Cell phone responsibility starts with the parent

The case of the teenage girl from Pinckney High School who took revealing photos of herself on a cell phone and sent them to friends -- who soon shared them with their friends -- has brought a new urgency to the dilemma faced by parents who want to give their kids access to technology but at the same time, protect them from their own impulsiveness and irresponsibility.
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For the dilemma is this: The kids know technology a whole lot better than the parents.

Let me be even more to the point with some tech columnist preaching: If you're going to give your kids technology, you need to know what they're doing with it. Which means you have to take the time to learn it yourself, before unleashing it for your kids.

I hear from parents all the time how good their kids are with computers, the Internet and cell phones. "My kid can actually text without even looking at the keyboard," one parent of a 13-year-old recently told me.

"What is he texting?" I asked.

"Beats me," said the parent. "Kid stuff."

There's the problem. Just what is "kid stuff" these days? I am stunned at what I see on the MySpace pages of many kids. Obviously, parents haven't gone there. Racy photos. Gutter language. Cyber bullying. These things are all over those social networking sites on the pages of kids barely in their teens.

It's so easy for the Luddites to blame the technology. I blame the parents. If you give your kid a tool, teach them how to use it and make sure they use it correctly. That means you have to check up on them.

"But I don't want to spy on my child," say some. Nonsense. That's your job. You're supposed to know who their friends are, how they're behaving, where they're going. And in cyberspace and hooked up to cell phones, there are a lot of dark and scary neighborhoods that can land your kids in a heap of trouble.

So, first step is, if you give a kid a cell phone, know what it can do and how they will be -- and are -- using it.

Most of the phone companies have usage filters that give parents the ability to better manage and control how their children use their phones. Verizon Wireless, for example, has a $4.99-a-month service that can:
• Set thresholds for voice minutes;
• Set specific limits for text, picture, IM and video messaging as part of pay-as-you-go or message bundle plans;
• Set time-of-day restrictions for data use and messaging;
• Create lists of "trusted" and "blocked" numbers; and
• Employ content filters.

"If a parent wanted to prevent a child from taking and sending explicit photos on their phone and receiving the same, they could block specific numbers from sending or receiving picture messages," says Michelle Gilbert, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless. "A parent could also block the time of day the child is messaging, and of course, limit the number of messages."

Sprint-Nextel has a similarly priced service. On Sprint Samsung and Sanyo phones, parents can set up and use a lock code to limit access to certain features like data services and the phone's camera/pictures. "This would limit access to sending or receiving any data on the device, so the user would be unable to send or receive a PictureMail," says Mark Elliott, a Sprint spokesman. "The phone's camera/video recorder could be locked to limit the ability to taking pictures or videos with the phone."

Elliott says a Sprint customer can make an appointment to meet with a Sprint representative to receive free training on the features available to them and how to use the different parental controls.

Those features and services are great, as far as they go.

But the real issue is parenting responsibility. A mobile phone is a privilege. It is incredibly powerful. It can be incredibly intrusive and disruptive.

Do pre-teen and early teen kids really need these full-featured cell phones? If your child must have a mobile for safety reasons and emergency communications, there are bare-bones phones made just for kids that don't have all the messaging and photo features and can be programmed by parents to make and receive calls only from a few numbers.

But if you are handing your child a phone that surfs the Internet, watches videos, plays music, takes stills and videos, and can send instant messages and text blasts to anyone, anywhere, you have given them a key to places that they shouldn't be allowed to go.

So you'd better know what keys they are using.

Kids, because they are immature, are by nature going to be impulsive and irresponsible.

You, Mom and Dad, have no such excuse.