If you’ve read anything I write, you’ll know our family runs on getting outside. Weekends are for the river bike path, the playground down the road, a scramble around Kings Park, a late arvo swim once the Freo Doctor finally shows up. My kids are happiest with sand in their shoes and a plan to be somewhere.
The tricky part of raising little adventurers is the moment they want to go a bit further than your line of sight. My eldest hit that stage around eight. She wanted to ride ahead on the path, go into the shop on her own, walk the last block home from a friend’s place. All completely reasonable. All things I wanted to say yes to. I just needed a way for us to reach each other first.
For a while I assumed that meant a phone, and a phone meant a smartphone, and a smartphone meant handing my eight-year-old a camera, a browser, YouTube and a group chat before she’d even finished primary school. That felt like a hard no. So we did nothing, and I kept saying “stay where I can see you,” which is no way to raise a kid who’s itching to explore.
Turns out there was a middle option I didn’t know about.
A phone that only does the one thing
We ended up going with a screenfree kids phone from a brand called Waffle. It makes and takes calls, and that’s the entire feature list. No screen to scroll, no apps, no camera, no internet. For a family like ours, that was the whole appeal. I wanted my daughter reachable, not glued to something.
There are two in the range and they suit different jobs.
The Waffle Go is the one that comes adventuring. It’s small and portable, it has GPS so I can see where she is, and it runs on a built-in eSIM that connects across multiple mobile networks, so it works out and about without needing wifi. It gets its own phone number when you set up a plan. On a bike ride, she rings me when she reaches the end of the path, and I get a heads-up when she arrives at the spots we’ve set. She feels like she’s off on her own. I know exactly where she is. Everybody wins.
The Waffle Home is the other one, and it lives on our kitchen bench. It’s wifi only, no SIM, no screen, and it rings out loud like the home phone I grew up with. The kids use it to call their grandparents over east, and my youngest has worked out she can ring her big sister’s to ask when she’s heading home for dinner. It’s become weirdly central to the house.
Why screen-free actually suits an outdoorsy family
Here’s the bit I didn’t expect to love. Because it only does calls, there’s nothing to disappear into. She rings me from the top of the hill, tells me she can see the whole river, hangs up, and gets back to the adventure. There’s no notification pulling her attention off the actual world in front of her, which, when the entire reason we’re out there is to be in it, matters more than I realised.
Safety is built into what the device is, not bolted on through a maze of settings. You set a short list of approved contacts, and that’s who’s in her world. No spam, no unknown numbers, no random group invites landing on a kid who’s meant to be watching for magpies.
Working out if your child is ready
Independence is the goal, but the timing is different for every kid, and a phone is a real step, even a simple one. A few solid Australian resources helped me think it through rather than just guess.
The eSafety Commissioner has clear advice for parents on the right age for a device. The Raising Children Network has a practical guide to responsible mobile phone use, and a lovely reminder of why unstructured outdoor play still matters as kids get older, which is basically the Buggy Buddys mission statement anyway.
The upshot
For us, the screen-free phone wasn’t a stepping stone before the “real” one. It was the answer. My daughter gets to ride ahead, explore a bit further, and feel like the capable kid she is, and I get to stop hovering and let her. We’ve had ours since autumn, and she hasn’t once asked for a phone with a screen. She’s too busy planning where we’re off to next.
So if you’ve got a little explorer straining at the lead and you’ve been dreading the phone question, know that “reachable” and “no screen” can absolutely come in one device. Around here, it’s given us the best of both. More roaming, less worrying, and a lot more Perth to discover.
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Lorraine is co-owner of Buggybuddys & Seniorocity and is a mother to two and furmum Cocker Spaniel Storm. Lorraine is also a qualified personal trainer and pilates teacher, once owning her own Yoga & Pilates studio in Perth. She previously lived and worked in London, UK where she worked as Public Relationships and Marketing Manager for several IT companies and worked with some of the largest tech companies in the world including Microsoft, Dell and EMC.
