BRYONY GORDON: I swore I would never give my 11-year-old son a smartphone… then I was told something shocking at the phone store that changed my mind.

My daughter was not going to have a smartphone until she was 16.

That was my limit, and I was going to respect it. She could get a face tattoo, join the Reform Party, insist on being referred to with the pronoun Xe for all I cared, but she wasn’t going to buy an iPhone until she could afford to buy one for herself. Or for Xerself.

“I want to preserve their childhood,” she announced haughtily, as friends with children already in high school tried to point out how difficult it was to keep children smartphone-free once they were a little older.

“They need to stay in touch while traveling to school alone,” someone might argue.

“Nonsense!” I’d reply, pointing out that back in 1992, I had to ride the subway eight stops to school every morning without even a carrier pigeon for company, and nothing bad had ever happened to me (apart from the time a stranger flashed me his genitals, but things were different now, right?).

“Your child will feel left out if all his friends are messaging each other and he’s not part of the group,” another mother argued.

“Well, I’ll raise a child who is confident enough not to feel peer pressure,” I replied.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” the parents of the older kids responded, rolling their eyes in the same condescending way I do when my 11-year-old insists on going out into the gale-force winds and rain without a coat.

I would show them!

As the fifth year turned to the sixth, we remained one of the few families who resisted buying our son a phone. Every week, our daughter, Edie, would come home and tell us that another one of her friends had gone digital, and every week I would tell her that, in time, she would thank me for my decision.

“You can have a dumb phone when you go to high school,” I said, “but that’s it!”

She finished primary school last month and I ignored her pleas for a phone until two weeks ago, when, as she tearfully received her new school jacket, it became clear to me that I could ignore her no longer.

After much care, consideration and research, a deal was struck on a brick phone with limited capabilities (similar to the new £99 Barbie, launched this week, which makes calls and sends texts, but has no social networking).

Spurred on by EE’s recent announcement that children should be shielded from smartphones for their “digital wellbeing”, as well as Wednesday’s calls from the Irish Medical Organisation to ban mobiles for under-16s, we headed to the High Street with full confidence in our somewhat old-fashioned resolve.

It was under the bright neon lights of the phone store that I began to experience what I will now call my personal Waterloo. The man who served us chuckled when I asked him to show me the selection of “dumb phones.”

“We don’t have them in stock,” he said, “and to be honest, you don’t want your kids using a phone that you yourself don’t remember how to use anymore. There’s a reason drug dealers use them as burner phones, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t know what he meant, but visions of my 11-year-old daughter living a bucolic childhood thanks to my insistence on a brick phone had now been replaced by ones of her joining a criminal gang.

“Forget it, we’ll take an iPhone,” I gasped, turning around faster than a prime minister after winning an election. “You’re the best mother in the world!” my daughter squealed in surprise.

‘I told you so!’ all my friends laughed when I admitted my ferret upside down.

So, for all my bluster, my daughter will be starting high school with a smartphone in her pocket and a hypocritical mother. Or should I say idealistic? Because I think that’s what a lot of us suffer from when it comes to all this talk about smartphones: we want our kids to grow up in some kind of Swallows and Amazons utopia that has never actually existed.

But when it comes to phones, we have to accept that the genie is already out of the bottle and has been for some time.

Doing this is not abandoning our children to social media, it is engaging and accepting the reality of the world we live in, on our own terms, rather than those set by Meta and TikTok. My daughter’s safety and mental health will always be my priority.

We’ve set up your new device with so many parental controls that it’s essentially an expensive version of two cans and a piece of string.

We’ve also drawn up our own parental phone contract with her: she can’t use social media until she’s at least 14, parents will have access to her messages, and everything must be turned off by 8 p.m. We’ll see how long this lasts, given how quickly I caved at the phone store.

But it’s a good reminder of an important truth: Parenting is much easier in theory than in practice, and just like my son when he starts high school, I’ll always have something new to learn.

My LED mask isn’t working? I don’t care!

Whether the LED masks used by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham actually have any effect on the skin is “highly questionable”, according to new research. Scientists claim that the LED light can only reach the outer layer, rather than the deeper layers where “the real change occurs”.

As I am an LED mask obsessive, I have to say that I don’t mind at all. My £395 mask, from Light Salon, is my most prized possession. It may not make any difference to my crow’s feet, but it does wonders for my mood.

Plus, it’s the perfect way to get some much-needed me time: sitting under the red light on a device that makes me look like Jason from Friday the 13th, my family is too terrified to come near me.

• Now that Oasis is about to reform and a new Labour government is back in power, things are starting to feel like the late 1990s. This time, only a couple of things are missing: my hope for the future and my glowing skin from when I was 17.

I can’t wait for the M&S style store to arrive.

There was a time when you did your best to avoid Marks & Spencer clothes as you headed to Percy Pigs. The style seemed scruffy, forever associated with the ‘St Michael’ brand of the 1950s.

But something is changing: Sienna Miller recently debuted a highly covetable collection with the store, while my friends and I drool over the affordable, plus-size cashmere sweaters and modern dresses. And now, M&S is about to open its first-ever fashion-only store, in London’s Battersea Power Station. Once it opens in November, I’ll be there before you can say “Colin the Caterpillar.”