Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.

>> my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media. ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.

>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.

>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.

Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.