Any parent who’s tried to manage a texting teen, an IM’ing middle schooler, or a chatting tweener knows how difficult it is to teach them to moderate their phone time. This week T-Mobile gave parents another tool in the never-ending battle of cellphone-mania. The new service allows parents to monitor every aspect of phone life except the content. For $2 a month, kids receive a message when they’re nearing the end of their allotment. For more, see www.KidsAtPlaySummit.com.

AT&T also has parental tools for monitoring phone time, but not for the iPhone. Verizon is on the brink of launching their parental control plan. The reason the carriers need to do this now is two-fold. First, many now have unlimited messaging and voice plans. This means parents won’t get bent out of shape from seeing huge overage charges on the phone. But money is not the only issue—having a healthy managed phone life is important. The second reason for the NOW imperative is that, with location-based services built into smartphones, it’s likely that children are about to be bombarded with advertising, spam, and, yes, even sexual predators.

Parents have been pretty slow to adopt parental controls on the computer, but it’s understandable when you think about the uneasy level of understanding that parents have about PCs and the Internet. The cellphone is a bit more ubiquitous in its daily use, and most parents are well attuned to the excesses in their kid’s phone life. Hopefully parents will keep the reins fairly tight as their kids get their first phones. Then, once the kids can prove that they use, not abuse, parents can let out a little slack.