A lot of things are different for our kids than they were for us. We didn’t have home theaters, decent video games, or twenty-four-seven kids’ TV shows. But it’s really the phones and the privacy they offer that change everything. Before my son started middle school I had made up my mind that I was not going to get him a phone.

“You’ll change your tune,” a friend told me. “What if he misses the bus?” she questioned. I rolled my eyes.

Cut to Christmas and my son tearing open a phone while his little sister calculates the number of months she has to wait for hers under the big-brother-broke-them-in algorithm. I’m still not convinced he needs a phone, but he wanted one and it was Christmas. Maybe I’m just jealous. Having a personal phone—not to mention a modest texting allowance—in the 6^th grade? I never had it so good.

Back in the olden days we didn’t even have cordless phones. They were all attached to a wall, either in your home or in public. You carried a quarter for a payphone and everyone could see you cry when your mom forgot to pick you up from soccer practice. When you got sick at school you had to use the office phone with its rotary dial and square buttons across the bottom. If you missed the bus you didn’t call anyone; you walked home. To have a private conversation at home you stretched the phone cord down that hall, pinching it in your bedroom door, then prayed your mom wouldn’t detach it from the wall while you were asking your BFF if she wanted to “go with” the new boy (who was named Curt or Tyler or Rob). Those deliriously fortunate enough to have a phone in their rooms knew their parents were listening in from the kitchen anyway.

Today’s kids don’t have to worry about parents overhearing conversations, partly because phones are rarely used for speaking to one another anymore. The important information—what band is cool, whose house they’re sleeping over at, and which color Converse to wear tomorrow—is all relayed via text. It goes without saying that back in the olden days we didn’t have our own secret language that our parents couldn’t figure out. We had to be clever and make plans while they weren’t listening or watching. (Whatever, Dad – no, you did NOT know we were “sneaking” out the sliding glass door.) Now kids speak in an ever-evolving code of letters and symbols—ikr? It’s a miracle our thumbs didn’t fall off–like the vestigial tail–from lack of use.

Popular as texting has become, I still thought my 11-year-old son was too young for it. I figured he just used the phone as a status symbol and to call me on the [many] days I forgot it was my turn at carpool. I didn’t realize he was using the text function at all until I started using it on my own phone. When my texts racked up I worried about the potential overage costs so I logged into my wireless account. While I was slightly under my plan limit of two hundred texts, my son was up to eight hundred twenty—two weeks into the billing cycle. I immediately called my provider to request unlimited texting.

I sensed a golden opportunity. His excess was just what I needed to institute the partial pay policy I should have started when we gave him the phone. I confronted him with the facts.

“But, Mom,” he almost cried, “it’s not like you can just end a conversation.”

Awww… proof that my baby boy is not yet a man.

I told him that instead of making him pay for the overage, he was going to chip in ten dollars a month toward his phone bill.

“But then I’ll have less money,” he whined.

I didn’t laugh. I did however take my platinum opportunity to ask for his phone– and read his texts. If I were a terrible person I would transcribe them here. Because they would make you laugh and reminisce over everything that was good and true and hasn’t changed about the summer before 7th grade. But I won’t. Because I am a good mother and because I’m beyond grateful for what I read there, in his private conversations with friends, both boys and girls. For now, for today–though he doesn’t realize it–my baby is as innocent as the day I brought him home wrapped in flannel and smelling like spit up. If only there were an unlimited plan for that.