The year 7 phone: how families are drawing up contracts with their 11-year-olds, and whether they work

On the kitchen wall of the Okonkwo family’s house in Wolverhampton there is a sheet of A4 with 11 numbered rules, two signatures and a date, 5 September 2026. It is the phone contract that Amara, 11, signed on the day she received her first smartphone, three days into year 7, and it covers where the phone sleeps (the kitchen), when it goes off (8pm on school nights), which apps are allowed (not the three she wanted most) and what happens if a rule is broken (a week without it). Her mother, Ngozi, 44, says it is the most useful piece of paper in the house.

“I thought it was a bit American when a friend suggested it,” she said. “But the thing about writing it down is that it stops being me versus her every evening. It is the contract. She agreed to it. When she pushes, I point at the wall.” Five weeks in, the phone has been confiscated once, for being found under a pillow at 10pm, and the week passed without the negotiation Ngozi had feared. “She knew it was coming. She had signed it.”

Parenting organisations say the contract has moved from a niche idea to something close to mainstream over the past two years, driven by schools, which have largely banned phones during the day since government guidance hardened in 2024, and by a wave of concern about what the devices do to children’s sleep and attention. A survey of 2,000 parents of year 7 pupils by a parenting charity last month found that 61% had given their child a smartphone by the end of the first half-term and that 29% of those had drawn up written rules, up from 11% in a similar survey in 2023.

“The contract is less about the rules than about the conversation,” said Dr Lucy Marchant, a child psychologist who advises schools in the West Midlands. “An 11-year-old who has sat down and discussed why the phone sleeps downstairs is in a different position from one who has had it imposed. And the parents are in a different position too, because they have had to decide what they actually think, which most of us have not.”

Marchant’s view of what should be in a contract is short. Where the phone charges overnight, which should never be the bedroom; a daily off time, ideally an hour before bed; which apps and whether the parent has the passcode, which she says should be yes until at least 13; an agreement that the child will tell a parent if something upsetting arrives; and a clear, boring consequence. She is sceptical of longer documents. “Twenty rules is a legal text. Six is a conversation.”

Not every family finds it works. Mark Gill, 47, a plumber in Walsall whose son Jake started year 7 in September, drew up a contract and abandoned it within a fortnight. “He signed it, then spent every evening finding the gaps,” he said. “The rule said no phone after eight. He said the rule didn’t say anything about the tablet. He was right.” Gill has moved to a single rule, no devices upstairs, and a router that turns the wifi off at 8.30pm. “It is less democratic,” he said. “It is also working.”

Marchant says both approaches are reasonable and that the Gill family’s experience points to the thing that matters more than the paper. “The contract is only as good as the parent’s willingness to enforce it in week six, when you are tired and it is raining,” she said. “Most of the benefit is that you have had to say out loud what you believe. The rest is just Tuesday.”