Living in a town of 9000, now 10,000, I did not feel that my children needed cell phones. They could walk home from school. It is reasonably safe, though I knew too much about local use of heroin and methamphetamines to believe that anywhere is completely safe.
I spoke to a friend from high school in the early 2000s. He asked me to text him my address.
“I’ve never texted.” I said.
“NEVER?” he said.
“Nope.”
“Haven’t your kids taught you how?”
“My kids don’t have cell phones.”
Long silence. Then: “If I were your child, I would run away.”
I laughed. My son got a cell phone when he headed for college and my daughter got a track phone, ten dollars a month, in high school. Calls and no texting. My son ran away the same way I did, as an exchange student. He went to Thailand at age 16 and was on the Maylay Peninsula, two years after the tsunami hit. His first comment calling home was, “Mom, the world is a really scary place.” Going off to be an exchange student is a fabulous way to run away, because you learn tons and come home.
My daughter had one friend who she would go to sleep over in her teens.
“I don’t want to sleep over any more.” she said after one night.
“Why?” I asked.
“She is up texting and by midnight she and friends are having arguments by phone and she cries. I want to sleep.”
Don’t leave the phone in the kids’ rooms, parents. And don’t have the phone in your bedroom either!!!
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: texting. With music: https://youtu.be/hkmZGh9DQZ4.
The photograph is Studt’s Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maze again.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
I got myself a cell phone after I crossed into my 20s. Bought my first smartphone when I was 37.
Your advice is very well noted.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you!
I get your daughter’s remarks. A friend sometimes comes to visit me, but she gets texts all the time, never turns the sound off and sometimes I wonder, “What are you doing here?” Her husband is blind and he doesn’t text, obviously. When she’s gone she calls to check in on their landline. My local friends will show me texts from people I don’t even know. I don’t like it. I think it’s simple courtesy to be here now with the living breathing humans we’re with unless there’s an emergency.
I was an early adopter ;) I got my first cell phone in 2018 so I could let my family know I survived each day of a cross-country bike trip.
Hmmm: 2018? I finally let go of my land line about 5 years ago.
Kind of you to reassure them.
Wow. I had my phone WAY before you had yours. I learned the value of it in 2003 when I was evacuated because of a wild fire. I could loan it to my friends to call their kids when we were all evacuated to a park and out of change for the pay phone. BUT in my little CA town, there was only one spot where the cell phone worked so I had my land line until I moved to CO in 2014.