SubscribeTeaching cell phone etiquette
Our children are addicted to cell phones! Their habit isn’t the same as the one we had for telephones during our youth, when we would close ourselves in our rooms to talk to friends. There was a phone curfew and when it was time to hang up, we did.
Our teenagers today seem to need their cell phones the way a smoker needs a cigarette and actually seem to have withdrawal pains. They don’t really use the phones for talking but spend hours texting friends in shorthand messages that I’m convinced affect their writing skills. It’s painful for them to put the cell phones away during study time or even to eat a meal. Without the watchful eyes of parents, some of them would text their friends until the wee hours of the morning.
My 14-year-old daughter is one of the cell phone addicts as are the children of several good friends of mine. We have all established rules for cell phone etiquette 
and grumble about how our kids somehow can’t seem to abide by them. One friend even started talking about the issue on her Facebook page recently and got lots of spirited response from other parents.
At my house, the cell phone rules include no texting during dinner or any other meal, no texting to friends when you’re talking to someone else (especially your mother), no texting after 9:30 p.m. on school days. And, if the cell phone is ever taken away at school, it goes dark for at least a month. (My daughter’s high school has a strict cell phone policy: the first time a student is seen using one during school hours, it is stored in the office and a parent has to pick it up.)
The other day I saw my daughter texting while she was doing some homework, stealthily responding to messages from a longtime friend. She looked at me with a guilty face, an addict trying to get a fix. I took the phone for the rest of the evening.
What is the cell phone etiquette for the teenagers in your family?
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I am a member of the Sandwich Generation, a Baby Boomer raising a teenage daughter and dealing with the needs of an aging mother. I am a veteran journalist, having worked for more than three decades as a reporter and editor. Mostly recently, I was an editor with the Metro section of The Washington Post.
