Image by Meneer De Braker (Akbar2) via Flickr
When your teen gets on the phone, who knows what they’re saying? While you can’t tap their phones to find out if they’re planning anything nefarious, you can check out who they’re calling and how long they’re spending on the phone. If they have minutes to be tended to, you can check out all of those things on your bill. Overall, monitoring your teen’s cell phone use is a fairly easy thing to do.
While your teen is downloading unlimited music, they can be talking to their friends about anything. While this can lead to a lot of possible problems, the real problems happen when they go over their minutes. In cases like that, an unlimited plan can be useful. However, you might want to actually limit the number of texts your teen can send and make them pay for any they send or look at over and above that number. While it might seem cruel, it is a good way to get your teen to think about the future and how to use resources.
Of course, making your teen actually pay can become a serious issue. After all, if he or she refuses to pay, you have to cancel their cell phone plan as a punishment, which can be a serious hindrance to a person in this day and age. “I’ll call you” has replaced almost any sort of real planning, as people tend to think only about right now and keeping in nearly constant contact through technology. But having consequences for inappropriate cell phone usage teaches powerful lessons that every teen needs to know.
