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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
What are your text message/cell phone rules?
Do you collect their cell phones at night? Make them leave them downstairs? When and where can they text message or call?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I had a wonderful friend in high school who you COULD NOT call after 9 p.m. It was such a strict rule that we still joke about it today 20 years later. In the1980s it was much easier for a parent to monitor phone use. Generally every phone in the house would ring and even if a teen had a private line a parent would still hear it. It was pretty tough to hide the giant princess phone with cords streaming out of the back.
But now itty bitty phones with vibrate settings and silent text messaging make it much harder for parents to monitor and control their child’s/teen’s phone/texting interactions.
I got a note from a friend with a 13-year-old 8th grader. Her daughter’s friends have been texting her in the middle of the night. The mom made her daughter tell her friends to stop and they have complied. (This mom has a secondary issue with this problem that we will talk about tomorrow.)
She also wrote about another friend who doesn’t allow her daughter to have a cell phone, but all the other girls bring their phones to spend-the-night parties. Can she collect them at the door and hold onto them while they’re visiting — house rules?
What are your cell phone and text messaging rules? How late can they call and text? Do they get to keep their phones in their rooms at night? I assume they take their phones to school for use in theory after school — are there problems with kids texting during school? I think that would be very hard for teachers to monitor as well.
And how does a parent know if bad things are being texted? How do you know if bad language, sexual stuff or bullying is being sent to or by your child? How do you monitor texting content?
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