Gabb on National Review

Journalist, Heather Wilhelm, featured Gabb on National Review on December 18, 2019 in this article arguing why kids should not have smartphones. Her primary argument: internet pornography.

She writes, “No matter how hard you work in your own house to protect your kids—no Internet, no iPads, and no smartphones of any sort—there is no way to prevent some kid with a smartphone from someday giving your child their first eyeful of hard-core Internet porn.”

She goes on to explain how a sixth-grade girl was exposed to rape porn on SnapChat at a birthday party by a group of sixth-grade boys who laughed as they watched. This girl’s mother, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, commented, “Gone are the days of your grandfather’s Playboy. Today, children have access to explicit, violent and degrading sexual content in the palm of their hands at all times.”

But even though Heather believes that children should not have smartphones, she does believe that cell phones are okay. A few cell phones that she recommends for kids are: the Gabb Phone, the Light Phone II, and the Jitterbug Flip. The reason she recommends these phones is because they do not have access to the internet so no parental controls are needed.

She concludes by encouraging parents who have already given their child a smartphone to take it away, stating, “The Internet shouldn’t be in the hands of children. Adults can barely handle it as it is.” But, as mentioned at the beginning of her article, she recognizes that just because a child does not have access to the internet on their own device, does not mean that they won’t be able to access the internet on someone else’s. Her final point, “Taking smartphones away has to be a collective action [by parents] if it’s going to have any hope of working.”