As many of you know, my eleven-year old son just recently got his own mobile phone less than a year ago.  I really wasn't considering even getting him one until he started playing basketball for his school team.  Due to regular practices during the week and games on the weekends, it became important for his father and I to be able to communicate with him to find out when we should head out to pick him up.  Before we even purchased the phone, we had a long family meeting where we established the rules around him having a phone and asked him to commit to abiding by those rules at all times.     Although our son has done a pretty good job of using his new phone responsibly, there have been a few instances where I had to use the parental controls to limit the access to some of the websites that he was visiting.  Many of them weren't overtly inappropriate but I felt the humor or content wasn't a good fit for a boy his age.  As a parent and educator, I'm also worried about the threat … [Read more...]