A provocative (electronic) conversation sprang up on one of my list-serves recently. A parent of a teenage boy wondered aloud in a long and worried email how those of us who have teens with phones were handling the texting question.

She had not allowed her son to get a phone until his first year of high school, wanting to wait until she thought he was mature enough to self-regulate when it came to texting. In the first three weeks of having his phone, she discovered that he had sent and received 12,000 texts! She and her ex-husband, the boy's father, agreed to new terms on phone use: he would be allowed to send and receive and total of 100 texts per day, and they put a moratorium on the phone between the hours of 10:00 pm and 7:00 am.

Needless to say, her son has complained that she is the only parent in the free world who puts such draconian limits on a phone. Shortly after sending out her story and looking for feedback, she received two responses. One was from a family that limits its three teens' phones to 100 texts per month, and one (with slightly older kids) who has resigned herself to the fact that if she wants to communicate with her children, texting is the way to do it and allows them unlimited texts.

http://www.currentmom.com/currentmom/2010/08/tethered-to-technology...