Smartphone Owning Teens More Involved in Unsafe Sex: How Safe is your Teen?

Posted on February 28, 2013 by admin

Smartphone looks good and every teenager dreams to own it but should you really provide your teen child with a smartphone yet? What if this smart techie device compromises over your child’s safety or introduces unknown troubles? If you have already bought your teenage child a smart phone, it is time to monitor teenage mobile activities before it gets really late.
 
What Research & Surveys have to Say?
 
A recent study conducted by Eric Rice, assistant professor at the School of Social Work, University of Southern California suggests that teens with smartphones who have 24×7 access to internet have more chances of being sexually active and even have the risk of indulging in the act of sex with the strangers from the internet.
 
The survey to study the sexual behaviour of the teenagers that he conducted during the school session year 2010-2011 among the school students in Los Angeles Unified School District brought into light that some 47% of the teens who had a smartphone were sexually active against 35% of those who didn’t have a smartphone.
 
Sexuality among Teens
 
Most teens have no idea where their being sexually active may take them up to. They indulge in most unsafe and unhygienic ways that can be dangerous and make them vulnerable to diseases, infections and even life threatening issues.
 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that in the U.S. alone about 47% of high school students have got involved in sexual acts and about 40% of these teenagers didn’t even try using any kind of protection like condoms which means they are most vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and infections like HIV, etc. This may even lead to increased number of unwanted pregnancy among the teenage girls.
 
What Role does Smartphone Plays?
 
So, where is the fault of the smart phone then?  Well, a slight fault is there, these smart phones are no less than mini-computers availing your child with 24×7 internet access and the web is not at all a secure place for children who never miss a chance of trying out something new. With sites offering adult content and pornography, children easily get to access things that are not at all fit for their age which leads to psychological conflicts urging these kids to practically try what they get to know.
 
Next, they befriend online strangers who can be predators ready to misguide a child online. Some teens are even found to have had sex with their online friends in the real.
 
How to Safeguard your Smartphone Using Child?
 
If you haven’t bought a smart phone for your child yet, wait till you have properly educated your child about the evils that they may get to come across when online and how they need to keep themselves safe from them. Asking your child’s school authority to conduct proper sex education that includes tips; for the children to stay safe from the abuse of technology will prove equally helpful. But if you have already bought your teenage child a smart device, install some parental control or monitoring software on it to keep your child safe.  This will help you filter out unwanted things as well as restrict unwanted downloads and mobile over-use. And at the same time you’ll know what exactly your child is doing with the help of proper child cellphone monitoring that these software programs provide you.
 
Reference Site: Teens who use smartphones may engage in more sex

 

Teachers Sexting Students, Is your Child Safe at School?

Posted on February 26, 2013 by admin

One simple question – how safe is your child and can parental control really prove helpful? Wondering if the questions really make any sense? Well, then simply read on to know how insecure the kids are lately and what things are actually helping their parents to keep them safe.
 
One splendid morning you wake up and start your day with a newspaper in your hand. You read about a teenage student raped by a teacher at school, you feel pity, you feel bad, you feel obnoxious. You realize that you personally know the gal; the splendour of the morning is gone, isn’t it? What if the gal happens to be your own daughter? Oops a sense of devastation is creeping in, you’re about to faint in a moment or so?
 
Relax! Relax! Relax!
 
This may happen or may not but one dreadful thing quite prevalent among the teens is SEXTING. And it is even giving an opportunity to the sexual predators to be abusive in the guise of intelligent and friendly teachers at school.
 
A Piece of Shocking News
 
Here’s a small piece of news about a Delaware teacher who has recently been arrested on the charge of sending SEXT to a student.
 
Stanley Zakrociemski, a 36-year-old worked at Sussex Technical High School, County Seat Highway, Georgetown, Delaware. He was found guilty of sending text messages full of obscene and sexually explicit nature.  Delaware State Police together with detectives told the media that Zakrociemski was caught SEXTING with a 17 year old female student by another employee of the same school.
 
