Their friends have TVs and game consoles in their rooms too.

For our kids, they have to travel on their own when they get to highschool, so a smartphone makes sense.

Family controls are pretty good nowadays, fwiw.

Yeah, I do feel like people confuse "giving children their own smartphone" with "giving children unrestricted access to a smartphone". Parental controls really change the equation.

And counterintuitively, giving children their own smartphone actually reduces risks, simply because you can enable family control on it.

I'm not a parent myself, but as an uncle, I recently had to diagnose an android phone which had started popping up random ads. The diagnosis: parents will lend kids their smartphone, kids will install random free apps from play store, which are malicious. And Google provides absolutely no way to prevent kids from installing free apps, short of family control (there is a setting that prevents kids buying apps without a passcode). And you can't really put family control on your own phone, the concept of family control (and apple's parental controls) is designed around giving kids their own smartphone, and using the parent's smartphone to manage those restriction.