through their apartment from the hundreds of mobile phones operating below them.

No they are not

A child would have to spend around five hours on the phone every day for a year before being a risk of getting cancer from the radioactive microwaves. Some mobile phones put out less microwaves than others, and some are built to direct the microwaves away from the skull. Older phones were bad at this, which is why some people did suffer from brain tumors as a result of using older phones.

But

The fact is that if your child is a heavy user of a mobile phone then they are being exposed too more radioactivity than the body is prepared to put up with. This is not a guarantee that they are going so suffer from cancer, but if the child is a heavy user then the chances are increased a little. This is not the case if the child is a heavy text user (which is usually the case), but is a problem if the child sleeps with the mobile phone under his/her pillow at night.

The human body is built for radiation

The reason our cells reproduce at such a fast rate is to guard against damage from radiation. The cells in our mind never reproduce, which poses a risk of permanent damage, but on the plus side, cancer works via uncontrollable cell reproduction, which brain cells are not too great at doing. This means that scuffing our knee is not such a bad thing, and so long as we do not scuff our brain matter then we should be okay. Microwave radiation is possibly harmful in long sustained doses, but in terms of radiation, a 30 minute plane flight is more harmful.

Theft poses a danger

A child having a mobile phone presents a much higher risk that the child is going to be mugged. This is a danger in itself, especially if the child is uncooperative. Mugging children is easy, and if you have no other way of getting money to feed your drug habit, then attacking a child to get a phone is not a problem for you. Plus, a lot of muggers will harm the child in order to stop the child from screaming.

Ironically, the unpopular kids with the older and less fashionable (i.e. less expensive) phones are the least likely to be mugged. This is also another way of getting the child to display the phone less often. The child with the most expensive phone will be playing with it all the time and have it out on display, which makes them a much more enticing robbery prospect.

Loss is a danger

Possibly not a danger in the physical sense, until the child returns home with no phone. At which point the child is in danger of getting one hell of a beating for losing the $500 item that he/she has just spent five months begging for.

Conclusion

Buy your child a phone, but not the most popular or expensive one. Encourage your child not to use the phone for calls so often, by instead encourage them to text instead of call. Also, encourage your child to use the phone less on argument that they should go out and get a life and stop messing around with something that basically robs them of their younger years. There is nothing worse than an adults only child memories being of playing "Angry Birds" or "Temple run." Or, for the people in their mid thirties right now, "Snake" and "Tetris."

This is a guest post by Kate Funk, an occasional guest-blogger and a full-time online tutor. She currently represents rushtutor.com which provides homework help online for everybody who needs it.