Mom records daughter's hilarious reaction to being gifted a flip phone as part of a valuable lesson

Kids these days have grown up surrounded by technology. So it's not unusual for them to demand high-end smartphones from their parents at a young age. But most kids do not grasp basic safety tips when it comes to using a cell phone even if their parents voluntarily give them one just to keep in touch with them when they are far away. So a mom named Dixie (who goes by @dixiej13 on TikTok) did something interesting when she had to get her young daughter a cellphone.

To teach the little girl an important lesson, the mom surprised her with a flip phone instead of a smartphone which most kids these days are familiar with. Dixie's 10-year-old daughter was certainly not expecting to receive a flip phone which is pretty outdated in terms of technological advancement today. The young girl takes the flip phone from her mom and looks at it in disbelief as she inspects it thoroughly as if it was an artifact. 

"Do you want me to teach you how to text on it?" Dixie asks her. With QWERTY keypads on touchscreen phones, texting has gotten a lot easier compared to texting on flip phones. "If you want to type ‘HEY,’ see it’s GHI, H is the second letter so you hit it twice," she explains to her daughter. "This looks like the newer version of something old," the young girl says in the viral video which has amassed over 10 million views so far.

"Don’t you love it?" her mom asked the youngster. "I guess...," she responds while looking at the flip phone with visible skepticism. "This is not what I was expecting though." "You’re welcome," the mom says, and her daughter replies, "Thank you, I guess." The mother seemed to teach her daughter the value of technology and the importance of being grateful for whatever you get or own. With a flip phone, Dixie's daughter can effectively communicate over calls with her mom and at the same time stay safe from potentially harmful apps that are not supported on flip phones.

Netizens praised this idea on TikTok and most of them agreed with Dixie that every kid should start with a flip phone as their first phone. However, Dixie clarified in a follow-up video that the flip phone actually wasn't her daughter's first phone. The little girl previously had access to an old iPhone which she got locked out of after she changed the pin and forgot what it was. So Dixie wanted to teach her daughter that buying a new phone just because your old one stops working isn't easy. Since Dixie believed that her daughter indeed needs a phone so she can stay in touch with her daughter when she steps out of the house, she made a clever decision to buy her a flip phone instead of a pricy iPhone.

Some concerned parents lauded Dixie for giving her girl a flip phone which they said was exactly what they gave to their kids until they were responsible enough to own a smartphone or earned the privilege of having one. "Honestly I miss those days. We are all so caught up in social media and our phones we spend less time enjoying life," claimed one TikTok user, reminiscing about the good old days when people did not have access to the internet and life was simpler.

According to a report by NPR, about 53% of kids now own a smartphone by the age of 11, and 84% of teenagers now have their own phones, immersing themselves in a rich and complex world of experiences that adults sometimes need a lot of decoding to understand.