Police informed that the messaging part of the story had started as earlier as March 2012 and continued going on until the teacher was caught this week. However, it is noteworthy that there wasn’t any physical relation between the man and the 17 year old girl who turned 18 this December.
 
Zakrociemski, who basically belongs to Millsboro, was finally arrested sexually soliciting a child below 18. He has now been sent to Sussex Correctional Institution on a bond of 100,000 dollars.
 
Well there are several such cases that remain undisclosed and kids never get to gather enough courage to tell their parents about it. But if you closely monitor your child mobile phone activities and know who she exchanges her emails and text messages with; what kind of content does her messages generally include; and how long has she been interacting with the person, you’ll be keeping your child safe from various sexual crimes related to minors.

 

Teenage Child Safety Tips: Keep Sexually Active Teens Safe

Posted on February 21, 2013 by admin

Are you ignoring your child? Is there anything that she’s trying to speak out to you but you aren’t paying any heeds to what she has to say?

 

According to The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, USA, most teen pregnancies can be avoided if parents involve in direct conversation with their children.

 

Your child needs your attention, presence and care. Proper child monitoring, personal involvement and time to time conversation can make all the difference. Be your child’s influencer and spiritual mentor to lead her towards the right.

 

Who influences your child the most when she has to take some of the most important personal decisions? Any idea what matters the most to her when she decides to get sexually active with somebody? Yes, it is your advice, your concern, your precious nuggets of counselling that matters really a lot to your child.

 

With 42% of teenagers between 15 and 19 having a sexually active life, how safe is your child from sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy?

 

The percentage of sexually active teenagers is quite unnerving, you can still be confident of your child following abstinence as you have always expected her to be. But how will you make this happen depends just on you. You’re the one who will have to enter your child’s life and talk to her, listen to her queries related to sex and pregnancy and other health issues.

 

According to various research and studies, children are most influenced by their parents, especially when they have to take decisions about sex and relationship. Even when the contemporary pop culture, friends, peer and teachers have their own places in forming a child’s ideology, it is their parents whom they place at the first place.

 

They look forward to their parents for all their information; in fact they approach their parents the first and consider them to know the most and the best.

How to Handle Sex Related Conversation with your Child?
 

Be friendly and a good listener and educate your child about every single thing that you find necessary. Tell her why she should be observing complete abstinence from sex and the troubles that crop up with unsafe sex and unwanted pregnancy.

 
Will making your Child Aware of Contraception give them a Mixed Message?
 

Make your child aware of contraception as well. Are you wondering if this will give your child a mixed message? Well, as far as the researchers believe, it won’t be sending mixed message instead will be clarifying all the doubts of your child and will be giving a clearer perception about what is right and what is wrong.

 
Why talking about Contraception & Condoms?
 

Do not avoid talking about contraception with your child, though it is true that your encouragement toward abstinence is the best possible way of keeping your child safe from various complications, psychological turmoil, and various STD’s like AIDS, yet it is essential to keep your child aware of other possible ways of keeping the trouble off in case she chooses the other way out (i.e. being a sexually active teen).

 

There are various types of contraception like sub-dermal implant; non hormonal intrauterine device; hormonal intrauterine device; contraceptive injections and so on, yet you just can’t forget discussing the importance of condoms with your child for the total safety of her health.

 

It is you who has to keep your child safe and well protected and interestingly, it will always be you who will be able to do this!

 

30% Teen Girls Met with Online Strangers Offline; Predator Risk Persists

Posted on February 8, 2013 by admin

Teenage girls online are getting into a most dangerous and risky adventure of meeting complete strangers completely alone whom them have only known through the Internet which has come up into notice through a new research.
 
The research found 30% of the teen girls out of those who were surveyed, met a stranger from the Internet in the real life, even when they haven’t known the proper identity of the person until they really met. Teens are generally of notion that by simply speaking to the person online they have known them well, which is not true always and this innocent notion sometimes goes a bit too dangerous as the young girls take the risk of meeting them and encounter with predators instead.
 
