A month ago my 12-year old son movingly explained why the Earth would
stop spinning on its axis if he didn’t get his own cell phone.

He was starting to go places without an adult, he informed me, so he needed one for safety reasons.  I explained that getting the mail at the end of the driveway is not really considered going some place without an adult. Undaunted, he continued, if he had a cell phone, I could always reach him and since he was staying out later at night he’d be able to check in with me more often. We could fix that by having him come home earlier, I countered. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned so he pulled out the tear-jerker, four-hanky, sucker punch argument:  “What if I was in a situation where someone was shooting and I was huddled under a desk and I wanted to call you just to tell you that I love you?”  I got him a phone.  Now he’s on that phone constantly, but he doesn’t call anybody.  He texts. Endlessly. At first, I rationalized this by thinking that his texting would help perfect his writing and his interpersonal skills.  Then I read a few of his texts.  My kid:  Wassup Other kid:  Nutin My kid: doon nglsh Other kid: ritns ovr8d My kid:  goddit Other kid: bcnu  Two weeks of texting and he’s become a moron. He’s forgotten that a sentence actually has a subject and a predicate, a noun and a verb, some kind of meaning to it. I was horrified. I did a little research and found that the typical California teen sends over 1,740 text messages in a month!  OMG!  :-@ ! (Translation:  “Oh my God, I’m going to scream.”) I needed to do something before my son’s phone succeeded in giving him a full frontal lobotomy. So, we have a new rule in our house now. My son gets to keep his phone and continue texting, if the texts show that he can still conjugate a verb, properly use a modifier, and never leave a participle dangling.  Yesterday, I received the following text from my son: “Mom, got a 98 on my grmr tst. So thr.”  My reply: “Congrats. But u cn x ur fone bb.” (Translation:  “Congratulations, but you can kiss your phone goodbye.”)