ICT Devices

As far as I could recall, our children did not carry a mobile phone until they were in upper primary. And that was for the purpose of communicating with them since they were already taking public transport back from school. Each of them had a hand-me-down phone or one obtained as part of a free gift, with a pre-paid card inside. At that point in time, a $20 pre-paid card could last between 1 to 2 months, before a top-up was made. It eventually reduced to one month when my daughter had to contact her friends frequently due to collaboration in school projects or as a result of CCA involvement.

Subsequently, when the younger one was about to move to secondary school, with anticipated increase in project collaboration, I subscribed to Singtel RedPac plan costing about $10 per month for each of my daughter's line. This plan came with unlimited incoming calls, limited outgoing calls and 150 sms each. I had 500 sms which could be shared with my children, if I don't fully utilise them. With this plan, I still had to top up a fair bit each month, but usually not more than $100. The amount of sms utilised by my children is phenomenal - this is their chief mode of communication, plus of course the excess in outgoing calls used.

Late last year in December, when the Redpac plan has expired, I re-contracted the children's plan to student's plan. That was the only time I bought each of them a new phone (due to their good end of year results) costing a few hundred dollars even with the student's plan. The wonderful thing about this plan is that it comes with unlimited sms but still with limited outgoing calls. Despite each of them getting a smartphone, I didn't sign up a data plan for them because we do not want them to be using the phone to surf the net. It was a great mistake.

When children get their hands on a smartphone, they cannot help but want to connect to the net whether wireless or through 3G network. The former is free when tapping on the home wifi network or wireless@SG, but the latter is charged. Thinking that they were surfing the net through wifi network, our children downloaded many games and went on social networking websites like Facebook. When their bills came, each shot over $300 and needless to say, we were livid. What follows was an intense negotiation with our service provider to waive the charges, pleading ignorance on behalf of our children. To cut the long story short, we managed to sign up a data plan for our elder daughter and had her bill drastically reduced, while for the younger one we paid about $170 and requested that her 3G network be terminated. Her next bill came down to $11, which was a huge relief. The children definitely learnt a painful lesson from this episode.

The elder child has acquired a tablet PC this year for her Integrated Programme in school. This has set us back by $2000. She has been told to ensure the security of her PC as well as to use it responsibly i.e. no gaming in school. Most of the time, it would be used to research information for her school projects. Students are also expected to use mathematical software to help them with exploration and discovery of concepts. We have also recently acquired a Toshiba notebook for our home as our Aspire desktop CPU has "died" and is beyond repair and restoration. Next year, our younger daughter would need to acquire a notebook, and I heard that it's going to be a Mac. Well that's the high cost of raising Gen iY kids, where technology is an extension of their body.