According to Dr. Jennie Noll, University of Cincinnati based Professor of Pediatrics, using Internet isn’t that dangerous as it is to take a walk down to some dangerous areas of the city which has been supported by the statistics as well. However, she also said that about 90% of adolescents who use the Internet on daily basis still have the risk around them because they decide to meet online strangers in the real life; this risk actually exists for everyone online. She is of belief that even if 1% of these kids stops interacting with strangers online or decides not to meet anybody from Internet offline, the risk still exists.
 
The study found some surprising facts. The study included a survey over more than 250 adolescent girls in the age group of 14 to 17 and found that some 130 of them had experienced an abuse in documented form or were maltreated otherwise.
 
The researchers even found that the girls who suffered from earlier maltreatment had more risk of getting engaged in some kind of risky Internet activity like meeting stranger or even owning an explicitly made online profile. The team further studied the role of the parents in saving the teenage children and reducing the risk.
 
They found remarkable fact about parents’ role in keeping teenaged children safe. Software filtering inappropriate Internet content did have some affect on child safety as well as the internet activity of the kids, but still there are risks surrounding these kids. At the same time, kids getting form their parents, what the researchers have named as, “high quality parenting”, are the safest; these are the children who are being educated by the parents about Internet safety, the possible risks on unsafe Internet usage, and at the same time there is proper monitoring of the child activities online.
 
Notably, Dr. Jonathan Pletcher, the Clinical Director of Adolescent Medicine at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital suggested that properly parenting the children cannot be said to be a one-size-fits-all. Parents and kids need to have open-minded communication, trust building between the parents and the progenies and finally putting kids under persistent monitoring especially when they are using the Internet.

 

Reference URL: 30% of teen girls admit real-life meeting with online “stranger”

 

6 Ridiculously Dangerous Teenage Trends Currently Most Prevalent

Posted on February 1, 2013 by admin

Handling teenage child has always been difficult no doubt but it never has been as surprisingly complicated as it is getting lately. Kids of the day are far more dangerous than the kids of yester years, especially the teenagers and say thanks to the information blast on the internet and the infamous social sites, chat rooms and most deadliest of all the video sites like YouTube.
 
Below is a list of Ridiculously Dangerous Teenage Trends that makes monitoring teenage activities more than essential.
 
Salt and Ice
 
Salt & Ice: two most easily available and harmless looking things that any kid can arrange anytime anywhere and the dangerous use of which is hardly ever suspected by parents. Here’s a really hazardous game in which most teens are found to be participating lately. It is called salt and ice challenge in which a child places a layer of salt on the skin and passes ice over it or holds ice cubes together with handful of salt in fists, the challenge is to see who can do this longer. When ice is mixed with salt the temperature drops down to -17 and exposing skin and bones to this temperature is really painful and if done for longer time, it has the potential of badly burning the skin and rupturing the bones at the worst.
 
This pain tolerance game even leaves the child deadly scarred and hurt for long time.
 
The Choking Game
 
This involves depriving yourself or your friend of oxygen to get the ‘high’ or push the threshold of danger a bit more and come up as a smart kid who gets more attention from the peer. So, who’s participating in this game? Well, most kids playing this fatal game belong to the age group of 9 to 16 years old.
 
What do they do? And how would you know if your child is involved? If you find belts, ropes, straps, etc lying around your child’s room or you find strange marks on neck or bloodshot eyes of your child, it is the time to vigil your child well. Kids generally choke themselves with ropes, belts, etc and deprive themselves of oxygen which can even kill them.
 
Butt Chugging & Eyeballing
 
This is something for which using the word dangerous alone don’t fit well, it is much more than just that. Parents are always worried about their kids getting involved in alcoholism, but this is a step more than just being alcoholic. Teens are found to get boozy by ingesting the alcohol through their rectums, something similar to enema. This can lead to alcohol poisoning, tissue damage and even death.
 
