Kids and Cell Phones

With all this talk about kids and technology and the Internet, I began to think about the kids I babysit for. One family has two kids ages 9 and 12 and they both have a cell phone. I remember getting my first cell phone when I was thirteen, and I think I was a little ahead of the game at the time. How young do you think is to young for a cell phone? According to the center of media and child health, 22% of children ages 6-9 own a cell phone and 60% of kids ages 10-14 do.

On the one hand, having a nine year old carry a cell phone is great for safety but on the other, is it just another way kids are over connected? How did we survive in a time when we weren't constantly connected?

In this Time article here, they speak about the hidden negatives to kids and cell phones that parents often overlook for safety reasons:

But cell phones took us by surprise: so small, so innocent, so powerful in the hands of a bored or twisted teen who now has an extremely efficient tool for wasting time, cheating on tests, organizing fights, bullying classmates, phoning in bomb threats, arranging drug deals and, more commonly, vamping in a junior-varsity version of Girls Gone Wild.

What do you think?