Warning! Warning! We now have a young lady in her mid-tweens in the house! Our oldest “baby girl” is certainly a little girl no more. Our formerly-known-as-Miss-10 recently celebrated her 11th birthday. Yay! Happy Birthday amazing, gorgeous girl! (I know you’ll be reading this 😉).
Birthday celebrations mean birthday party planning, right?!? And boy, did she have plans. A gaggle of girlfriends stayed over to dance, chatter, play games and feast on popcorn while watching a DVD. Apparently they even managed to find time for some shut-eye.
Apart from her big birthday party though, she had one other grand plan occupying her thoughts every waking moment: a mobile phone.
Mobile phone, cell phone, Handy, expensive-addictive-glowing-screen-attention-sucking-vampire. Call it what you want. But that gadget was front and centre on her birthday wish list and she was darned certain she was going to get one. From us. Her parents. Her caregivers. Her guardians. The logical left-brain to her own excitable right-brain.
But what to do? The idea of giving her her own mobile phone had me feeling incredibly nervous and concerned and a thousand other emotions that all together made me feel, well, uncertain and a little uncomfortable.
I mean, how are we supposed to know whether now is the right time to give her a phone? How does anyone know when “the right time” is? Read on!
Continue reading “How to Know Whether Your Child is Ready for Their Own Phone”