Your Tween and Her First Cell Phone

If you’re considering a first cell phone for your tween, that’s great. Eventually, she’ll need a cell phone to stay connected with you. All three of my children are now cell-phone owners (and only one has fallen into a pool - the phone, not the kid - knock on lots of wood!).

When I think back to when we presented my first child with his cell phone when he was 12, I wish I had instilled some firmer family rules. I’d like to share a few suggestions with you here, just to make your life easier for when you get your tween her first cell phone. Call them what you will: demands, rules, non-negotiables - you are the parent, you’re paying for this phone, you call the shots.

In short, you own that phone, and your child is borrowing it. What you say goes, and yes, I could kick myself on quite a few occasions for being too easy-going with some ‘phone-faux-pas,’ but my living through it is your learning through it!

What I Know Now

Don’t let your kids keep the cell phones in their bedrooms at night. Unnecessary. If they tell you they need the phone as an alarm clock in the morning, buy them a separate alarm clock. The phone in their room is just a reason for them to be on it all hours of the night.

Remove the phones during meals, and also an hour or so before bedtime. There’s no need for kids to be on electronics playing games or texting friends right up until the minute their heads hit the pillows. Their little brains need some unwind time.

Don’t give in and get her the ‘whole package’ immediately. She does not need immediate access to the whole wide world web on her phone when she first gets a cell phone. A package with just phone and text capabilities is just fine for the first year of a child learning how to be responsible with a device. The reason you’re giving her a phone is to stay connected to you, right?

Practice what I preach. If I’m telling my children not to text while I’m talking, or not to have the phones on during dinner, I need to put my own phone away during these times and afford them the attention I expect from them.

Use their phone as a privilege and remove it from them for misbehavior. Stand by my threats and keep their phone for the amount of time I have threatened to take it away from them. If your children don’t keep care of the phone or lose it, don’t replace it immediately. Or make your children pay for the replacement.

Teach your children to PAUSE and think before texting anything. There are so many times that tempers can flare and words can be typed and once something is written, it is out there for anyone to see. It’s dangerous territory.

Do surprise checks on your child’s phone where you ask for it and scroll through to check what’s going on. Soon enough she’ll get savvy and password-protect it or erase the good stuff, but for a very long time, my children actually believed me when I told them we had a special parent app installed and could read everything on their phones.

What I Always Knew

I trusted my kids and you’ll trust yours too. Give them the chance to be responsible for their cell phones and to use it wisely. Since you’ve raised them right, they should be just fine when it comes to safe and smart communicating!

Want to know what the girls themselves are saying about using their phones? Check out - the FPgirls chat about whether or not they have a cell phone! They have lots of opinions on the subject!

About the Author:

Stephanie Elliot, in no particular order, is a wife, writer, blogger, book reviewer, editor and mother to three kids, two who have already been tweens, and one who is right smack in the middle of his tween-ness. Her oldest son is almost driving and her daughter survived her tween years so Stephanie must be doing something right. Find out more at http://stephanieelliot.com