I was driving a car filled with soccer players home from practice one day when one of them asked me, “Mrs. Singer? Can I play with your phone?’
Oh no. I know better than to hand over my cell phone to a 13-year-old surrounded by other 13-year-olds, lest my Twitter feed end up filled with such bon mots as:
Jen Singer has hairy armpits and smells like Cheetos.
Or worse. My cell phone has a camera, a camcorder and instant access to 13,000 Twitter followers, a few thousand Facebook followers, Instagram, the Internet, e-mail and text.
You know, just like the phones of many of your kids.
You know who you are. You’ve set up all sorts of child safety settings on your home computers and the kids’ laptops, and then you handed your kids unrestricted access to all that the Internet has to offer via their mobile phones.
Maybe it’s too hard to figure out how to monitor all that technology, or it’s just too much to keep up with when you have your own bazillion texts and emails to lord over. Parents are overwhelmed with the amount of technological monitoring required these days, so sometimes, they just give up.
Consider this: