‘Dear Mom, YTB. XOXO’

That’s the text message I would get from my teen should I get her a text messaging plan. And I’d respond: “FCOL, IHA. Stop being so kewl.”

Of course, I would have to consult an Internet slang dictionary every time I needed to communicate with my own daughter.

[Translation for above text slang
Headline: “Dear Mom, You are the best. Hugs & kisses.”
My response to her: “For crying out loud. I hate acronyms. Stop being so cool.”]

It took three years of lobbying before teen finally got her first (freebie aka ugly) cell phone just a few months before she graduated from eighth grade. When she was in fifth grade, she had handed us a list of top 10 reasons stating why she should get a cell phone. It took her dad and me three years to work out the contradictions listed therein (I can call my friends vs. I will always use it for emergency only) to process the request.

But teen’s latest request, via email and chat phishing attacks, is not making me LOL, laugh out loud. For one thing, teen has offered just two reasons: her friends never talk on the cell phone, they only text; and “it’s the cool thing” — which means she expects us to deliver the verdict in less than three years. Two, her reasons are not plausible. Parents so do not want their children to be “cool.” We want them to master their chemistry, biology and social studies so they can earn a Nobel prize and be “cool” in their later years.

Moreover, we discovered, for a child who said she and her friends hardly ever talk on the cell phone, she definitely has a way with words. Our last two cell phone bills leave us speechless. The mobile company assured me there was no billing error. Teen just has a gift of gab.

If the old-fashioned way of communicating is cost-prohibitive, perchance it might be a better idea to get teen a text plan. Apparently, she will be joining a host of kids doing “the cool thing.” The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported in April that 72 percent of all 12-to-17-year-olds in the country send an average of 1,500 texts a month.

Obviously, teen texting is getting way out of hand and inflicting financial and emotional pain on many families. But as a parent, I’d like to have the last word in this conversation. Since teens are great at KPC, keeping parents clueless, for any text plan to work in my house, I would need to get a PhD in teen-IM slang so I can decipher all the messages teen sends and receives.

Given my current time constraints, learning to crack the code of teen lingo will take at least another four years. By then teen should have graduated high school and be able to afford her own new "cool" cell phone and text messaging plan.

OO, Over and out.