So, why do the kids have to do this? Just for two reasons: to get boozy and have fun.  Some teenage girls even use their regular tampons for the purpose, they soak their tampons in hard alcohol and insert it just the way they’ll do with any regular tampon.
 
Eyeballing is yet another way of consuming alcohol indirectly. Teens take a shot of hard alcohol right into the socket of their eyes which cause irritation and swelling of the eyes, even cornea scarring and in worst cases blindness.
 
Vampire Biting
 
May be influenced from The Twilight Saga, teens love to behave vampire like but it is a little too much when they start practicing ‘vampire bites’ onto their beloved’s neck. Teens are giving a love bite to their boyfriends or girlfriends to show their love. This weird practice is not just painful but also unsafe as it may inflict some kind of infection, or even worse things like hepatitis or HIV.
 
Substance Abuse with Nutmeg, Hand Sanitizer
 
Getting on to drugs or hard alcohol needs lots of bucks to spend and they cannot be acquired that easily as the nutmeg powder in your kitchen or the hand sanitizer in the washroom.  Drinking the sanitizer has an intoxicating effect and so has the smoking of nutmeg which kids can acquire quite easily. Check out if your nutmeg is getting secretly taken away from the kitchen or the sanitizer is getting over too soon!
 
Inhaling Helium & Nitrous Oxide
 
Teens are just ready to do anything to get their “high”, some are even inhaling helium from balloons or from pressurized tanks, and this inhaling is taken as a popular game in parties and this is a highly intoxicating thing to do which can induce giddiness, and other side effects and over inhalation can lead to death depending on a strength of a child’s body.
 
The laughing gas is not all about laughing it is highly dangerous when inhaled in higher amounts. A small amount can be harmless but when addictively inhaled it causes nerve damage leading to tingling feeling or loss of sensation, a condition also known as peripheral neuropathy. As the inhalation deprives the brain of oxygen, there can be serious seizures and cardiac issues happening to the person.
 
How to Keep your Child Safe?
 
Pick a conversation with them and listen more, give them more room to speak, don’t hesitate to pick up issues of substance abuse, dangerous activities, peer pressure, sex, but never be bossy. Always be vigilant and monitor all that your kids do: the people they meet, places they go, and even the things in their rooms. Parental control child mobile phone and home computers to know what sites they use the most or who they communicate with, and the best is to restrict all the sites that you find inappropriate or dangerous.

 

Teens’ Late-Night Cellphone Use Causing Mental Health Issues

Posted on January 25, 2013 by admin

A latest study in Japan revealed that teenagers waking up late using their cellphones have mental health problem risks, other than insomnia related diseases.
 
The study found that the teens more frequent with cellphone usage after going to bed had more likelihood of developing poor mental health, suicidal thoughts, and thoughts of self harm compared to those who didn’t use cellphone once in bed.
 
Even after considering other factors evolving mental health issues like alcohol and drug abuse, the link between night time cellphone use and poor mental health was found true. Added to this, teens using cellphone once the lights are out were found to be more prone to lesser time spent in sleep.
 
Interestingly, the researchers also gave cautionary note that the study shouldn’t be considered as a hard and fast rule as this only showed an association. It can also be possible that those who had mental health issues are more inclined towards late night cellphone use.
 
However, late night mobile phone usage has its own wrong impact on brain as looking at bright display to perform tasks can excite one’s brain and also result in change in the melatonin production, which is an important hormone produced during sleep. This change in the hormone secretion can mar the entire quality of child’s night’s rest.
 
It has to be noted that the study didn’t include various other activities that a child staying awake late at night may indulge in like TV viewing, video game playing, or surfing Internet on computers, these can also have bad effect on a child’s mind and reduce the night sleep time.
 
However, it has been advised by Lauren Hale, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine, Stony Brook University, New York suggested that the finding couldn’t be taken as surprising as shortened sleep time does have a strong connection with affected mental health.
 
