I would overall dislike giving him one. However, I would honor his wishes to the extent that I would offer a compromise and offer to get him one by a certain not-too-distant birthday if he meets a set of conditions for getting good grades, or some other beneficial goal. He’s just getting to that age where he deserves some give-and-take.
Even then, though, I would let him know there will be limitations on its usage, such as no going to bed with it. (no cell phone starting an hour before bed time or something, it goes into some drawer in the common spaces of the house, maybe no cell phone during meals) Because of your compromise and deal, you should have enough leverage that he will not be too upset about comparatively minor restrictions like this.
The compromise won’t make either of you completely happy, but that can be a lesson in and of itself. For your part, I would try to look for silver linings, like despite cell phones being linked to certain negative health outcomes, these can be mitigated, and with information technology progressing so rapidly, there are potentially benefits to learning how to navigate it fluently at a young age.
People have freedom. This includes the freedom to run a Lemmy instance that they own, on hardware they own, and administrate it however they see fit.
I would say it is extremely natural to get a fairly diverse array of different ways to run things, depending on the opinions and feelings of each individual owner.
Being private individuals operating their own private property for whatever reason they feel like, (usually nerdy tech reasons in our case) none of them are under any requirement to be nice or accepting of anyone. It is 100% their choice to operate however they see fit, within the laws of their own country. (which can be anywhere on Earth that has internet)
It is odd to me that people feel they should have some sort of right to go onto someone else’s property and say whatever they feel like. That’s just not how anything works anywhere. You are on their digital property by open invitation, and that invitation can be revoked at any time they feel like.