Click photo to enlarge
Cell phone in hand, sophomore Samee Soto, 15, steps off a school bus last year at Mayfield High School.
To read the Las Cruces Public Schools policy on cell phones, click here.

LAS CRUCES - Cell phones allow your children to stay in touch with you - especially latchkey kids. They can call for help if they get lost, are abducted, catch the house on fire, discover an invasion of aliens (from space), etc.

Cell phones can teach responsibility and can give you some peace of mind. For instance, the new app iHound allows you to set a virtual perimeter for your kids and track their movements.

"So let's say you want to know when your child arrives or leaves school, you can receive an e-mail or a text message that they have arrived or they are leaving school," software co-developer Gary Moskoff told KDVR-TV in Denver.

But, what age is appropriate for your child to have a cell phone? Is there an age that, above which, the number of times you rip hair from your head and have the urge to take your child next door to the neighbor and say, "He's yours now!" can be minimized?

I mean, do you know how many times I've asked my 12-year-old where his cell phone is,

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only to be told it was at his mother's house, and when that turned out not to be true, I was told it was his grandmother's house, only to learn that "it must be" at my house, because he "remembers now"?

Of course, the battery is dead, so we can never call it and see if it is ringing deep down in the bowels of the couch or maybe in the pocket of a pair of jeans buried in the back of a closet. That would be too simple.

Las Crucen Susan Palmer, the mother of a 13-year-old, knows my pain.

"More than once, it's gone dead and we have to clean the whole house to try and find it," she told me.

She is still glad she bought him his own phone when he started middle school.

"It's more about safety and being able to stay in touch," Palmer said. "If he needs to stay after school for a ball game, he can call."

Still, cell phones can interrupt class at school, run up bills, put your child in touch with unsavory characters, etc.

My wife is a third-grade teacher, and I was surprised how many 8-year-olds have cell phones. She said no matter how many times she warns her class not to have them on, inevitably, someone's backpack will start playing Lady Gaga. Luckily, my wife can give a very good "mean teacher look" and most students don't make the same mistake twice.

The Las Cruces school district allows students to have cell phones, but in elementary schools, they can only be used in the morning before classes begin and in the afternoon after classes end. Middle school students can use phones at lunch as well, while high school students can use phones at lunch and between classes.

For those currently in school, and the generations to follow, cell phones and whatever other technology is on the way, are just a fact of life. Having phones in their pockets, backpacks and purses is expected. Dealing with what these phones bring is no big deal.

In fact, Cathie Norris, a writer for businessweek.com, calls on teachers to embrace cell phones and digital music players and other technologies as teaching tools. She reports that advancing technology allows students to do computing on their own hand-held device.

"A new generation of computing technologies - mobile, handheld, low-cost - is emerging. Students are already bringing these technologies to school; we just need to allow the kids to bring them out of hiding and use them in their classroom for curricular purposes. Schools can then use their limited funds for educational software and teachers' professional development," Norris writes.

This kind of thinking won't work just yet, especially in poorer parts of the country where not everyone has a cell phone. But the ever-progressing advances and decline in costs make this vision a real possibility.

So that brings us back to determining when you child is old enough to handle a cell phone. The answer seems fairly simple: You know your child. Is he responsible in other matters of life? Does she get her homework down, obey bed time and help with work around the house? Can he grasp why a parent would want a phone for their child? If so, they can probably handle the responsibility.

Just make sure, when your child accidentally runs the phone through the washing machine, you haven't just accidentally gone for a swim with yours in a hotel pool, or else you won't be able to take the moral high ground.

Brook Stockberger can be reached at (575) 541-5457.