The devil in your pocket

I need to confess something.  I dearly love my iPhone.  I'm embarrased to admit it, but it's true.  Over time, it has become my constant companion...to the point that I feel naked without it.  It keeps up with my four email accounts, my three calendars, my hundreds of pictures, my complete iTunes collection of music, all of my lists and reminders for work, and the names/numbers/addresses of everyone I know.  It allows me to read a good book, find out what the weather will be next Tuesday, discover what time it is in Bangkok, obtain the news from 100 different news sources, play Candy Crush when I'm bored, text my husband at random times just to say "I love you" and chat with my parents who live four hours away via FaceTime.  It is an amazing piece of technology.   In fact, I keep an iPhone charger in my office at work and a portable charger in my pocket, just in case my battery runs low during the day.  Can't do without it.  I'm not proud of my addiction, but there it is.  Luckily, my husband has a similar affliction and hasn't staged an intervention to insist that I join a 12 step program.

Having said this, my husband and I have recently discovered that the beloved iPhone can, in the wrong hands, be a portal to bad behavior and exposure to a wealth of inappropriate things.  Our oldest child was given an iPhone six months ago as a reward for his good grades.  Maybe we were naive, or just plain stupid.  I don't know.  We truly had no idea the Pandora's box we were opening up for ourselves and our barely 13 year-old son.  We thought we were doing a good thing...and he was THRILLED!  The iPhone means love and sunshine, right??  So why not share the love?  Yeah- I know what you are thinking: this chick and her husband are clueless....and, you would be right.  We were totally clueless.  We made a major mistake by not researching all of the different facets of the phone and its cornucopia of downloadable applications prior to giving it to our child.  I won't go into details...but suffice it to say that we had a surprise in store for us when we had the opportunity to go through his iPhone and see what he had been up to.  

Applications such as Instagram, Kik, SnapChat, Vine, Ask.fm, Pandora, Twitter are fun, harmless applications in the hands of responsible adults with good intentions.  In the hands of a young teenager who has no concept of danger and an over-abundance of hormones...these apps have the potential to be used in ways that no parent would like or promote.  We had installed parental controls on our son's iPhone...and it was laughable how little that did.  

If your child has a smart phone, then be smart about it.  Learn about all the social apps that kids are using now. Consider putting appropriate limits on their use of the phone and on their ability to download certain applications.  I know not every parent would feel comfortable monitoring their child's phone due to privacy concerns.  For us, we would rather be guilty of a small invasion of privacy, and subsequently keep our child from something harmful.  That's a trade off I will take every day of the week.  

An object that my husband and I truly love...turned into an evil thing for our sweet son.  A wake-up call that something you believe you know all about...can still have its secrets and dark sides.  I never imagined an iPhone could cause so much trouble.  The devil that was in his pocket is now sitting on a shelf in our closet with its service turned off.