What's better: refusing to let your kid leave home, and keeping them in to get fat playing Nintendo and watching TV, because you're terrified any time they're out of your sight that they've been abducted, or giving them a cell phone?

It used to be that parents could let their kids run around and play outside for hours. There were no deadlines to meet, no soccer or karate or piano lessons to go to. There was no need to pile everyone in the car and do the shopping at 6 pm because both parents hadn't gotten home until then. There were a lot of problems with those days, but kids got more exercise and more freedom, they were healthier, and they were better equipped to handle life's problems without having their hands held.

Nowadays we're overscheduled and terrified of what's outside for our kids. It's not acceptable to let your kids run and play a block away from the house if you're going to need them back for a lesson or because you need to run errands in half an hour, because then you're not going to be able to call them back. Fortunately we have a technological solution for the problem that doesn't involve Mom having to have a gong or a bullhorn. It's called a "cellphone".

Give your kids a cellphone, and you can be as secure that they haven't been kidnapped yet as you would be if they were at the gum-chewing, TV-watching babysitters (which is to say, not perfectly secure, but better than if you knew nothing of their whereabouts.) Give your kids a cellphone, and you can let them go play two or three blocks away in confidence that when you need them, you can call them home wihtout having to drive around the neighborhood looking for them. Give your kids a cellphone, and if you're running late picking them up from after school care because there was a traffic accident on the highway, you can call them and reassure them.

Do I think they're appropriate for 6-year-olds? No, they'll lose it. Do I think they're appropriate for all 8-year-olds? My son is 9 and doesn't have one; he'd lose it. But my daughter got one for her 8th birthday because I wanted to be able to stay in touch with her. I'm not paranoid about child abductions, but I live in a big city, and I want her to have the freedom to play in our neighborhood and still be able to call her back when I need her.

I can monitor her calls because it's a cell phone; every number she dials and every number that dials her is reported on my statement, same as on *my* cell phone statement. She doesn't go over the time allotted because it's pay as you go, and if she runs out of time, she gets no phone. She knows she's not allowed to make long distance calls without permission, and I trust her not to do so since she knows I can check.

I believe in giving my kids as much independence as they can handle. If a technological tool allows me to give my kids independence that children in another era would have taken for granted, but that people today generally don't feel safe granting their kids, I'm all for it.

This blog seems incredibly judgmental and dismissive of parenting practices and lifestyles the regular contributors haven't thought of or don't understand. I realize you have space to fill and that you're trying to be funny, but I fail to see how such judgmentalism serves a liberal news site like Salon. Aren't the people who whine and bitch and get all moralistic about parenting practices that don't really hurt anyone supposed to be on the religious right, not the secular left?

"It used to be that parents could let their kids run around and play outside for hours. There were no deadlines to meet, no soccer or karate or piano lessons to go to...It's not acceptable to let your kids run and play a block away from the house if you're going to need them back for a lesson or because you need to run errands in half an hour, because then you're not going to be able to call them back."

While kids may not have been so overscheduled (by parents) when I was growing up, we did have music lessons, Girl/Boy Scouts, and homework to do after school. How did our parents possibly manage getting us back into the house when we were playing a block away?

It's called a watch, got my first one at age six. If a kid can be responsible enough to only use a cellphone for emergencies, they can probably learn to tell time and be able to get back from a playing a block away to go to lessons, etc.

Both my parents worked and didn't get home til 6, but you can be sure we got a home-cooked dinner--we didn't go to *the mall* for dinner! I think that's a good example of how baby boomer parents are full of whiney excuses for their excesses.

Things have not changed *that* much; we do not *need* all the materialistic trappings boomers rationalize.

I, like many New Yorkers (at least the ones I know in their twenties and thirties, which may very well be a biased sample), do not have a landline. My cell phone is my only phone.

While I don't plan on having children for a while, it's possible that my situation will be similar when I do have children -- and, more to the point, that the parents of my children's friends will also be in similar situations. If my child is off playing at a friend's house, and needs to call me, should s/he use the cell phone of the friend's parent to call me? Or would it not be easier to just give the child his or her own phone?

I'm not really for or against the development, but I don't really see any reason to be up in arms one way or another.