Reply to Latchkey kid: Can I ask 10 year old to text me when he gets on the bus or home?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yep, texting an affirmative "I'm home safely." sort of message works. When I started doing this with DS, I put the fear of God in him by telling him that if I didn't get this or a call, the cops were getting called. [/quote]

This the problem. Any normal person would occasionally forget to text upon arrival, and would sometimes have the phone at the bottom of the backpack where they wouldn't hear it ring.  This would be true even of an adult, and surely true of any well-adjusted kid.  By demanding a text every time, you are setting yourself up for extreme anxiety on those occasions when the kid forgets - or setting your kid up for extreme uptightness to make sure he/she is perfect 100 percent of the time.

[b]And remember, kids walked to school and looked after themselves for many years before cell phones existed.[/quote][/b]

No. You entirely missed my point. The point was to make sure he remembered. I was single at the time. He was younger than some folks here would think appropriate. It worked. One the one or two occasions he forgot, I reached him. [/quote]

I should also mention that we live in a part of the metro area frequently derided in these forums as horribly unsafe and no place a loving parent would send their kids to public school. As in, we have had people shot on our block, and a few years ago there was a PCP bust a few houses down. And yet, here we are. We still live here. The neighborhood's gotten nicer. I suspect that some of the same people on these forums who like to pull out the straw man argument of the overly-connected kid and helicopter mom while reminiscing about the good old days when we all ran around until the streetlights came on are the same people who would immediately move, never send their kids to that public school system, blah blah, and are in part why we had to have our own school forum created.[/quote]

I'm one of the PPs that said it is unreasonable to call the police when your DC doesn't call/text upon arriving home - or even to threaten to do if you're not actually going to do it.  I don't make empty threats.  I, too, live in an area disparaged on DCUM - The Alexandria section of FFX.  My kids go to one of the Title 1 schools that's majority minority and lots of FARMS/ESOL students.  While it's not SE, we have our share of violence/drugs in our neighborhood.  I've never called the cops when my kid(s) forgot to call/text.  [/quote]

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