My kid has been asking for a cellphone since he was old enough to grab mine in his plump little fingers. It was easier to say no when he was 5 or 6 years old because he was almost always with me and we could talk for free. But now he’s 11, growing into the increasing autonomy of preadolescence. More and more, he’s not in my presence and it’s kinda scary.

I have resisted the call of the phone because I’m not sure if he’s ready for the responsibility of keeping up with it. Can he avoid giving his number to random knuckleheads that may mean him harm? Will he become a YouTube zombie?

But the results of the recent presidential election have me scared that he is increasingly unsafe in a country only barely keeping a polite lid on its violence, and particularly racial violence. And when I read about a disturbing alleged bullying incident last week at a Charles County elementary school, I reflexively started searching “best phones for tweens.”

Am I finally sure he’s mature enough for a phone? No. In a perfect world, that would be the most important factor. But our world is not perfect, and the cracks of that imperfection have become jagged volcanic fissures. As a parent I need to know that he can find me immediately, whether it’s a call for a ride or a plea for safety. I asked my closest parenting experts — i.e., my friends and family on my private Facebook page — for their thoughts. The consensus was that the right time is a combination of necessity and nerves. You’ll know, they said.

But will I?

“I got that question daily,” said former Apple employee Rachel Cohen, who spent much of her youth in Prince George’s County and now lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida. “Should I get my kid a phone, or a watch instead?’ I had people coming in with 8-year-olds.”

For the past year, my son has had a smartwatch specifically made for kids, with contacts I control. But I’m not impressed with its location-monitoring abilities and it doesn’t have enough bells and whistles to incentivize him to keep it charged.

Agonizing about the timing and reasoning for getting smartphones for one’s offspring is common. In a recent Harris Poll, 62% of parent respondents with kids between 6 and 17 years old said that safety and security was their biggest reason for buying one, with the ability to communicate when apart coming a close second. The parents admitted there are drawbacks, like children being more distracted and reading less. Still, more than half stood by their decision to unleash their kids to the handheld digital hounds.

Parents my age and older navigated the world of our youth without cellphones but still had other methods of communication. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Cohen got her first cellphone at 16 after “they took out the pay phones in my high school,” she said. “I could go into the office to call, but when the offices are closed and there’s no pay phone, you can only bum one [a phone] off someone so many times.”

Now that she’s the mother of three, she believes she’ll consider a phone when her kids are in fifth grade and have extracurricular activities — maybe a smartwatch before that. Some of the other parents I talked to said activities were a big factor in when their kids got phones.

Derrick Pittman, who I grew up with in Baltimore and now lives in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, said he thought 16 was the ideal age for the responsibility. ”There’s a level of maturity there, and if you’re driving, you need to be able to get to me from wherever you are.”

That was the age when his oldest daughter got hers, but his next youngest got hers at 14 when the family was transitioning from Maryland to Pennsylvania and she was already living with relatives near their new home. And his youngest got hers in middle school when she started dancing seriously, and “there were times when somebody else was picking her up in the evening, and we would get home later than she would need to be at practice.”

Not that it’s a free-for-all. Pittman said he spoke to each of his girls about the expectations and responsibility of their new phones. “I had to remind everyone about screen time, and being in the IT field, it was a given that the phone was going to be monitored,” he said. “Before they even got them, we had the talk that there would be restrictions on what sites they could go on, and this is a tool, not something that they’re entitled to. ‘It’s a necessity, and you have that privilege, but abuse the privilege and it goes away.’ That was met with the normal teenage, ‘Why are you controlling my life?’”

Like Pittman, Heather Gimbel of Reisterstown upgraded her daughter from an iPad to a phone in high school because of after-school activities. Gimbel made it clear to her kid “that I was able to look at it whenever I wanted to, to see who she was texting. After six months, I stopped checking because she wasn’t doing anything on it. She didn’t really want the phone, so she personally put herself on the restriction of no social media because it was a distraction.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be the case with my son, who keeps asking me why I haven’t uploaded onto my TikTok account his funny home videos acting out the “You can’t handle the truth” scene from “A Few Good Men” or him slow-motion leaping over LEGO towers. I have already had the discussion with him about restrictions, and let him know that, like Uncle Derrick told his kids, I will be monitoring and will snatch that thing back so fast if he can’t handle the responsibility.

But after the phone is all set up this weekend and Cohen, my Apple expert, walks me through all the safeguards, including blocking certain sites and contacts, I’m going to reiterate the rules and trust the kid I’ve been raising. As a friend recently said, parenting is like your heart walking around outside your body. At least now, I can keep track of my heart a little better, and hope there’s never a crisis that escalates this new device from a tool to a lifeline.