Mobile phone contract

 This week we celebrated Anna's half birthday.

At fourteen and a half we decided it was time to give Anna a mobile phone, especially as she's now beginning to go places on her own more. We have always been a bit wary of giving children license with too much technology too young. In our home we have no television or gaming devices. The children have laptops but the internet can only be accessed from plug ins at their desks, so a mobile phone is quite a big step for us. As a paediatrician Justin would see children in his clinic almost weekly complaining of headaches and trouble sleeping. Invariably there is a piece of technology, be it a television, computer, phone or gaming machine being used in the bedroom and once removed the symptoms resolve! Also I don't like seeing children surgically attached to phones or gaming devices who can't even lift their eyes to answer you. Not so long ago we saw an elderly lady in a cafe who had treated her two teenage grandchildren to coffee out. The lady sat looking out of the window in silence while the teenagers texted and surfed on their phones, ignoring her.
However we do feel it's important to embrace the technology that is available to us. As home educators the internet is our greatest resource.  Physics lectures from Stanford, guided tour round the Coca-cola factory, demonstrations of science experiments, online tutorials. You name it, we can access it on the computer. However it's up to us as parents to teach our children how to use it responsibly and safely, for their benefit without letting it rule them or become a barrier to genuine human interaction.
We therefore spent some time over the last couple of weeks trying to put together a framework of how we wanted mobile phones to be used in our family. We could envisage a situation, once we have a growing number of teenagers with phones, where every family meal or conversation could be interrupted by phones ringing or bleeping. In our opinion attention should be given to the people we are present with, with phones very much taking second place. To this end Justin and I have also been trying to change a few of our own habits to set the groundwork. We believe that what we expect of our children we should be living ourselves. For example, unless Justin is on-call, we don't answer the phone during meals, that's what the answer machine is for. We also are trying to leave our phones docked in the kitchen rather than carrying them round when it's all too easy to 'just look something up' or send a quick text during the children's bath time for example instead of engaging with them.
For issues such as this in our family we have found that 'contracts' work well. We try to give them due gravitas as indeed any contract will be in the adult world. We sat down with the older guys ( Beth isn't that far behind) trying to take into consideration our expectations and their hopes and worked through content and wording together. This is what we came up with;

I know this isn't a very good photo but Anna was delighted to have her own phone at last!