When do you give your child a cell phone?

My daughter is a responsibloe second grader, and I shouldn't be having this problem so young. When we were kids, didn't we have to wait til middle school or high school to get our own phones in our rooms? Only the extremely spoiled got their own phone lines, too. Now with technology, children have their own portable phones. They can take pictures, text people, call whenever they want to. High schoolers take them to phone, where they can text eachother the answers to tests, "sext", etc. It's a whole new world from passing notes in class or slipping them into the locker slots. *sigh* I miss those simple days. Now as young as elementary school, kids have their own phones. How young is too young? My daughter's friends have phones now and they are being quite snobbish about it. I will admit, in the past my daughter has had a "firefly", one of those pre-programmable phones that allow calls from certain people and you control who they can call. She was going to Mississippi for the summer and I used it to keep in contact with her. I figured that was a good reason, and she doesn't have it anymore. The elitism is ridiculous. My daughter got mad at one of the kids I babysit because they were answering texts when she was playing with them. Should second graders have to deal with that? Seriously? Do we need to teach cell phone etiquette in preschool? Does your kid have a cell? When would you consider your kid responsible enough for a phone? When is it too young?

Technorati Tags: kids and cell phones,children and cell phones,cell phones,childhood responsibility