The professor also favoured keeping cellphones away from kids at night time to encourage better sleeping habits. Restricting child mobile activities at late night can prove helpful in improving sleep time, mental health and habits. She suggests another study to be conducted to find how good prohibiting child cell phone use at late-night proves in improving their mental health and sleeping habits.

 

Child Mobile Habits Going From Calling, Texting, App Usage to What Next?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by admin


 

Here’s a simple question which is somewhat difficult for adults to answer, let’s see if you answer to it correctly. So, exactly for what do the teens and pre teen kids crave for a cell phone? Talking to friends, staying in touch with parents, for showing it off, because other kids have it, or for texting or playing cool games?  So, what did you guess? If you think it is to keep in touch with you or talking with friends, you aren’t correct at all.
 
Yes, some kids would like to have a thing that other kids have but when it comes to owning a mobile phone, most kids want to have it for texting and in fact most of them are found to be texting all the time. Kids of the day send or receive more than 4000 text messages every month, now that’s an enormous number, isn’t it?
 
And another most important fact about kids’ texting habits is that the kids in the age group of 13 to 17 are found to be texting the most and it is generally the female teenaged mobile user who text more. Though it is true that lately families and friends have started communicating more with SMS, the texting habits of the kids are addictively more compared to those of the normal adults.  And next to text messaging is the app usage that attracts the young users toward cellphones more.
 
Safety No More Stays at the Most Important Reason for Owning a Cellphone
 
Until a few years back, the most important reason for any kid to own a cellphone used to be safety and after that came staying connected. This doesn’t remain the same anymore. At least, if you’re to listen to what kids have to say. Parents may buy their kids a mobile for their safety or for staying in touch with them all the time but kids surely demand for a one for their own joie de vivre, and among many of them like internet surfing & chatting, calling, or keeping in touch with friends and family, text chatting stands the first and kids text chat like insane.
 
Application Usage Gearing Up
 
Along with texting, app usage is another of the weaknesses of today’s kids. Though the application using tendencies of the kids aren’t that enormous as is the texting habit of the kids of the day, it is surely gearing up and making similar kind of place among the young cell phone users.
 
Does that mean any harm?
 
Are you wondering if texting may mean any harm to your child? It is a kind of 50-50% concept; there are both pros and cons of texting. The texting can keep your child busy when getting bored but it will be really damaging if the child gets addicted to texting and starts neglecting studies, and other important things. And mobile lingo can be damaging to regular linguistic skills of your child. As childhood and especially the teenage is the part of time when we learn most of the words and spellings and too much of indulgence to misspellings, and wrong language structures affects a kid’s language a lot which then hamper in their grades in language exams.
 
App usage too can be really harmful. First, it digs a big hole in your budget when your child downloads unwanted apps through the phone, next is sometimes a child may download applications that can harm the phone leading to hardware damage. Again, age inappropriate app on your child’s cellphone can be really damaging to your child.
 
Can Kids be Stopped from Over Texting & App Usage without Taking Away their Phones?
 
Child mobile monitoring is one of the best ways to stop your child from over-texting without having to take the phone away. Lately, most parents have started monitoring their kids’ phone using special parental control application installed on their phones. Some of the smartest of the technologies even time bound your child’s cell phone usage or restrict texting for certain period of time.
 
Technologies used to monitor your child’s cell phone even help you block unwanted applications both from being downloaded and used on your child’s cell phone keeping your child safe and you free from anxiety concerning their safety and discipline.

 

Is Your Child’s Cellphone Only an Entertainer or also a Life Saver?

Posted on January 11, 2013 by admin

Cell phones are banned in several elementary and middle schools, yet many parents don’t mind giving a cellphone to their kids going to school. Even though all through the school hours, the phone will be kept switched off in the kid’s backpack and allowed to be used only after the school is off for the day, it keeps the parents satisfied.
 
