A Rite of Passage

My daughter experienced a major rite of passage this past weekend. And it wasn’t her bat mitzvah. She got her first cell phone and it makes my Blackberry Pearl look like child’s play.

The Samsung Rogue is a touch screen side-slider with a 3.1" AMOLED display. It sports a QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth, MP3 Player, GPS, and a 3MP camera with Geo Tagging. It will also use Verizon's EVDO Rev A data network.

Her cousin, who had seen her the week before, marveled: “She’s become a teenager overnight.” And so she has. For bedtime reading, she chooses the Samsung manual over the latest book in the Twilight series. She’s obsessed with figuring out whom to include in her “free” friends and family plan. She’s become a texting maniac and spends more time calculating how many texts she has left than she does on her math homework. The stakes are high as she’s sharing the plan with her dad so if she goes over her limit he’ll be penalized.


According to one of her friends, not having a cell phone by age 11 is ‘social suicide.’ To think that in my day it was bad breath. I certainly didn’t easily cave in to Ruby’s well-mounted 6-month campaign for a cell phone. I made her work for it. We wrote a contract – what she was going to do to earn it and my binding obligation to honor the contract.


Studies conducted by Pew Research Center show that most American kids get their first cell phone between 10 and 11. I was bemoaning my situation with a 19-year old (who got about 10 texts in the hour we were together) and she astutely pointed out that 9/11 was the tipping point: after that parents wanted their kids to be accessible at all times and kids started getting them at younger ages. Marketers have fanned the flame with family plans and unlimited plans to encourage usage.


There is value in being able to reach your kids at a moment’s notice but now we parents have to deal with yet another addictive behavior, in portable form:

The Internet is addicting, says psychologist David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Conn., because it works on a "variable ratio reinforcement schedule," which is a fancy way of saying that it gets you high every once in awhile. This is based on a theory first espoused by renowned psychologist B. F. Skinner—not knowing whether a reward is coming is actually more compelling than being able to count on results every time.

"It can be as simple as finding an e-mail (or text) you like, hearing from somebody you love, being told a cousin is coming to visit, interspersed among a lot of neutral, less-salient information," Greenfield says. "You don't know how desirable that will be or when you're going to get it."

I’m still searching for ways to control this new addiction. “Model good texting behavior,” says her school psychologist. Oops, I flunked that one already since I’m permanently attached to my constantly vibrating Blackberry. “It’s work - it might be important,” is my excuse. “Limit her texting minutes,” says another well-intentioned friend, but Ruby has 10 people in her free friends and family plan so there IS no limiting her usage. “Just be thankful that she doesn’t have a boyfriend yet so she won’t be sending nude pictures of herself,” is the reassuring advice from yet another friend.


I don’t have the easy answer but I’ll be returning to this topic often as Ruby and I figure out the rules of engagement for cell phone usage. In the meantime, if you have any advice please let me know!