As the interviewed parents discussed why they have purchased—or will purchase—a cell phone for their children, a key theme was that these devices, like baby monitors, help keep children safe.12 Parents said that children with cell phones can let their parents know if they need help, or they can reach emergency resources if their parents are not available. This concern with safety is in keeping with an increased sense of individual responsibility for curtailing risk.
In general, parents in all socioeconomic classes do not make a distinction between safety issues and monitoring issues. That is, parents speak as if safety depends on monitoring—on knowing precisely what it is their children are doing and precisely where they are. And parents link the need to know these details at least in part to new conditions of parenting, to the fact that moms are at work and thus cannot be available in the same way it is imagined they were in earlier times, and to the perception that not only are others less available, but neighbors now have different values and may be less appropriate substitutes. Thus, parents who cannot be home to greet their children after school said that they find cell phones particularly useful for monitoring kids’ activities to ensure that they remain safe. Danielle Jones, a single, African American, working-class mother of five children who hails from Philadelphia, explained that while she is at work (as an intake representative in a local social service agency), she calls home repeatedly once she knows the children are out of school:
[The main advantage of having a cell phone is] being able to contact them immediately. … I get off of work at five. … I think I might call them about three or four times while I’m at work. And when I come home, if they’re out, I call maybe three or four times, to find out where they are: “When [are] you coming home? What [are] you doing? Try to come in.” You know, to remind them of curfew, stuff like that.
Another single, African American mother, Larissa Small, a professional middle-class woman with a master’s degree in social work, said very much the same thing:
Everyone has a cell phone. [I got the children one] when… I was working at the police department. . . . They would go out with their friends. I wanted to always be able to contact them. Sometimes calling the friends’ homes, you can never contact the kids. And then if they walk out the door,
I like to know where they are at all times. Just in case if something did occur, they could pick up the phone and if not call me, call 911.