Is there more pressure on parents to get their teen a cell phone?

Yes

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by Jeffrey Wright

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I would say there is more pressure on parents to get their teen a cell phone. For one thing, in today's world it's very important that families are able to stay in contact with each other. In a world where children and teens go missing every day, parents need to be able to stay in contact with them, bringing just that little bit more piece of mind that their children are safe. This is a good thing and gives parents the ability to know where their teen is and be able to contact their teen if it becomes necessary.

Another good thing about some plans is parents are able to monitor what their children are doing. How? For one thing, parents can go online with many cellular companies and see what phone numbers their teens have dialed and who that number belongs too. Even more significantly they can monitor text messages from the sites, reading texts sent and received. Some times with some kids this is the only way that parents stay in the know, for all the effort they put in to trying to drag it out of their kids.

Among friends, having a cell phone has become a necessity. Friends like to keep in touch after school hours. Big in this field is that of text messaging between two phones. This helps them keep connected if they are working on planning a party, with parental permission of course. Also many teens enjoy Internet applications such as Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant messenger, or AIM and MSN Messenger, which are programs that increasingly demanded features on and are showing up in many cell phone plans.

Even worse, cell phones have become a status symbol. If you don't have one in school you're a loser, you don't have value among your peers. I've experienced this myself, not with cell phones specifically, but the principle is still the same. When you don't have what everyone else has, especially when it's not the newest or the best or what's in, you become an outcast until you do, made fun of and treated like you're nothing. So this puts extra pressure on teens to try and convince their parents to get them what will make them accepted again, or part of the in crowd as it were.

Now some teens do well by this by earning the cell phone from their parents by getting a part time job and paying for it themselves, but it's the parents that feel the most pressure. They have to approve of the teen having a cell in the first place. They have to make sure the bill is paid. They have to make sure that the phone is not abused. So it is the parents that has increasing pressure to get their teens a cell phone.

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