Want to get rid of surprises?

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Tweets or bleats? Tool measures importance on Twit...US election, iPhone among top 10 Internet moments ...Twitter, Facebook 'costing British economy £1.38 b...

: all sounds like a great way for parents to avoid sticker shock — and perhaps set the stage for a nightly battle with their teenagers over the day’s limits. Maybe so. Whether parents will like the feel of these new reins in their hands is an open question. In a recent Nielsen Online survey, most parents of 8-to-12-year-olds say they don’t use even the rudimentary parental controls offered on phones, like the ability to block calls made to certain numbers.

So why would the carriers introduce these features now? Simple, said Jill Aldort, a marketing analyst with the Yankee Group. The only demographic groups not yet saturated with cellphones, she said, are the very young and the very old.

“The way to get to the parents is to alleviate their concerns about surprisingly high cellphone bills, or their child sitting in math class texting or accessing inappropriate content,” Aldort said. Verizon will help parents curb such activity soon. The company has since last year allowed parents to set limits for the type of content each phone could access. But in August, the carrier will extend that service to include customized time limits like those offered by AT&T and T-Mobile. Parents with Sprint contracts, meanwhile, aren’t completely on their own. On most of the carrier’s phones, subscribers can still block their children’s access to certain Web content, or block all Web pages.

That still leaves a lot of potential for sky-high bills, especially if a teenager is involved in an text-messaging war or cellphone drama.

Sprint suggests that an all-you-can-eat family plan could help in such situations, but those plans can quickly add up for people with large families. And for parents who want to stop their children from texting and surfing through algebra class, such unlimited plans could just aggravate the problem.