Maybe, maybe not, but by like 5th grade most of them seem to have one regardless. Many younger kids have one. By 7th it's practically all of them (a smartphone, that is, though yeah, often an iPhone)
Our school assigns every kid an iPad. In Kindergarten. Good idea? I kinda don't think so, though it's been useful this year, of course. But it happens.
Increasingly parents have trouble letting kids wander the neighborhood on their own without a tracker/communication-device on them, and a smartphone's really good at serving that role. There are other options but kids want to have their smartphone on them, and as soon as you want them to be able to do one other smartphone-thing any other option starts to look kinda pointless.
(just relating observations of parenting in the wild, not my own parenting approach)
Our school assigns every kid an iPad. In Kindergarten. Good idea? I kinda don't think so, though it's been useful this year, of course. But it happens.
Increasingly parents have trouble letting kids wander the neighborhood on their own without a tracker/communication-device on them, and a smartphone's really good at serving that role. There are other options but kids want to have their smartphone on them, and as soon as you want them to be able to do one other smartphone-thing any other option starts to look kinda pointless.
(just relating observations of parenting in the wild, not my own parenting approach)