I'm just curious about this....

Do those of you here have rules about your kids and their phones?

Our son is a great kid. We trust him as much as a parent can trust a teenage boy. By that, I mean he hasn't done anything to break our trust, we know and like his friends and don't worry about who he's with, etc... but we aren't so stupid as to think we can go on autopilot from here on out. Kids - even the good ones - do dumb things sometimes!

He has a girlfriend, and we like her just fine, but we realized they just seem too 'connected'. Because of his cell phone, she is essentially always "with" him, sitting in his hand in that little electronic device.

I remember having a boyfriend at his age. He lived in the next town over so I only got to see him about once a month, and had to wait on SNAIL MAIL letters from him for us to have any sort of 'discussion'. That meant that when I was with my friends, I was actually *with* my friends and not also in a constant state of distraction because I was in communication with the guy I was nuts about who wasn't even in the room.

It seems 'off' to me that thanks to his phone, the girlfriend is the first person he greets when he wakes up and the last person to whom he says goodnight.

His girlfriend, quite literally, is always in the palm of his hand.

That just didn't seem healthy somehow. So last night, we made some new rules about his phone. Nothing drastic... just that it gets plugged in to charge overnight in the kitchen. He tells his *family* goodnight last and doesn't head to bed and 'visit' with her for awhile before he falls asleep. He comes upstairs and eats breakfast with us and has time with the people actually *present* in the home with him before striking up a conversation with the girlfriend across town.

He didn't fuss with us about the new status quo at all, and I think he actually appreciated that now he isn't totally tethered all day and can use us as the excuse/reason that he can close the 'connection' for a time and have his own thoughts. He's still sound asleep, and his cell is plugged into its charger here with me on the island in the kitchen.

I told him we won't go through his texts on a regular basis or anything, but that we did reserve the right to read them if we felt we needed to. I have a friend who does a 'surprise inspection' of the things her daughter is texting about once every 4-6 weeks and I don't think that's unreasonable.

Are we just old fuddy duddies, or have others of you felt the need to put some restrictions on texting for the mental health of their kids?