By Jason Dagenhart
Round Table reporter

Everyday I have to get my little brother from school. I have to walk my butt from my nice comfy house all the way to his stupid elementary school, and then walk back. And on the way back I have to resist the temptation to just start screaming.

Now, the inane temptation to scream isn’t because of the long walk in the cold or burning heat, but it’s that almost every single little child there has a cell phone; they’re just talking and talking or texting on them the whole walk back.

Don’t get me wrong; I love kids. But these kids shouldn’t have cell phones or texting or any other implement that goes along with a cell phone.

Why would they need them? It’s not like they have lives somewhere else in the world besides school and sitting in front of the TV melting their brains. They don’t have jobs, they don’t have cars so they can’t drive anywhere, they can’t go anywhere in the first place because of their age, restrictions and limitations, they don’t date or have emotional connections to other girls or boys their age – well, at least let’s hope they don’t, because then they might need their pituitary gland checked – and they basically don’t have lives in which they would need a cell phone.

A child doesn’t actually obtain a life that involves the use of a cell phone until at least high school, because that’s when they start to become more independent and start to go out and do things on their own.

It just sickens me to see the child population of our country be so defected and diseased by these little hand-held devices. It poisons them into thinking that wherever they go they absolutely need a cell phone, and that’s not true at all.

But that’s what’s happening. Our children are learning about a tomorrow that revolves around technology and cell phones, and they’re learning it from the most influential sources of all; their parents.

Our parents are the people who teach us, tutor us, grow with us, and are the people who we look up to every single day of our lives. We see them talking on cell phones and always having their cell phones wherever they go, and we see that that’s okay. Since they need them all the time, we need them all the time.

I’m not going to lie, I have my cell phone with me constantly and it’s always on and waiting. But I don’t live off of it; I don’t need it to survive. It’s not a necessity at all.

I just look around and see all these kids that seem to live off of their cell phones. These little, tiny, munchkin kids who walk around with both hands readily on their cell phones waiting desperately for their parents to text or call them.

Like I said earlier, it’s the parents who do this sometimes. They give the kid a cell phone because it’s easy to get a hold of them, simple to use, and cheap for them to pay for.

But what’s so hard about going to pick up the child or just being able to know where the child is most of the time? It’s like a tracking device for the parents’ laziness.

I just don’t see the point in giving something that technologically advanced to a child who hasn’t even gone through puberty yet, much less knows what a text is, and who probably hardly uses a phone to begin with.

It’s so pointless. I know I may seem freakishly redundant by now, and I know I am, but I just don’t get the point. Children under the age of ten at the least don’t need a cell phone at all. They just shouldn’t have one. It’s not productive and it’s useless for parents to be wasting their hard-earned money on a child’s cell phone, and it’s useless for the child do have it because they don’t need it.