Perhaps the parents are thinking this way because of undetectable emergent situations cropping up out of nowhere like the Sandy storm outbreak that created a real pathetic mayhem everywhere and led to loss and damage beyond imagination and the Connecticut shoot out that killed 28 people including  20 children from the elementary school.
 
Where some people including parents, teachers, and child counsellors believe that mobile phones are nothing more than a device providing information and entertainment to the kids, there still are others who firmly stick to the point that mobile phones are essential devices capable enough of helping kids in emergency and keeping them safe and secured from all kinds of dangers.

 

It is true that elementary school kids don’t do much with their cell phones other than playing games, listening to music and feeling good about its ownership. And bigger kids spend all their time sending and receiving text messages, checking emails, and communicating on the social networking sites, yet there are certain situations when these very devices of entertainment become life saviour to them.
 
How do Schools Handle the Emergency Situations? What Role can Mobile Phones play in this?
 
School has so much of burden on their shoulders at the times of emergency that they are pretty mesmerized with what to do and what to leave out. In the recent school shootout case in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, there was a total confusion and the school authority could only inform the local police about the case and as a result of which, a reverse 911 call was sent to the parents in order to inform them about the incidence, which couldn’t clarify the situation well to most of the parents, as per USA Today.
 
And one parent even told CNN that she couldn’t make out exactly in which school did the shootout took place. In such situations, it is always better that the kids directly talk to their parents and inform them if they are in any perilous situation or if they are hiding out somewhere. And a mobile phone with a kid can prove really helpful in this situation.
 
Can Mobile Phones really keep Kids Safe?
 
Mobile phones especially the smart phones prove helpful in locating a lost kid with the help of GPS Tracking, but it will be rendered useless if the mobile is lost or if the kid leaves it out in the school itself. And again in several mugging cases, kids were the most targeted victims of the cell phone mugging and snatching. Thus, if such cases are to be brought to notice, cell phone sometimes proves a bigger trouble to life than being a saviour.
 
Again, with the recent increase in cyber crime, kids are most badly hit. Mobile phones do prove useful and helpful in the time of an emergency yet it sometimes proves far more dangerous than those very situations. It is becoming a common trend that parents are providing their kids with cell phone but at the same time restricting its usage with child mobile monitoring programs and other security technologies installed on the phone. So, the kid can keep in touch with parents all the time; tell them of any possible peril or emergency. Interestingly, many of these parental control technologies have special features for emergency situations that make it far easier for the kids to contact their parents when in any trouble.

 

References:
 
Gunman kills mom, 26 others in school shooting spree
Comforting survivors: ‘Hug them’ and ‘cry with them’
The teen smartphone mugging epidemic: Two-thirds of mobile theft victims in London are children or young adults

 

More Under-Aged Users on Facebook, Is your Child Using Mobile Safe?

Posted on January 5, 2013 by admin

Are you sure your 10 year old doesn’t have a Facebook account? So, you trust your child that he won’t tell a lie or perhaps you are too sure about the age restriction policies of FB? Yes, FB does have a unique age restriction policy but sadly, it doesn’t work that perfectly well. Or perhaps the kids of the day are far more intelligent that they easily fool the policies!

 

In a survey, one out of every three kids in the age group of 9 and 12 in the UK, were found to have their own personal pages on Facebook even when the minimum age required to have an account on the social networking site is 13 years.

 

It is not just the account on the social site that matters but also the activities in which these kids take part. Several under-age kids are found to be playing online game or downloading video games which require them to be an adult. And when these kids interact with adults on the age- inappropriate sites, there is a potential danger skulking for these kids everywhere on the internet.

 

In an another survey it was found that these kids in the age group of 9 and 16 on Facebook and other social networking sites place their addresses and contact numbers and about one fifth of these kids have their accounts public which introduces more security threats to them. Any online sexual predator can prey on your child, with such vulnerably available information.

