Rapid Rise of Children With Cellphones

The proportion of children with cellphones has nearly doubled since 2005, an increase driven in large part by boys, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence, a market research company. Though girls still have more cellphones than boys — 21.8 percent of girls have them, compared with 18.3 percent of boys — that gap is about half as large as it was in 2005. Most of the children surveyed who had cellphones were 10 or 11 years old; Mediamark reported that 36.1 percent of children in that age range had phones.