The phone in my son’s pocket chirped about every five seconds, and everyone giggled. His friend was pestering him with a comical stream of text messages. It was funny, but also troubling, and it sent me scrambling to find ways to appropriately monitor and limit my son’s cell phone use. What I discovered was ATT’s Smart Limits for Wireless.

Recently my wife got a Blackberry from her place of work. She rarely used her “family phone” even before she got the smartphone, but we decided about a year ago to upgrade to a rugged, shock and water resistant Samsung Rugby because we anticipated our son using the phone situationally. Now, with the arrival of the Blackberry, the Samsung has become Bubba’s phone.

My oldest is eleven, headed off to middle school, so now seems like a reasonable moment for him to have a phone, but having recently been burned by going over my minutes, I wanted restrictions on the phone use. Unlike Apple devices, the Samsung does not have onboard parental controls to limit web access or store purchases. After a few minutes exploring the ATT website I came across the “Smart Limits for Wireless” program.

The program costs $9.99 per month and offers parents the ability to limit the number of text messages, data usage and store purchases, to filter web content and to set time restrictions on outbound calls (with exemptions for approved numbers).

I configured Bubba’s phone as follows:

-200 texts per month (our plan limit)
-Data usage allowed: 0 kb/mo (aka internet off)
-Purchases in ATT store: $0/mo (aka store access denied)
-Outbound calls blocked after 9 on weeknights, 10:30 on weekends (with exemptions for our phones, an essential feature)
-I activated the internet filtering (redundant since he has no data allotment)

Curiously, the program does not allow for limiting inbound calls, so the phone still needs to be out of the child’s room at night. I wonder why this restriction is not available. Clearly they are able to exempt family contacts and 911. Why not apply this to inbound calls?

I look forward to reporting on how well this program helps my son to use his phone responsibly.

Looking to the future, I’m eligible to upgrade my first generation iPhone at the subsidized prices and will probably do so in the next six months. Should I pass along my old iPhone to my son? The expense of the data plan would be partially offset by canceling the Smart Limits program. I feel pretty comfortable with the built in parental controls on those devices, but an iPhone is a pretty powerful device to hand over to a pre-teen.

I guess we’ll keep an eye on how well he manages the Samsung over the next few months.

[update: Bubba called me this morning before dawn wondering why he couldn't use his phone to call his grandmother (he's on vacation -- I'm not). Guess I'll be setting those morning hours a little earlier. But it works as advertised.]