 

The increasing cases of cyber bullying also have a lot to do with such unsafe Facebook accounts. Imagine a bully going through your child’s FB account and getting hold of contact details and other personal information, wouldn’t the bully then be misusing all that information against your child?

 



 

And the kids downloading applications and games inappropriate for their age are doing another big blunder as these apps and games work psychologically on them and sometimes prove as one of the biggest factors in motivating them to get involved in crime. Imagine a child continually coming in contact of pornographic videos and games, how the psychology of the child would have become? This may either lead the child toward sexual crimes or obscene act of sexting which is another of crime and can mar your child career forever.

 

As you can’t leave a toddler home alone, you can’t leave your pre-teen kids accessing internet or downloading apps and games on their cellphones unmonitored. It is essential to have a look at all the internet and mobile activities of your child.

 

Make out what your child does sitting at the home Pc tapping at the keyboard. Be aware of all that goes on in your child’s mobile: the contact details saved on the phonebook, the interactions between your child and other, the kind of interactions, the regular downloads made, the internet surfing and so on. If your child is a pre-teen, avoid giving a feature rich smart phone or install a parental control on it to monitor child mobile activities. Block the unwanted sites and applications on your child’s mobile. Also educate your child about all possible dangers for better safety.

 

Quick and Easy Tips to Control Kids Cell Phone Bills

Posted on December 28, 2012 by admin

So, you replaced your teenager’s old school mobile phone with a brand new smart phone thinking it will be useful for your child but the cell phone bill sky rocketed to something you never imagined? Well, it isn’t anything unusual, in fact it is quite a general scenario where parents pay their child cell phone bill.

 

So, how you’re going to mend up this really big hole in your monthly budget? Will grabbing the phone back make any sense? Nay, it won’t prove that very helpful, of course you’ll save a lot of money but still it wouldn’t be very effective and will not make your spendthrift child learn anything.

 

Below you have a list of some really simple things to do that will surely help you in manage child’s mobile phone bill as well as mend up the big dent in your monthly budget.

 
Set a Rule: Tell your Child the Limit you’ve Set
 

If your child doesn’t know how much calling, texting and downloading limit you have set, you can’t expect your child to be using the phone less and saving on a lot of money unless he is a born niggardly (which is generally not true with teenage kids especially when you’re to pay for the expenses!) Make it sure with your kid that you have set a proper billing limit for all kind of cell phone usages like calling, texting, downloading or internet surfing and the limit must not be exceeded and if it happens to exceed, you take the phone back.

 
Buy Cheaper Plans from your Mobile Service Provider
 

Whichever mobile service provider you have chosen for your child, there always is an availability of cheaper plans or special tariffs for calling, texting as well as the internet usage. Better buy such special tariffs for your child and tell your child what special plans you have bought also ask your child if there is any such tariff on his mind, as today’s kids know much more than we do.

 
Restrict Data Over Use with the Help of Service Provider
 

Cell phone service providers offer to restrict certain services, data use, buying and downloading etc for their child/minor clients if parents talk to them. Simply talk to your child’s mobile service provider and get unwanted services like downloadable purchases of music, wall paper, etc.

 
Use Child Mobile Parental Control
 

Some kids are smart enough in fooling their parents by telling lies and if you suspect your child too will be doing this better monitor all his cell phone usage and also put restrictions over the usage that you don’t want your child to indulge in. Install child mobile parental control on your child’s cell phone and make out all that’s happening at your child’s end like the calls made, texts and mails sent, stuffs downloaded, etc. And if you don’t like some of these things, simply put a full stop to them by restricting the usage.

 
Let your Child Pay the Cell Phone Bills
 

So, it is your child who is over using the data limits, who just doesn’t know where and when to stop while talking to his friends, how much texting is really too much, why not asking your child to pay his bills and know how it feels when you have a real big hole in your monthly budget. This will also help your child learn how to handle money and grow up smart. This is indeed the best way to control kids cell phone bills but if you find it too harsh, simply warn your child not to over budget or he’ll have to pay the bills!