Lessons learned: Combining kids and cellphones

Today’s children live in a digital world. They’ve embraced electronics. As parents, we live and die by the Best Buy.
I confess that, earlier this year, I let my 11-year-old daughter test-drive one of the many demo phones we get here at the RCR Wireless News offices: the Samsung Blast (in red) offered by T-Mobile USA. Needless to say, she fell in love. She managed to assign her myFaves, complete with some photos and some icons, send voice mails and text messages (more than 200 of them, I’m afraid), and do a bunch of other things-all without reading the instruction booklet or the instructional CD. She also did not lose the phone, thus showing me how responsible she is becoming. (It’s difficult to lose something when it’s tightly gripped in your little fingers, 24/7.)
My daughter would be the happiest person on Earth, sad to say, if we got her a cellphone for Christmas. However, I’ve made a pact with two of the moms in our circle that we wouldn’t get our kids these devices until 7th grade. We don’t really leave the kids alone so why would they need a cellphone?
And from watching her friends who have cellphones, it seems the gadgets are mostly used for texting non-messages to friends when bored. Plus, as a journalist who covers the wireless industry, I am very aware of a warning from the U.K. that said kids shouldn’t talk too much on cellphones while their bodies (and brains) are still growing. As a mom, that makes me nervous.
And then Kayla got hurt.
Kayla is one of my daughter’s schoolmates. She and three friends were over at the field by the school the other day and decided to climb over a chain-link fence rather than walk around it. You guessed it: The fence won.
Kayla suffered a pretty deep gash from the fence, and was bleeding a lot. A lot. Amid much hysteria, the cellphone beat the fastest runner’s attempt to get help. Kayla got stitched up in the ER and the kids learned a valuable lesson about climbing fences.
But the adults learned a little lesson too.