When you say “bullied” what do you actually mean? Is it active bullying or passive bullying? By which I mean has he been regularly and systematically picked on and ostracised/humiliated/physically hurt or is it just a few passing comments?

I’d start out first by talking to him about what is actually happening. Is it his friends bullying him? Where and when is it happening? Is he being left out of things?

How did you find out about it? Has he mentioned it in the context of “my friends think I’m a loser because I don’t have an iPhone” or is it “I’m getting left out of things because I don’t have an iPhone and people are calling me names”.

When you’re 12 being told that one thing is as good as the other thing is meaningless if everyone else has the other thing and the other thing is perceived as cool.

In reality and android phone is not as good as an iPhone if everyone you know has an iPhone - and particularly when you’re a kid as it means you can’t do things other kids are doing and participate in those things. This can be iMessage group chats or FaceTime group video calls - or it can just be simple stuff like being able to join in a fad like where everyone uses the same images for their wallpaper or something like that. Sure you can set the wallpaper on an android phone but you’re still being othered.

I’m an adult. I use an iPhone. Most people I know use iPhones. I do t like whatsapp but I have a whatsapp account but it’s hidden away and I don’t have notifications turned on because I’ve got really bad ADHD and have all non essential things hidden and notifications off.

If people don’t iMessage me I tend not to reply because I just don’t see it.

There is no easy answer to this. But saying “an android phone is as good or even better” might actually make things worse because you’re not hearing what he’s trying to say.

To be clear - this is probably not actually about the “wrong phone” making him stand out, and it’s not about consumerism gone mad - but more likely about the fact that he doesn’t have a key tool that lets him participate.

Will changing the phone fix things? Maybe not. But telling him the thing he has is great when he knows that it’s not will make him less likely to come to you in the future.

When I was a kid I was bullied - horribly, physically, psychologically, every day.

After one particularly horrible incident when I was about 9 where two “friends” who were bullying me relentlessly told me that they’d created a skeleton key for all the locks in our house and given them to a “burglar” who was going to get in at night and “murder my parents and murder my dog and then burn the house down” I finally - after literally not sleeping for an entire weekend through fear - plucked up my courage to tell my parents.

The problem was that I felt like I had done something wrong - that’s what bullies do - and I felt ashamed and horrified that I’d brought this danger on my family.

My parents laughed and said that I was being silly and of course they weren’t going to do anything like that and anyway the two boys were good friends and they were just teasing me.

That increased my shame, and I never told my parents about bullying again. It continued for another ten years, and ruined my childhood. I would fake illness to avoid going to school, and would spend lunchtimes and breaks hiding wherever I could to avoid encountering bullies. That made me more alone and more susceptible to being bullied. And it fractured my relationship with my parents, and I never really trusted them again because when I was at my lowest they laughed off my concerns.

As an adult I can see that it actually made me incredibly resilient, self sufficient and almost immune to caring about what anyone thinks of me - which has allowed me to achieve a lot.

But as a child it nearly killed me.

Talk to your son. But more importantly listen to him, and try and understand what he’s actually telling you.

The best suggestion I’ve seen here is that you buy two iPhones and make it a thing for the two of you. Do weird things together with your two iPhones. Play games together. Don’t even switch to an iPhone for your main phone. Make it the hat phone that only he can reach you on. A direct line to dad.

There was an interesting radio programme I heard the other day, talking about online safety for kids; the woman talking said that too many parents treat online games differently to other hobbies. If your kid is into sport of music or drama or whatever you get up early to take them to practice, you’re there on the sidelines cheering them on, celebrating the highs and the lows. You are participating in their participation.

Do that. Make the iPhone a hobby that you do together.