TheMommyBlog

Thursday, July 22, 2010 Family

OF COURSE I want my kids to be safe on cell phones, especially since we’ve gone to an all-cell phone family. For the first time, we don’t have a house phone. That just blows my mind.

See, I’m used to the kind of family phone everyone had to fight over so your parents set elaborate rules about how many calls you can make and how long each can last. Eventually you learn to sneak calls by making it look like you’re not actually ON the centrally-located kitchen phone because you’ve stretched that 25-foot cord out the kitchen door, around the corner of the dining room, and then around the corner of your bedroom where you’ve found a gap in the door that lets you close it without pinching the phone cord too much. And then your sibling finds out when he trip-wires the cord on his way to get a bowl of cereal and takes revenge by disconnecting the cord from the phone base, letting the yellow, stretched-out, curly cord spring back and whip around the corners until it WHAPS against your closed bedroom door where you’re having a whispered conversation because you think you’ve pulled off the bluff of the century.

And then you’ve got like twenty twists to reverse in the cord because it’s all out of shape and there’s always that one that won’t untwist unless you run it all the way to the ends of the cord and when you wake up the next day it’s BACK, with three or four cousins. And believe it or not, your parents never replace that cord. It will persevere throughout your childhood, going from springy and not quite reaching your knees, to a long, worn-out looping thing that has to be tossed over the top of the phone to keep it from dragging on the floor where you will trip on it eleventeen times a day.

So. Cell phones.

My kids use them. And I want to know HOW they are using them because they are portable little buggers and you never know where they are until you call them and your shoe starts ringing. Well. Here’s a story that ought to get your attention, and get you thinking about how to keep your family safe while using a cell.

Forbes Personal Tech: Keeping Kids Safe on Cell Phones
By Claire Courtney

SAN FRANCISCO—Colorado mother Sharon Hamilton thought she had a close eye on her son’s technology use. The 15-year-old turned in his cellphone every night at 10 p.m. One evening, Hamilton became suspicious when he frantically deleted text messages before giving over his phone. Her worst fears were soon confirmed.

When she turned on his phone, a text message from an unrecognizable, out-of-state number appeared. “Good night Babe,” it read.

REET! REET! REET!

“I am a watchful Mom,” she said, ” and this bypassed my watch.”

Her son told her that the text came from a 30-year-old female friend he met while playing “World of Warcraft,” a popular online multiplayer videogame. Hamilton, unconvinced of the innocence of this friendship, investigated the woman further. She ended up paying a company to discover that her son had spent three months communicating with an adult male. Read more…

Don’t EVEN get me started on texting.