I’ll admit it; I caved.  My eleven-year old son Bodie has been angling for an iPhone for the better part of two years.  He repeatedly recites the list of friends who, by the age of nine, had been given cell phones of their own, then caps off his performance with a soulful rendition of that tearful ballad “I’m The ONLY One Who Doesn’t Have One”.  While I don’t want to hold my son back, I never enrolled him in the Junior Executive Program, so I didn’t see the point in giving him a phone back then.

But last month he started walking to and from school on his own, exposing a little known philosophy I held deep within me:  Offspring cannot be out of eyeshot, even for the twelve-minute walk to school, without access to parental supervision.  Ok, I’ll OWN it!  I feel better knowing I can reach him, or moreover, he can reach me, if needs be.  After all, it’s not the same world we grew up in (yup, I just officially became my mother.) Read more