Too much of a good thing?

One of the goals we have for Maddy is that she is as social as possible. She needs to have appropriate peers and we are lucky to have found that. She does have a groups of friends in a few areas of her life now.

Another goal we have for her is to be comfortable with technology. She is incredibly well versed and comfortable with all types of technology. This can be both a blessing and a costly curse. In this house we do not do bargain basement technology. When it comes to electronics we must have the biggest, best and brightest on the market.

We also try to teach her the concept of money, time and responsibility. This is an ongoing task with many lesson to learn. Heck I know some adults who need lessons in this still.

For a while Maddy had an Iphone. It was neat and cool, but we had a lot of problems with it because she wanted to use it more like an Ipod than an actual phone. We finally got her an Ipod Touch and a regular cellphone and that has worked out much better.

With the introduction of friends the desire to text has taken over. The hubby and I understand that this is the main medium that teenagers use to communicate so we encouraged it. Maddy has a few friends that she texts with on a regular basis. She also now has my mother texting her.

Now that we have a boy in Maddy's life the texting has increased a good bit. I do my best to monitor her while giving her privacy. She knows that we have the right to review her texts at any time and that she should never text anything she does not want us to read. I placed a no phone after 9:00 in the evening policy and when I feel she is not adhering to it, I take her phone to bed with me in the evenings.

I knew that she was going a bit crazy on the texting and was setting limits when/where I could. I also explained to her that if she went over the limit too much she would have to explain to her father what happened.

This month our phone bill was an extra 300 dollars because she went over her text limit by 3202 texts. I know that a good bit of them where the one letter/word answers the kids do, but really how can you text that much?!

Since we want her to text, we have upped the plan, but we are watching the phone a bit more and setting a few more limits. I think that each month I will sit with her and the phone bill and go over how she is spending her text time.

Hopefully it will work and lessons will be learned.