Parenting Teens

The chances are good that your teen or tween has a cell phone. According to Linda Barrabee, a wireless market analyst for The Yankee Group, 56% of 13-to-17-year-olds have cell phones, compared to just 5% in the year 2000. What are kids doing with all those phones?

Originally, cell phones were used to make calls in case of emergency. A car broke down or you were stuck at a meeting somewhere. Cell phones eliminated the need to make sure you had quarters for the pay phone, and that you could find a pay phone when you needed one! Great idea, right!

That was until teenagers became one of the primary markets for cell phone manufacturers. Now you can do anything with a cell phone. Not only can you make calls and send text messages, you can take pictures, surf the web, play video games, watch movies and music videos (although those tiny screens are murder!). The cell phone has become a mini-computer-much smaller and easier to carry than a laptop.

My 17-year-old uses her cell phone primarily for texting friends. By paying an extra ten dollars per month, she gets unlimited texting. That’s actually a bargain, considering the amount of texting she does. She does use it to stay in touch with me when she’s at afterschool activities, on school trips, or just out shopping. She does that with actual phone calls. I just can’t get into texting. Call me an old fogey, but all those text abbreviations bug me (bff-best friend forever, idk-i don’t know). I just prefer to use whole words!

However, with cell phones being put to so many uses these days, some parents are becoming concerned about the kinds of things their kids have access to on them. At home, you can monitor your kids’ computer usage and block sites that you don’t want them to visit. It’s not so easy on their cell phones.

More and more cell phone manufacturers are seeing the need to give parents some control over what their kids have access to via a phone. Erinn, over at Parenting Our Children has a review of a new phone that allows parents to decide when the phone will be on and what features kids will be allowed to use.

If your tweens and teens carry cell phones, you might want to look into any controls that your company or phone allows you to have over your kids’ phone usage. These days, strangers have access to your kids via their cell phones. And that’s not a good thing.

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