I was fortunate enough to have gotten two of my four kids through high school before cell phones found their way to school lockers and backpacks. But when my younger two kids landed on the high school scene, all of their friends had cell phones and I confess, it wasn’t long before mine had cell phones too. My son was at away soccer games, and I wanted my daughter to be able to call me or her dad from a date. They needed phones, I reasoned, just in case, well, anything happened that I needed to know about immediately.

Of course, my older two kids reprimanded me for spoiling the younger two. For the most part, cell phones didn’t cause me the headaches that many of you with kids and phones contend with today. We didn’t have iPhones, and it really was possible to have a phone bill for $19.99 per month. Those days are gone.

My kids used cell phones to call friends and occasionally, me. They couldn’t access the Internet at any time of day or night, order clothes, watch movies, or sneak out of the house and take videos at 3 am. But there were other problems we…