Wireless companies are making it easier for parents to give phones to their kids — and those kids are getting younger

Cellphones, must-haves first among high-schoolers and then middle-schoolers, are now being adopted by kids in the earliest years of elementary school.

An August survey of some 3,000 parents by Recon Analytics, an independent research and consulting firm focused on telecommunications, found that 15% of 6-year-olds had gotten phones in the previous three months. An additional 15% of kids that age had already owned phones for more than three months. The wireless equation That children are a source of net additions for the wireless industry isn’t necessarily a new development, Supino noted. But the idea that they’re playing a role in growth seems to be on the minds of wireless executives lately.

Families often opt to hand down older devices to children, he noted, but in some cases, parents will take advantage of trade-in deals while buying phones for kids outright. “It does lower the hurdle for getting a child their first phone and you’ll likely be pitched for exactly that when you go to store to upgrade your own phone,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst with MoffettNathanson, a division of SVB Securities. Customers can then attach the line to an old phone.

“It’s not unusual to have a retail rep in a store advise the customer by saying, ‘Take this extra line even if you don’t need it,'” Moffett said. By his math, he said, you’d “have to see the average age of kids getting smartphones fall by five years in one year to fully explain the excess growth in the U.S. wireless industry.”

Entner’s survey didn’t just suggest an incremental 15% of 6-year olds getting phones in the three months leading up to late August combined with the 15% who’d already owned phones before that period — it also found big spikes among 7- and 8-year-olds, each building on yet larger bases.

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