Vitamin T

Cell Phones & Kids

When my friend with a 4-month old baby asked me about when I thought an appropriate time to get a child a cell phone was, I have to admit I was shocked she was already thinking about this topic. She was already thinking about how she was going to keep in touch with her child the first time he went somewhere on his own. But she was also concerned about what he might be exposed to and what he could access via a cell phone with all of today’s capabilities.

Then there are the health concerns. Do cell phones cause tumor or impair cognitive function? Taraka Serrano, a health advocate associated with BIOPRO Technology, writes about the health risks in her article: Cell Phones Endanger Children. But I think my friend’s bigger concern was that her son could be the target of exploitation, bullying and invasion of privacy as well as have the possibility of ringing up a phone bill that could get out-of-hand.

As Larry Magid aptly points out in his article Talk to Your Kids About Cell Phone Use, “When you put a cell phone in children's hands, you're giving them access to the world and the world access to them, including when they're away from home and parental supervision. What's more, today's cell phones are not just mobile telephones. They're also Web browsers, instant messengers and e-mail terminals. In other words, just about everything you can do from an Internet-connected PC, you can also do from a cell phone.” All these exposure points give a parent a lot to worry about.

What limits are appropriate to set with your children when it comes to cell phone use? Should you give them full access to all functions and features available or limit their use somehow? Also, what is an appropriate age to allow a child to carry a cell phone?

-- Pamela Klores, Reichert Communications

See No eGadgets, Hear No eGadgets

As far as tech enthusiasts go, I’m a bit more reluctant than most.  That’s because when I’m not rallying excitement for a client’s revolutionary new product as a public relations professional, I’m busy explaining the inner-workings of pronoun agreement to college freshmen.  My “extracurricular” job as an English instructor has provided me with a unique technology perspective.  I have seen the dark side. 

Teachers are on the front lines of the fight to preserve face-to-face, human-to-human interaction.  Last semester, one student in particular—a lump of blond hair, baggy clothes and sulking facade—tested my patience.  She always sat in the back row of my class, looking down and smiling at her lap.  In the past, this type of unusual behavior might have been construed as an unintentional plea for psychological assistance.  But today’s tortured teacher knows that laps are seldom empty anymore.  There’s usually a gadget of some sort competing against you for the student’s attention.  Sure enough, I spent the entire semester trying to pry her reluctant hands from the type pad on her text-enabled cell phone. 

Sometimes you win; sometimes the gadget wins.  But as more and more, smaller and smaller tech toys surface, the more treacherous the battlefield becomes for us—the human society soldiers.  I have lost my share of battles—when a student enters my class with one ear plugged into a mobile phone headset, the other ear plugged into a tiny MP3 device, a hand clenching a Palm Pilot, and a web of indistinguishable wires spilling out from the slightly opened zipper of his backpack, I start to imagine how Napoleon must have felt at Waterloo.

So when Time Magazine describes a new gadget like the Oakley Thump MP3 Sunglasses as possibly being the “tuxedo shirt of the tech-generation,” pardon my sigh.  Now, in addition to covering your eyes, the windows to your soul, you can also, at the same time, keep people out of your ears, the highway to your brain. 

Technology is supposed to improve life.  And more often than not, it does.  But we’ve also seen what it can take from us.  Viewers don’t have the patience to watch more than a 5-second sound byte on cable news screens crowded with scrolls, charts and logos.  Second graders are playing with computers rather than each other.  You have to pay to talk to a human at your bank. The guy sitting next to you on the train pollutes your commute with his loud, tireless chorus of, “Can you here me now?”

I love new technology—my portable DVD player, my MP3 device, my camera phone.  I’d have an easier time giving up a kidney.  But I realize what many of my students do not: sometimes you have to unplug to be plugged in. 

The text-obsessed blond student with the baggy clothes failed my class, and ultimately flunked out of college.  I couldn’t get through to her.  There was too much tech in the way.

--Craig Kaufman, Reichert Communications LLC