Parents need tools to check on teens

This is in response to Chuck Goudie's article on teenage texting. Goudie says, "Once upon a time it was easy to eavesdrop on your teenagers and check their pockets or backpacks for incriminating notes." Maybe. But it's not too difficult to do some electronic eavesdropping.

Cell phone service providers often offer a plan for parents of teens in which it is remarkably easy to see whom your kid is texting or calling and at what hours.

Our plan allows us to turn our teen's cell phone off for certain hours (let's say, the middle of the night). Another tool is a calling circles plan, which allows unlimited calls only to certain numbers that your teen would pick - such as home, our cell phones, a few friends, and the significant other.

Calls outside the calling circles cost money, and the teen has to pay that or lose the cell phone. This severely limits calls outside of a certain circle of friends. Even our land-line phone offers online records only a few hours old, so we can check to see if one of our kids is making phone calls at off hours (a service which my parents never had).

Goudie is absolutely right that it takes a high level of vigilance on the part of parents to oversee this, and the stakes these days are very high - much higher than when I was a teen.

With sexual predators a reality, they absolutely cannot take this responsibility lightly. A list of cell phone numbers called means nothing if you do not know the cell phone numbers of your teen's friends, if you are not willing to browse through your phone records on a regular basis, or if you are not willing to act when phones are being misused.

Joyce Haworth

Des Plaines