Last week, Rachel was with a friend and got herself into a situation that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and couldn’t easily contact me to get her. She was at a sleepover, and even though the parents I had entrusted her care to thought they weren’t doing anything wrong, they did. (I don’t want to get into specifics, but because obviously this can easily be taken the wrong way, I’ll just say this has to do with a religion issue and not anything else). I was furious, and while I learned a hard lesson about the fact that, unfortunately, I’m going to have to be a lot more careful about who I allow her to have sleepovers with and who I trust, I also realized I need to give her the ability to more easily reach out to me if she needs to.
She’s been begging me for a cell phone for maybe a year or more now and it’s been one of those things that I’ve honestly laughed at. A nine year old with a cell phone?? You’ve GOT to be kidding me!!! Well… now my tune is changing. Fact is – if she had a cell phone at that sleepover, when things started getting a little over the top, she could have snuck away and called me and said “Mom? Uhm… Think I’m ready to come home now!”
Of course, being 9 years old, there’s all kinds of issues here. One problem is that I’m reasonbly sure this phone is going to get lost. Sooner rather than later, I’ll bet. The other issue is that, I can’t be 100% sure that she’ll forever get the idea that this phone is not to be used to chat it up with her friends. It’s to be used for me to contact her or her to contact me. If she wants to talk to her friends, we do actually have a landline phone she can use to her heart’s content. (Or at least until it’s time to do her homework or go to bed. LOL!)
So, after much debate, we finally got her one of those Tracfones. The particular model we got for her actually does text messaging, (so I can easily send her a text message to come home from her friends house at a specified time, if need be – and it only uses up 1/3 of a minute), it has voicemail, even a little camera. You buy minutes via a card (and actually the model phone we got doubles the minutes you buy for the life of the phone) – and if she uses up the minutes – that’s it – the phone stops working until we add more minutes. There’s no monthly or daily charge. And it’s not tied to our credit card. So no worries about a surprise $500 phone bill because she decided to sneak a few calls to some friends. And the phone itself only cost about $20. So while I really hope she doesn’t lose the phone – it’s only $20. It’s not like $200. And the phone? I mean for $20… that’s a pretty sweet deal – which is why I finally caved. I mean, I think I couldn’t get a decent walkie-talkie for only that much!
So yeah – I’m pretty sure only a few months ago I was saying “I would never buy my kid a cell phone!! Not until they’re at least 13 or something…” Yeah. Funny how circumstance will change things. That and the technology that can put out a $20 cell phone! 
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