Do Your Kids Have an e-mail Address?

My oldest who is 8 has a email account but he doesnt really use it to often. Its so he can talk to family once and awhile. I will not give him a cell phone he will get one when hes ready to pay his own bill.

My daughter will be 8 in August and a couple times, when playing games online either at Disney or Nickelodeon, has been asked for an email address to create a character. I just let her make up a name and the use it on my own domain. If I had to decide, I guess 12 years old would be a good age to have their own email address. Now for cell phones, what are your thoughts on that? I know my daugther has been asking for one because some of her classmates have one. She doesn't even call anyone from the home phone and she's never going to be left anywhere (at least while I'm alive anyway!) where there's a potential for me or her mom to be running late. When in school, I believe the office phone is just fine in the event of an emergency. Cheers, Ed

I think that kids should definitely be monitored when on the computer, there are so many weirdos out there, as far as an email, I don't know about a limit, you could probably set up a free one on hotmail or yahoo for them and just monitor it. You check it a couple times a day and you control the password. Kids these days are using the computer while they are in preschool, so much work is done on the computers I wouldn't be suprised if they had to have an email address by the time they got to 2nd grade.